Film: Heartbeat Detector

I’m choosing a musical one not because of my love of music, but actually because the physics involved in this makes the metaphor work.  Let my mind be like a bizarre musical instrument, my neurons little strings all at different tensions, all connected to each other.  Somehow the vibrations of these strings set off other vibrations in other strings and by a series of conducted vibrations and interferences, you have “thought”.  An artificial intelligence researcher specialising in neural networks might call these string tensions “weights” within the network.

If you twirl your finger around the rim of a wine-glass, you can make a note.  The note suddenly starts, and then you dim it to be quite quiet.  You adjust the speed and pressure of your finger and you can make the note almost disappear, but there is still enough vibration in the glass that the note is still sounding — even if it is inaudible — you can feel it through your finger.  And gradually, very slowly altering how the friction of your fingertip induces vibrations into the bell of the glass, you can build a gradual crescendo; and as you do so, the note takes on more harmonics as other modes of vibration are set up in the body of the glass.  The note becomes harsher, less pure, more sawtooth in waveform.

Heartbeat Detector was like a hundred fingers and a hundred different wine-glasses, all filled with different amounts of liquid.  One would start very quietly.  Then another and another.  There was no order to the pitches of the notes the wine-glasses were producing.  They all started very quietly, but as more and more came to sound, the noise became more and more maddening: a horrible clash of dischord.  Very slowly different wine-glasses would get slightly louder.  By the end of the film, almost two and a half hours later, the glass-notes had become a horrifying roar of sound.

The pitch of each glass’ note was tuned to the resonant frequency of a dark neuron buried deep in my mind.  As the glass’ note became gradually louder and gradually louder it would correspondingly induce a vibration in that dark neuron, which would gradually get louder and louder in sympathy.  And slowly — as the film progressed — the notes got louder, and the dark-thought neurons were jangling and firing, and there were so many of them, and now my head is a bit of a mess, and I’m not going to sleep well tonight.