There’s a strange dissonance — in the cognitive sense, not the harmonic — when tracking the progression of a short piece of ambient music as it flows across a browser. There’s the placid, even if dark-toned, audio on the one hand, and on the other there’s that rapid motion of the projected image, the symbol of the music’s forward motion. Take “Budapest,” by Moon Zero, which was posted at the artist’s soundcloud.com/moonzero page, and which has, as a waveform, the sort of largely uniform contour of a drone.
It’s a thick, unwavering stretch of sound, by all appearances. In colloquial terms, “Budapest” is more tube than wave. And, indeed, Moon Zero’s drone is a drone, in that it has a consistent tonal quality that maximizes stasis over any evident melodic or rhythmic intent. But there’s more to it than that, not only because drones entice the ear to listen for subtle distinctions, but because “Budapest”’s distinctions aren’t all that subtle: inside that tube there are cycles of ringing, metallic chatter, slurry echoes, and more. This waveform pattern is just one view of the track. Certainly there are other visualizations that would do greater justice to its complexity.