Precipitating resonance

Intuitively, you already know what resonance is. It's what happens when someone "strikes a chord." It's the timing of your leg action that swings you ever higher. It's the reason why people say, "Se, no!" or "One, two!" or "Heave, ho!" with the same tempo. It rips bridges apart, is a dial you adjust to get your favourite radio station when radios still had dials. It gives instruments their voice.

Resonance is all about making things tick, even if that ticking leads to structural collapse. Structural collapse is serious business — the prevention of, that is — and so we (yes, you!) are very interested in discovering resonance, before resonance discovers us and presents us with a ticking time bomb from Tacoma.

When inquiring about what makes bridges fail or whistles wail, we usually take a black box approach. We are less concerned about why there is a sweet spot, and more interested in where that spot is. We enumerate the possibilities (frequency sweep) and take notes. In this way we characterize non-chocolate cornets and clarinets, buildings, antennas and filters; even the digital ones.

Could we, perchance, characterize ourselves in a similar fashion?

It sounds a bit loony on the surface, and slightly degrading just beneath. First, it makes absolutely no sense to frequency sweep a human, except for maybe a hearing test. But frequency is just an abstraction for all the bumping, twisting, swinging and shaking that goes on in the time domain. So what if I modified the proposal to sweeping for abstractions? Aren't we affected by abstractions?

Aren't we, colloquially speaking, affected by ideas?

Fan art. *cough*

There are tons of ideas to run through, but on a typical day this place is about anime, and the abstractions there are pretty well defined. We have established spectrums for genre, setting, character, and relationships. Don't believe me? I'll see your skepticism and raise you … an Absurdly Powerful Student Council. That's right! And there's more where that came from.

The resonance response that we tend to be interested in is (logarithmic) magnitude, one that bears no indication of its penchant for productivity or destruction, so it stands to reason that resonance is the umbrella that embraces love and hate.

Taken alone this is an elegant duality — love and hate, awful and awesome — but application-specific considerations compel us to add the analogue of phase: "like" is positive, "dislike" is negative.

A complete picture would give us three pieces of information: what you like or dislike, how much you like it or dislike it, and the transition that occurs as we move between related items.

So this can be done. It may get unwieldy, but we could characterize the anime fan to some arbitrary degree of granularity. What could we do with this information? Design a performance that hits as many of the right notes as possible, maybe? Get compensated for doing so, maybe?

Why is it that when engineers do this, it's called meeting customer requirements, but when the anime studios do this, it's shameless pandering? Both give the customer what they want. It pays the bills and puts food on the table. They are functionally equivalent.

If there is a legitimate difference, it's that the customer (or their consultant) issues a request for what they want. It's a whole other matter when someone shows up at your door and tells you that they have what you want, and they're right.

And to do it through black box analysis! What are we, caps and coils? How could we possibly be understood in the span of several graphs? Or surveys and focus groups? How does a server farm in the back office of the marketing department know you better than you know yourself?

This has been the reality long before data mining was a buzzword but we are, increasingly, becoming tractable problems, neurons to numbers, solved in silicon. It's a notion that is sometimes horrifying, sometimes humbling, sometimes humiliating: someone is out there, smashing minds for fun and profit, and r00ting our wallets. Or perhaps, rooting through our wallets.

Cringely figures that entertainment is software. But with software comes malware, and won't somebody come along and patch our kernels? Nope. No one has come, no one will come, save maybe the collection agency. You can detune, tune out, be apathetic or what-ever, but a grey world is a double-plus unfun one. Might as well just uninstall.

You, me, the drooling fan, the snobby artsy, we're all fair game, can be gamed, will be gamed, all the while enjoying said gaming. So maybe we should stop complaining. After all, we're just a bunch of black boxes looking to have our buttons pushed.