🎶 Humans On The Loop's Theme Song "Scalar Reconfigurations"

Sampling the cosmos, the musician-as-entelechy inverts scalar synecdoche.

Listen anywhere and everywhere. But it’s on Bandcamp right now.

The first original composition for Humans On The Loop and the podcast’s intro and outro music, "Scalar Reconfigurations", is a labor-intensive combination of sonified space data, layered studio instrumentation (piano, synth, six- and eight-string guitar, voice, and programming), and text-to-audio LLM output. This piece is an homage to the multi-scale, multi-substrate extended self of second-order cybernetics and our accelerating (re)turn to more-than-human identity in the 21st Century.

It’s an experiment in music production that predates Humans On The Loop by half a year, starting with the inkling to make something of public domain observatory data, sampling distant X-ray sources for sounds to use in textural beds and synthesizer voices. The heart of our own galaxy seems like a prime musical element to include in something about an expanded sense of identity, no?

But at around the time I started working with these samples, generative music was getting easier. I stumbled into Cassette AI, a text-to-music startup from Austin (nicely encapsulating the town’s inner tension) and got to work provoking Vespertine-esque electronica I have no other way of knowing how to manufacture.

Then there’s the human element. Production took on painterly and sculptural qualities as dozens of fragments of melodic sound grabbed from the heavens and latent space found their way alongside one another. I found forms in the music of space and machine that I wanted to anchor in the meso-scale as playable motifs. Refrains and voices stuck out and haunted me over months, so I leaned in and highlighted them with synth and piano overdubs, six-string and eight-string guitar runs, and chanting. Eventually, it felt like a whole.

People have been up to this for ages, organizing rocks to match geometries they saw at night, harmonizing things that we can hold and move around to match the patterns we observe in The Beyond and bringing something of the great ineffable chaordic structure of our world into reach. This music is what I see through the macroscopes of computer-assisted music modeling and space exploration.

These sounds are both mine and not-mine inasmuch as I both am and am-not co-arising with the rest of all it. It reminds me of some of the most joyous moments I’ve ever had of interspecies communication, practicing harmonics on my acoustic guitar in wild spaces of California and New Mexico and catching the attention of Hermit Thrushes. The cosmos sings to us and new tools empower us to sample and remix and sing back…and then what?

“Scalar Reconfigurations” is titled in honor of Joshua Dicaglio, fellow student of Richard Doyle, Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M, and author of Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry, whose rhetoric on nonduality and scale gave me the words to write about what started as a purely intuitive gesture. His episode is coming soon…

Our next members hangout is Saturday February 15th at 3 pm MT but now and always you can “find the others” in the Wisdom x Technology Discord server.