The Ladder

Thirteen readings of the same instruction, forty-two minutes long. Each view of a data cube is quantised into eight brightness bands. The piece steps through those bands while the view itself advances in depth, weighted so that depth carrying more structure takes more time. That instruction never changes here. What changes is the tuning it lands on: struck gamelan bronze, real bell partials where the contrast of a band picks the size of the bell, quarter tones, a raga over a fixed drone, a just-intoned overtone series. Two sources. A quasar host observed by JWST’s NIRSpec, and a slice of the DESI redshift survey. Listen for the terraces, and for how differently they arrive when the scale underneath them changes. The next programme is about what those terraces are actually reporting. This programme contains material from the DESI Early Data Release (DESI Collaboration et al. 2024), used under CC BY 4.0. Required citation and the full acknowledgement: https://radio.enthropysystems.com/pages/attribution Source data: public JWST observations obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute, operated by AURA under NASA contract NAS 5-03127. Programs #1191, #1257, #1328, #1621, #2457, #2484, #2727, #2731, #2732, #2733, #2736, #2926, #4426, #4523, #4528, #5086, #5883. We acknowledge the teams led by Lee Armus (#1328) and Roberto Maiolino (#4426) for developing their observing programs with a zero-exclusive-access period. Observation identifiers are given above. Audio © 2026 Far Wide Radio — licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. All artwork by Elliot Fairbanks Junior. Archived and citable: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21693766 Series 2 contains material from the DESI Early Data Release (DESI Collaboration et al. 2024), used under CC BY 4.0. Full citation, acknowledgement and data credits: radio.enthropysystems.com/pages/attribution Series 2 is archived and citable: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21995512