SUNYATA: a film where no two voices ever begin together

Watch on YouTube. Emptiness is not absence. It is the space that lets form happen.

Licensed CC BY 4.0.

The bowl holds because of what is not in it. The room is a room because of the empty
part. You have spent a long time looking for the furniture, and the room was the gift.

Song 19 of Out of Your Mind, and the quietest thing I have made. No kick, no clap, no
percussion of any kind, and no bass anywhere in it.

No two voices ever begin together

Not once in four minutes. Every voice in the score owns its own onset steps, and no two
notes anywhere in the film share a start.

Which means there is never a chord event. There is no instant you can point at and say
the harmony happened there. Harmony is only ever something that has quietly become true
while you were listening to something else, and by the time you notice it, it has been
the case for a while.

That is what I wanted emptiness to be as a rule rather than as a lyric. And because it
is a rule, it is checkable: the build walks the finished note grid and refuses to render
if any two notes in any section land on the same step.

It caught me on the first run. The bell that traces the title walks its own path through
the bar rather than sitting on a fixed onset, and it wandered onto a step another voice
already owned. The assertion stopped the render and named the step. I would never have
heard it. That is exactly the kind of claim that quietly becomes false between the
docstring and the audio.

The four voices breathe against each other

They share one slow cycle at four different phases, so as one swells another recedes.

I claimed in the first draft of the score that this keeps the total energy flat across
the film. Then I measured it, and across the whole film the spread is thirteen decibels,
because the opening has one voice and the bridge empties out under the Heart Sutra and
the ending opens outward rather than stopping.

What is actually true is narrower and more interesting: inside the sections where all
four voices are running, the level holds to between one and four decibels. The breathing
keeps the texture steady. The arrangement is still allowed to arrive and leave. I
rewrote the claim to say that, because the version I had written first was the kind of
thing that sounds better and is not the case.

The title is in the gaps

At the arrival the bell does not play the word. It plays around it. The notes fall on
either side of three silences whose lengths are the three syllables, sun ya ta.

The voice is kept out of those windows deliberately, and the build checks that too. One
line was sitting a second into the second gap, and it got moved rather than kept. The
name of the film is the part with nothing in it, and the film does not get to talk over
its own title.

There is no ground

The whole piece is C whole tone. No leading tone, no perfect fifth above the tonic, no
major or minor third relationship anywhere, so nothing pulls toward anything. There is
no bass and no sub in the film at all.

The harmony floats with nothing holding it up, and it stands anyway.

The forms are never drawn

The bowl and the arch in the picture are not illustrated. A soft wash is laid across the
frame and the shapes are cut out of it, so the object is the part that was left alone.

My first attempt at this used a rectangle for the wash, and it read as exactly what it
was: a grey box with a hole in it. The fix was to give the wash no edge of its own, a
soft ellipse blurred until only the cut out shape is legible. The bowl holds because of
what is not in it, and that is also how the bowl is made.

Late in the film the bunny stops being a translucent figure and becomes an opening. The
sky is composited through a mask of its body, so what you are looking at is a hole in
the field with stars behind it. The outline is the last thing to go.

Made on a laptop

Stick figures in Python and PIL at 1280x720, twelve frames a second. An original
ChipForge score generated from numpy, no samples. No GPU, no subscriptions, no stock
footage.

More from Napkin Films

One Hand is the other film built out of what is missing.
No Spectator is this one's opposite number, all motion
and no seat. And Anatta takes the emptiness one step further,
into the self that was never holding anything either.

License

This film is licensed CC BY 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International). Remix
it, repost it, drop it into your own thing. Credit "Napkin Films / Organic Arts LLC" and
link CC BY 4.0.

Engine code (Napkin Films, ChipForge) is licensed GPL-3.0-or-later.

ElevenLabs voice audio is licensed content and is not redistributed outside this film.
The words are adapted and compressed from Alan Watts, Out of Your Mind, not the original
recordings.