On Mind, Music, and Technology

The site began somewhere in 2000 as a simple platform to mention the music work I did. After the discovery of WordPress and music in a multi-user environment, the site transformed and a journaling began. Presently, the site has become a long-term meditation on the interface between the mind, music, and technology with the occasional foryas into  play and art.

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Music is a primal language. In fact, I believe it is the primal language from which present communication has evolved. Its power to move us is unparalleled. Actors, for example, practice different emotional expressions of the same words precisely through the music of voice to change their meanings.

Technology is a function of the tools mankind has developed over the years. It has been and continues to be fashioned in our collective hands. These changes are aptly portrayed in Clarke and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as a bone thrown into the sky transforms into a space vessel.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Music is man’s development of his inner self, and technology is man’s development of his outside world.

By way of telegraph, telephone, radio, Internet, and multi-user environments, man’s language and tools have been in a process of fusion. The two growing paths of the internal found in communication and the external seen in technological advancement are joining. Though no single person is at the lead of this odd caravan, we are surely moving in some direction.

Watching both paths develop as reflections of mankind’s growth manifests something as coming into focus within mankind.

Much of this site is self-reflection. Play is a primary component for growth, and meditation is the honing of play into a state of maturity and health.

Video games and the multi-user worlds are rapidly evolving. The play and learning opportunities that present are powerful. Parents and politicians are alert to this strength as are players who invest much time within them. Learning the positives and pitfalls facilitated by these new and growing abstract spaces is an exercise of facing our fears of technology and discovering how best to handle ourselves as we move forward.

Pianos provide a speech developed from minds of centuries past. Synthesizers show a speech in development now. The music performed and presented here stem from a state of meditation as a mind in the technological present influenced by the primal beauty found in sounds of the past.

When these works of words or music resonate with an audience, then hopefully they describe a more universal position than my own self-reflections, in that they portray, by the medium of music and technology, some of the myriad meanings and emotions sensed in parts of all humanity as we continue forward in these seemingly chaotic times.