“The Vacuous Megaparsecs” – Companion Booklet

Streaming

Free Streaming

unfortunate pun.

Available for download and non-commercial use.

[Update 04 2026] Player of Space Engine? TVM is now available in lossless quality as part of my first Music Pack for the software, you can get it on Steam Workshop.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3617568556

An Exercise in Arpeggio

TVM was another spontaneous project from the Iridium Point Ideas Dump Bin, collections of samples and melodies that I occasionally dig through and develop into full songs.

The basic chord progression and piano roll patterns came from a different time¹. Initially titled “Arpeggio of Free Space”, TVM was written during my first session with Klimper on my Mac.

The final title, TVM, was meant to evoke the vast, indifferent void of intergalactic space. A bass line was modulated with a EQ set up that I made to resemble the dimensionless cosmic power spectrum (fancy way to say band pass filter). Quite cheesy indeed.

60 Megaparsecs and 17,000 Kilometres

In the late stage (i.e. last 20 months) of my PhD studies, I dreamed of running high-performance, high-fidelity structure formation simulations with novel dynamics. My current chosen playground: a 30~60 comoving megaparsec box. I had crossed the planet and twiddled my thumbs for another year to make it a reality. I like the contrast between the scales — the cosmic and the personal.²

One of my first correct™ simulation snapshots was sampled, and rendered in Blender to become the cover art for TVM. Both activities explored comparable aspects of my vision and philosophy. I randomly sampled two million N-body particles from a billion, gave them emission shaders, and placed them into a dispersive glass environment—each particle representing a handful of galaxies or a small cluster. The result: something like a cosmic snow globe. Of course the snow flakes don’t just fall, they coagulate and dance while falling into one another.

Notes

1. while usually I am not, like some technopessimists, referring to times before ChatGPT as the low-background era of the human Internet, I feel the need to clarify that this creative endeavour is all mine with no bot intervention. ↩︎
2. By some measures this would be the most precision-oriented work I’ve led so far. Arxiv soon. Really. ↩︎