PRIME: My 127th release is a "math electro" love letter to prime numbers and the search for them! Composed with prime number melody structuring and timings, "Prime" also soundtracks Catherine's tireless search for these increasingly rare gems of mathematics. -- 🔊 Stream this on other platforms like YouTube and Spotify: hyperfollow.com/moule/prime 👕 Prime Merch: redbubble.com/shop/ap/163763287 🎥 Prime Cover Art Timelapse: yewtu.be/watch?v=7ZLgKJBcxHY -- "Prime" is a track I made dedicated to my latest hyperfixation of prime numbers, the search for larger and larger primes of various forms, and celebrating how they are used in fields like cryptography. -- This track began production with its opening melodies on June 27, 2024. I knew I was going to eventually release a prime-number-themed track given that I tend to make tracks about what I'm interested in, and my 127th release (a Mersenne prime) would be coming up, so what a perfect time to release it! The next Mersenne prime is 8191 and I doubt I'll release that much tracks. It's possible though! (And yes, I know its release date isn't prime, but I'm not waiting until February 2, 2027 to release this!) -- This track is also dedicated to the software, projects, and people who search for the largest prime numbers, such as the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), PrimeGrid, and others. It is my goal in life to contribute to mathematics by finding a really large prime number, or at least disprove what values for numbers of certain forms result in primes. These goals are of similar interest to Catherine, the anthropomorphic quokka in this cover art! She's the head of the Rottnest Island Space Agency's Department of Computation! -- How I made this track and the prime numbers it has: -- I called this track "Prime" because it has 5 letters and if you add up the value of each letter based on where it is in the Latin alphabet it is 61, another prime. I started by editing Prime's Logic Pro project file's settings to use prime numbers, setting a 5/2 time signature and tempo of 373 BPM, even though it sounds like 191 BPM. Both are palindromic primes and so is the time signature. -- My next step was to have a bell sound play every time a prime-numbered bar is reached in this track. Sadly, it resulted in 72 rings, but at least it's between the two primes 71 and 73 (and it rang for 71 odd primes!). Also, the bell's notes are B, C, E, and G, which are the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 7th letters in the Latin alphabet respectively. -- Next: creating a synth stab 5 times per bar, played at 7 different notes, looping 3 times. This would be the first of 5 sections for its emotional intro, which lasts for 2:43 minutes (163 seconds). I say it's emotional because when I finished the intro, I couldn't listen to it without crying. As I wrote on Mastodon: -- "It's made me tear up a few times (in a good way)...the music I make never has this effect on me and I've always struggled to deliberately produce tearjerker music, so this track is truly something special!" - mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/112976485978294661 -- Also, there are 5 gong sounds in the opening, the pad chords build up to having 5 notes each, and the pad melodies play in 3 groups of 5, resulting in a different chord being played when combined with the 7 groups of 5 synth stabs, which itself becomes a chord with 3 of them playing at the same time: one octave higher and another making a fifth chord with the lower octave. -- I ended up leaving this project for a while before coming back to it mid-July, where I shared a preview its opening on my Mastodon server on July 14: mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/112780575357902257 -- There are also 5 sections of this track: the intro, the 3 middle sections, and the outro. The intro obviously starts at 0:00 (I didn't think about having a 2-second bout of silence at the start to get Prime to start on a prime number) and ends on the 97th bar, the first middle section starts on the 101st bar at 2:43 (163 seconds), the second on the 149th bar at 3:59 (239 seconds). -- However, as I write this I realise I've made some mistakes: the third section starts on the 181st bar (181 is prime) but at 4:51 (4, 51, nor 291 seconds are primes, and the outro starts on the 211th bar (211 is prime) at 5:39 (5 is prime but not 39 nor 339 seconds). This track concludes at 7:59, which is 639 seconds, but 7 and 59 are prime. I think towards the end of this track I focused on slowing down the gaps (to prime number BPMs, of course, like 307 and 509) between sections just so they'd land on prime-numbered bars more so than times. -- I figured composite numbers would be impossible to avoid anyway (and besides, all composites are the products of primes), but I am very happy with the final result of this track and was so emotional when I finally finished this track during a sickness. I believe prime numbers are, for lack of a better word, "sacred", and this track was an excellent step forward for me to embrace time signatures and track creation patterns outside my usual four-on-the-floor patterns. The rest of this track involved a lot of mastering and sound decoration. -- Cover artwork: -- The cover artwork STARTED easily, with me simply modifying Catherine's face emoji, and clothing from Quokkium's artwork. The hard part came later when I created all the prime numbers of interest, but in the Great Vibes cursive font, which I thought looked aesthetically pleasing individually, but not with so many numbers! It didn't help I couldn't simply change the font all at once to Futura which I ended up using, because I had to separate the numbers into individual shapes, as Assembly, the graphic design app for iPad I use, doesn't allow superscript writing; I have to make some numbers smaller manually. Also, some math symbols did not look right in either font and I had to manually adjust the kerning. This took a huge chunk of time for this artwork. -- Eventually I redid all the numbers in the Futura font, and used the numbers made with the Great Vibes font as an artwork on Redbubble (www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/163764087) as well as an animated background for videos about this track. -- The wavy graph behind Catherine is a superimposed periodic curve model showing the prime numbers, as discussed more by Omar E. Pol here: www.polprimos.com – I found this graph very aesthetically pleasing! There's an interactive graph by Jason Davies here: www.jasondavies.com/primos/ -- As for some of the prime numbers that surround Catherine, there's too much to list here, but some choice ones include (information correct as of August 21, 2024): -- • 2^82589933-1: A Mersenne prime, and the largest prime discovered since December 2018. This one takes pride of place in the artwork as such! -- • F201107: The 201,107th number in the Fibonacci sequence, the largest confirmed to be a prime so far! -- • (10^84653-1)/9: The longest confirmed repdigit prime, composed entirely of 84653 ones. Some much larger values, such as (10^8177207-1)/9, are probable primes. -- There's primes of other types listed here: t5k.org/top20/ -- I announced the finished artwork on Mastodon on August 13: mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/112950104880465201 -- I hope you enjoy it! Let me know what you think on the Fediverse at MASTODON.MOULE.WORLD/@MOULE (or copy and paste @[email protected] into your own instance's search bar), or visit MOULE.WORLD for all MOULE links! more

THE BUGS: Aggressive electro about the titular botnets, viruses, worms, and other advanced polymorphic malware crawling out from the dark web and wreaking havoc across the surface web! Can the Cyber Threat Resistance League get them under CTRL? -- 🔊 Stream this on other platforms like YouTube and Spotify: distrokid.com/hyperfollow/moule/the-bugs 👕 The Bugs Merch: www.redbubble.com/people/mouleofficial/shop?artistUserName=MOULEOFFICIAL&collections=4031471&iaCode=all-departments&sortOrder=relevant 🎥 The Bugs Cover Art Timelapse: yewtu.be/watch?v=G-NvDULb2q8 -- This is yet another track I made years ago, starting on April 15, 2018, "finished" as my 41st "finished track" a few months later, and actually finished (improved, remastered and shortened) on August 3, 2024 and released as my 126th release. -- It was originally called "RACCOONS!!!!2" and was part of a trilogy of similar-sounding tracks called "RACCOONS!!!!1" and "RACCOONS!!!!3", all originally 10 minutes long, which use a kick sample distorted using GarageBand's AUReverb2 plugin to form the dominant metallic kick sound in this track. -- As with my more recent releases, it's been renamed to fit MOULE WORLD lore, in this case I wanted a track about the titular polymorphic malware threats that the Cyber Threat Resistance League (CTRL) have to battle! -- This track was inspired by Karma Fields', MORTEN, and Juliette Lewis' track "Stickup" I discovered in 2015, and I wanted to make something similar at the time, but didn't know how to because I was just getting started with GarageBand. Messing around with AUReverb2 in 2018 lead me to make this track's beat and its distinctive sound. -- This track's cover artwork was easy to make at first, as I knew what insects I'd like to make symbolising various types of malware: scorpions, having stingers, symbolise SQL injection and arbitrary code execution, hornet rhymes with botnet, and worms are...well...worms. I created 14 different insects! -- The trouble came afterwards, when you can see in the cover art timelapse that it goes through numerous prototypes such as bugs being arranged in a certain way depending on what malware they symbolise and how they connect, or having a central screen in the centre. I eventually settled on having the "spider-on-a-globe" symbol for the bugs along with a background of insects and binary code. Using the most greenest green of RGB (#00FF00), which in the past I was never a fan of, was actually a good idea when combined with black, white, and shades of green combined with shadows around the artwork. -- I hope you enjoy it! Let me know what you think on the Fediverse at MASTODON.MOULE.WORLD/@MOULE (or copy and paste @[email protected] into your own instance's search bar), or visit MOULE.WORLD for all MOULE links! more

O-RANGE: Chill synthwave music soundtracking Count Chiroptera's prized orange orchard, or as he calls it the O-Range! Unlike other vampires, he doesn't suck blood, he sucks oranges! -- 🔊 Stream this on other platforms like YouTube and Spotify: distrokid.com/hyperfollow/moule/o-range 👕 O-Range Merch: www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/162119201 🎥 O-Range Cover Art Timelapse: yewtu.be/watch?v=Gh1PMQQKaOg -- This track began creation on July 29, 2018 under the title "Marmalade", since listening to this made me think of a beach front during sunset where people drink orange drinks. During production, I decided to merge another unfinished track I had called "5-Sense Lemonade" which can be heard 4 minutes into the track due to how similar-sounding they were – the fact they were named after citrus fruit drinks was a coincidence. -- I first shared a preview of Marmalade on my now-deleted Twitter account in early 2020, which you can also view here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTqHG3qDD2k&t=210s -- Recently, as MOULE WORLD characters developed, I wanted to re-purpose this track to fit MOULE WORLD lore, and before finishing this on June 18, 2024, I made an artwork showing MOULE WORLD character Count Chiroptera in his prized orange orchard, and allocated this track coincidentally named after an orange drink to it! It uses the same synth arp as Castle Chiroptera too where Count Chiroptera first debuted, which is called "Twenty Eights Layers" in the project file because Castle Chiroptera was originally called "Twenty Eights". -- This track's cover artwork was very fun to make too. I started by importing assets of Count Chiroptera from Here For It's artwork and Robin from Reality Collapse's artwork, to get Count Chiroptera's vampire clothes and the same standing posture Robin has, and began editing his face based off Count Chiroptera's emoji. Then I added shadows, then began making the orange trees, then the bits of Castle Chiroptera (recently pained orange), and finally putting it all together. It was originally going to be titled "Orange Orchard" but I thought "O-Range" sounded more fitting, being a range of oranges while also referencing the fruit. -- Fun fact: I made a design of scaffolding in my attempt to show Castle Chiroptera's castle under construction to be flipped upside down and was aiming for it to have an M.C. Escher-esque appearance to reference Count Chiroptera's current plan in MOULE WORLD lore, but I decided to leave the castle upright in this artwork as aesthetically it looks more pleasing. -- I hope you enjoy it! Let me know what you think on the Fediverse at https://MASTODON.MOULE.WORLD/@MOULE (or copy and paste @[email protected] into your own instance's search bar), or visit https://MOULE.WORLD for all MOULE links! more