The Projection · from Anthony's Fire
This is the real male fruit fly: every traced neuron in the MaleCNS connectome, placed where its cell body sits. Scroll, and it is eaten, projected onto its own eigenvectors, collapsed into a spectrum, and played.
Loading about three megabytes of fly…
I · the host
Each point is a neuron. Where the dataset records a cell body, the point sits there. The optic lobes are the two great wings of light; the ventral nerve cord trails away beneath.
II · the axis
Colour now shows the Fiedler vector: the second eigenvector of the graph's Laplacian, computed from connections alone. Nobody told it where anything is.
III · the parasite
Seeded in the gustatory neurons, it appropriates along the fly's own connections. Where it has fed, the fly is amber; where the host is used up, it is dead.
IV · the projection
Every neuron leaves its place in the head and moves to its coordinates on the graph's second, third and fourth eigenvectors. Anatomy is discarded. Only relation is kept.
V · subtraction
Its nodes, the edges that touched them, and the record of which they were. What remains is the fly alone.
VI · the spectrum
Each neuron falls into the column of the mode it belongs to most. The columns stand at the eigenvalues. This is the form that can be heard: the spectrum is invariant to labelling, and different graphs can share one, so it can never be turned back into a fly.
The lowest eigenvalues of the fly's graph, mapped to pitch. Start with the fly alone, then add the parasite, then its anti-sound. The top trace is the pressure wave and the bottom one is the spectrum you are hearing. Put headphones on if you can; laptop speakers lose the lowest partials.
Nothing is playing.
“Dude, that's like fly Jesus: the only fly to live without sin.” — Meow-Ludo, on learning that the real fly was being turned into a spectrum
A picture of a connectome can make any claim look true, so here is exactly what each layer is.
| layer | status | detail |
|---|---|---|
| neurons, synapses | observed | MaleCNS v1.0, neurons with status Traced, body-to-body synapse counts at minimum confidence 0.5. |
| positions | observed, partly estimated | Annotated soma locations. Traced neurons with no soma annotation are placed at the mean of their neighbours. |
| axis, embedding, spectrum | computed | The largest connected component, taken as an undirected graph weighted by synapse count. Its normalised Laplacian and bottom eigenpairs, from ARPACK. |
| parasite | modelled, illustrative | An appropriation rule we chose. It spreads along outgoing connections and consumes the host's resource. It models nothing about flies, ergot, or activity. |
| joint spectrum | computed from the model | One parasite node per infected neuron, fed by its host, joined along the host's own edges. The fly's graph plus those nodes, re-solved. |
| sound | artistic mapping | Eigenvalues to frequencies on a log scale across four octaves; amplitude falls with mode number. The chorus snaps each to a partial of 55 Hz. Harmony is the instrument's, not the fly's. |
| activity | none | No neural activity is simulated anywhere on this page. Nothing here is the fly thinking. |