The signal is not the story

Last January, I spent fourteen nights relabeling a recording archive that had been hurried into folders named final, final-two, and final-actual. The files were orderly only after I stopped asking them to prove one dramatic thing.

Noise is a record of the room

Every instrument makes a little weather around its measurement: a power supply settling, a door opening down the corridor, a hand returning to the desk. Removing that weather can make a chart more legible; it can also erase the conditions that made the chart true.