Signal

Oh hey, I finally made another music.

The Timeline

Based on the FL Studio project data, I started working on Signal all the way back on March 19th, 2024, when I was a (hardly sentient) 17-year-old. I then gradually lost interest in the song after composing myself into a corner; more on that later.

Not wanting to abandon the whole thing, a (slightly more sentient) 18-year-old me decided to cut his losses and release a way slower and shorter version of Signal in 2025, very creatively titled Lost Signal. Listening back on it, it was very obviously unfinished, but hey, better than nothing, right?

Well, I didn't stop there for some reason. From June to July 2026, due to personal circumstances (read: a horrible internship), a (reasonably sentient) 19-year-old me decided to lock in and actually finish the darn song. I completed it near the end of July, then spent a couple more weeks on the full music video.

So yeah, it roughly took 2.5 years, but honestly, the raw number of man-hours was probably only like 100 or so.

The Specs

Some fun technical details ahead. I tried to keep the original structure relatively intact. I probably would've done things a lot differently had I restarted from scratch.

• All melodic tracks (i.e., main melody, backing melody, chords) use 3x Osc, because my past self liked hurting his ears apparently. Still, I tried to make them sound as gentle as possible.

• The drums are sampled from cw_amen14_175.wav from Amen Breaks Volume 1. I love chopping drums.

• The "vocals" are sampled from The Lincolnshire Poacher numbers station broadcast. Sort of the classic ARG-esque vibe going on here.

• The main melody is a musical realization of the VOX tones at the start of an SSTV transmission, see here for an example. This is also where Signal gets its name from.

• The remaining sound effects (riser, reverse cymbal, cymbal crash, etc.) are either FL Studio presets or samples from Cymatics. That's good enough for me.

It's worth noting that, unlike all my previous attempts at it, this one is actually breakcore! It's 200 BPM and has a lot of rapid vocal/drum chops. That's basically breakcore. Please don't argue with me on this.

I still don't know how to mix or master and I refuse to learn it properly.

The Sections

Signal is canonically divided into 8 sections: Inception, Mechanism, Reconnect, Frequency, Innocence, Heartbeat, Transcend, and Exception. The nice thing about having a name for each section is that I don't have to use timestamps.

Most of the names are self-explanatory, some of them less so. When you make a work of art, it's common for other people to find additional hidden meaning beyond your original intent. But as someone who makes a lot of… shit, I find myself noticing hidden connections in my own work all the time, and I end up subconsciously osmosing those interpretations. I don't know if there's a name for this phenomenon. Let's call it retroactive overfitting. Or retroactive projecting. I'm just projecting onto my own work.

Anyway, I have my reasons for why these names are "perfect", but that's just the retroactive projection speaking. I chose these names on a whim after finishing the track, and they've just stuck.

One thing I can say is that they're all 9 letters long. I did this on purpose so the music video would look "aesthetically pleasing". But then there are only 8 sections, so surely there must be a secret 9th one, right? This totally real metapuzzle is left as an exercise for the reader.

The History

I don't exactly remember whether the main melody or backing melody came first, but I know I had the skeleton for the last part (Exception) very early on. Then Inception, Mechanism, and Frequency followed naturally. Innocence and Heartbeat came shortly after that too.

And then… nothing. I had no idea how to connect Heartbeat and Exception. Signal went through many, many, many iterations. I considered dropping Exception entirely and making a new section instead, but in the end, most of the initial version remained in the final product.

One thing I find interesting is that the missing link (Transcend) wasn't a breakthrough at all. Despite its short length, it was a combination of several ideas I tried on and off over the months. A nice way to tie up all the loose ends, I think.

The Inspirations

This list is not exhaustive and probably includes a lot of retroactive projecting. It's here so you can get a sense of how [adjective] my music taste is.

• The transition from Inception to Mechanism is partly based on Doin's The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog, also around 200 BPM. If you squint at it, it also resembles µ-Ziq's Hasty Boom Alert.

• The vocal chops in Frequency roughly follow the drum pattern in Kyu-kurarin by Iyowa. I think I just had that earworm while I was making this section.

• For some reason, the slow melody progression in Innocence always plays in my head whenever I shower. Good ritual, I guess? Anyway, that progression predates this track, I had played around with it before.

• The transition from 200 BPM in Frequency to 100 BPM in Innocence is a reference to an old unreleased song I made, and no, you are not listening to it. The whole Innocence section is a reference to that song, now that I think about it.

• Heartbeat's build-up drum pattern is directly ripped off of Eptic's Violence.

• If you listen closely, you might notice that Transcend's vocal pattern follows the piano chops in anybody can find love (except you.) by hkmori.

• Last but not least, Exception and the music video itself are both references to Credits by Frums.

The Video

I knew I wanted to do something special instead of just slapping ZGameEditor Visualizer on it and calling it a day. And because I hate using proper editing software more than I hate myself, I did the bulk of the work in Python.

First, the background image. I knew from the start that I wanted it to be grayscale with those long-exposure motion blur lines. But after trying (and failing) to take the photo near where I live, I decided to just set up a tripod in an unused classroom at my university (the academic year was starting soon) and capture myself walking across a white wall. I got kicked out by security shortly after, but let's not talk about that.

Next was the waveform, and for that I just used Aaron F. Bianchi's fine LSaO Visualizer. "Extremely violent", it advertises. Wonderful. Overlaying it on top of the background image was straightforward enough.

Really, the only labor-intensive part was visualizing the lyrics. The numbers girl yaps so many digits in this song, and I wanted the timing of those digits to be as accurate as reasonably possible. I also had the freedom to control how long each chunk of digits was before moving on to the next one. By the end of the song, I chose to be a lot more liberal with the splitting and chunking, so you couldn't really follow along with the lyrics on the first watch. I think that enhances the overall chaotic vibe I was going for in those final sections.

I don't think there's much educational value in sharing the code, but here it is anyway. My mentality for these things has always been to just "get it working", so don't expect any easily readable (or runnable) code. A friendly reminder that no one cares about your code if you're the only one using it.

Epilogue

And so we're at the end of this post.

You know, I find myself releasing creative works even when I'm unhappy with them more often than I'd like to admit. Of course, I get around to liking them after the initial sense of inadequacy, but you know, not ideal.

Signal has been in the works for over 2.5 years. Even after uploading the video unlisted on YouTube, I mulled it over for a few more days just to make sure I was ready and I didn't have any regrets before making it public.

But it really is out now, and I'm ready to leave it up on its own for good.

Is it perfect? No.

Am I happy with it? Yes.

Would I do something like this again? Probably not. Some things are just less enjoyable as an amateur than others. At least with drawing, I can visually see that I screwed up the anatomy or proportions or whatever, but with music production it's like… eh. Feels more like guesswork than anything. I am well aware the pros have their tips and tricks, but I kind of don't have the time and I kind of can't be bothered.

Nevertheless, this project deserves to be completed, despite me being a totally different person now than I was back when I started this.

So to those who still have works left unfinished, I hope they get to see the light one day.

The world can wait.