cherub is an image of sound data—specifically, the mystic chord of Scriabin. This chord can be heard played note by note in “Angel.” The abstraction of what can be read as sound by a nonhuman looks like complex wood grain to our eyes but can be transmuted into the mystic chord by a computer.
Scriabin believed specific music could allow other beings into the world.
The circle is a visual effect added to the data, its dimensions “burned” into the sound by sight. This sound is now still readable as sound to the computer but produces what we humans, with our biologically determined aural pattern seeking, interpret as noise. The circle is attempting to bring a feeling of something outside of the world of sound into it, like a crossing of visual and aural realms that have an intrinsic incompatibility but are nonetheless understood and rendered by a machine in a way we cannot expect.
