I recently encountered a Ted talk by neuroscientist, Anil Seth, in which he proposed, “we’re all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it ‘reality.'” His reasoning was that our mind is simply conditioned by its environment to understand the impulses it receives from our senses. And that perception is really just a process of impulses being compared to previous experiences that subsequently form our expectations of the world (The video is at the bottom of this post). Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival is a film that explores this idea (kinda). The protagonist, a linguist, by the end of the film is experiencing “reality” or dreaming (it’s not abundantly clear) outside of time because of exposure to an alien language that isn’t necessarily arranged or contained within any kind of temporal system.

Image recognition technology has advanced to a level that Facebook is now helping blind people see their families through intelligent descriptions of the contents of imagery. I have wondered for some time if a similar thing might be possible with music.

Seth in his Ted talk also described the process of experience from the inside out instead of just the outside in; the idea that we constantly experience not only the world around us, but also ourselves within the world. I know that could sound very simple, but I think immersion (at least in my own opinion) occurs when I forget the latter. When I forget that I exist within the world around me and for a brief moment, the world exists without me, or the thing I am immersed in takes over.

In the same way that something as simple as the THX chord can signal to your mind that you are heading into the world of a film, I would love to create a soundscape that is inherently musical, captivating and that still retains the physicality of a space, something that’s more than just music. To create a piece of music that at some level encodes a three dimensional space or a frame of video and yet still can be partially understood as that thing. (Goal 1)

I would love to create a video sketch that manipulates the feeling of consciousness within the audience. (Goal 2)

And finally, I want to create a media artefact that does both, that explores how music and imagery can combine to not only recode information from other formats that could be so alien, other or new that for a moment the audience might completely lose themselves in it. (Goal 3)

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