1/f
March 9th, 2010
…the basic
shot structure of the movies,
the way film segments of different lengths
are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act,
has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably
wave-like pattern called 1/f, or one over frequency — or the more Hollywood
friendly metaphor, pink noise. Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated
somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world
is ablush with it. Start with a picture of Penélope Cruz, say, or a flamingo on a lawn,
and decompose the picture into a collection of sine waves of various humps,
dives and frequencies. However distinctive the original images, if you
look at the distribution of their underlying frequencies, said
Jeremy M. Wolfe, a vision researcher at Brigham and
Women’s Hospital, “they turn out to have
a one over f characteristic
to them.”
So, too,
for many features of our
natural and artifactual surroundings.
Track the pulsings of a quasar, the beatings of a heart,
the flow of the tides, the bunchings and thinnings of traffic, or the gyrations
of the stock market, and the data points will graph out as pink noise. Much recent
evidence from reaction-time experiments suggests that we think, focus and
refocus our minds, all at the speed of pink. If you’re sitting at a task,
Dr. Cutting said, “sometimes you’re good at it, sometimes your
mind wanders, sometimes you’re fast, sometimes you’re
slow, and the oscillating patterns that
occur are generally
one over f.”
