“The Vacuous Megaparsecs” – Companion Booklet

Streaming

Free Streaming

That’s an 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. I think not long after the 2021 New Zealand lockdowns. That year my trusty composition app Klimper (which happened to be German in origin) just announced its desktop edition. Initially titled “Arpeggio of Free Space”, TVM was written during my first session with Klimper on my Mac.

The full project originally was envisioned to have more complex dynamics in the lead synths, but the version you are about to hear stays with the first eight bars and then sets up camp, repeating them throughout the whole track. Emotion and narratives are relegated to more traditional Iridium Point textures, like an organ and live (iPad, finger) drums.

The 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.

A folk song murmured by an alien [Spoiler] as they casually [Spoiler] the [Spoiler].

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.

In that, the project takes on the mythical hue of the poem above. It is a gift—
to cosmology, the field where I’ve found a home. To the people I meet. My crystalline time³.

TVM is rather overtly written to echo how I have perceived love⁴. It starts with a distant synth that sings back to the main Leitmotif, but weaves into a complex and groovy dance number half way. The two instruments break free, and reache the ethereal and surreal by the third quarter mark, and ultimately they return to the original melody but with renewed determination, emotional intensity and firmness.

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. ↩︎
3. Unsurprisingly, given Three Body’s vast impact on me around the time I declared Physics to be my major, Crystalline Time is indeed the title of another unpublished Iridium Point musical scrap. ↩︎
4. Sagan’s “…to make the vastness bearable…” ↩︎