Mu-Psi Manifesto*
Mu-Psi is to music what science fiction is to narrative art. It is sound-art that seeks to transcend the personal and to express universal concepts, patterns, and processes. Just as a science fiction begins with the premise of some possible future universe and proceeds to fill in the details and consequences of that premise, a Mu-Psi sound work begins with a hypothesis, a “what-if” premise, and proceeds to explore the ramifications of that premise.
Art has a purpose and plays a powerful role in society. The artist’s mission is to:
- Stimulate imaginative thinking, discussion, and creation of alternative worlds, solutions, possibilities
- Entertain by stimulating the intellect
- Guide audiences along paths through abstract conceptual spaces
- Invite the audience on an intellectually challenging journey from which they will return refreshed, rejuvenated, and inspired
- Create sonic metaphors for powerful universal concepts (not personal psychological trauma)
- Create an ecstatic experience for the audience (in the original sense of ek stasis — to be outside or beyond one’s self).
- Play within a set of constraints; experimentally violate one or more constraints to explore the ramifications
We all want to be entertained but beyond that, we want meaning in art.
—Mark Johnson from The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding
Examples of MuPsi — the musical counterpart to SciFi or math fiction. Each piece is a “what-if” premise; musical transformations explore the ramifications of that premise, for example “What if you tried to create music using nothing but clicks?”, “What if the Internet showed signs of being a group-intelligence?”, “What would it sound like if the dissemination of genetic information by a lysogenic virus were modelled in sound? What are the up-sides of friction?
Autocatalysis (2010)
Your contribution to the complex system results in feedback that can inspire you to create even more input.
Bubble & Squeak (2017)
In the beginning, was the bubble. Before life could emerge from inorganic matter, there first had to be a boundary to separate inside from outside, self from other.
Conductus (2014)
Given that sound is vibration and thus can effect change in the physical world, if we excite the impulse response of a church using singing pilgrims wearing tap shoes, will we be able to hear the echoes of all the music that has ever been played and every word that has ever been spoken in that church?
Cyclonic (2008)
Is there any difference between events as recorded, events as experienced, events as remembered, and events as imagined?
Double-well (2016)
Inspired by the story of how, when the universe was young, the Higgs boson lived in a (three-dimensional) double-well potential and there was symmetry between the weak and electro-magnetic forces. But, as the universe cooled down, the Higgs settled into just one of the wells, breaking that symmetry forever
Frog Pool Farm (2002)
What if every living thing on Earth is signalling — “Here I am!”
h—>gg (2017)
How much of what we know has been acquired through inference, by observing the effects or the traces of the actual process rather than by observing the process itself?
Lament (1999)
What if we could use technology to upload our life-long accumulation of knowledge?
Levulose (1986)
What if left-handed sugars could satisfy your hunger while starving you to death?
Lysogeny (1983)
An idea is not just a virus — it’s a lysogenic virus. New ideas change us. And those ideas are also changed by us, modulated by our own experience, before we pass them along to others.
misfold (2023)
Proteins frolic in an energy landscape, skipping lightly between order and disorder, but sometimes they get stuck in a trap…
Mitochondria (1994)
Imagine a telelphone call from your mitochondria.
Motet (1977)
Sentient animals and vegetables beg the question: what is legal to eat?
…odd kind of sympathy (2011)
You can never know for certain exactly how your part fits in the larger scheme of things.
Public Organ (1995)
The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything.
— Lewis Thomas The Lives of a Cell
Rupture (2019)
How did the surface rupture caused by the 2010 El Mayor-Cucapah Earthquake expose social and geopolitical ruptures?
SlipStick (2008)
Could there be a world without friction? And if so, would we really want to live there?
QUANTUM (2013)
Can data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN be mapped to sound in such a way so as to express the mystery and beauty of the Higgs field?
sunSurgeAutomata (1987)
Energy surges outward from the sun, driving self-organizing systems that evolve from clicks into pitch, rhythm, and life on Earth
Tangled Timelines (1999)
When you visit your home town or re-read your old papers or journal, your timeline crosses over itself and gets tangled up
Trinity (1989)
The exact moment at which the atomic bomb ceased to be a fascinating scientific challenge and became a weapon of mass destruction
VR_I (2017): 3D Music & Sound Design for Gilles Jobin’s virtual reality dance piece (2017)
From the largest scale to the smallest, we contain multitudes!
X bar (1986)
Cantor Sets: Can you hear the spaces between the sounds?
Yes (1981)
The scientific, the erotic, and the mystical thoughts simultaneously exist and interact in your brain
* [A] manifesto is a statement in which someone makes his or her intentions or views easy for people to ascertain. Merriam-Webster Dictionary