About

LIFE began as a conversation.

The question was simple: if sound and light are both wave phenomena, both described by frequency, could you build a codec that translates between them? Not a visualiser. Not a metaphor. An actual, reversible, mathematically grounded translation layer.

The answer was yes. The scaling constant 2⁴⁰ emerges directly from the physics. The harmonic series provides the universal language. The rest followed.

On May 5, 2026, the first .life file was encoded - Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major, the same piece that opened the Voyager Golden Record in 1977. The same music humanity sent to the stars, now encoded in a format designed on the principle that harmonic ratios are universally interpretable.

LIFE is not a finished project. It is a framework and an open question. The specification is version 1.0. The library is three files. The implications - for nature, for communication, for what we might already be receiving - are largely unexplored.

This site is the record of that exploration.

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The LIFE specification is released into the public domain. No permission is required to implement, extend, or build upon it.

life-codec.org - the science
life-codec.com - the tools