Inspiration from truly *weird* places

[David Emm]

This is an excerpt from the short story "The Falls: A Luna Story" by a fine author named Ian McDonald. In part, it concerns AIs so advanced that humans are playing catch-up with their unique thinking *processes*. (The AIs have no gender, of course, but are grammatically referred to as e or er as an assist to human interaction.) If you can bear with the length of this, you'll see why I posted it.

.......

"If Callisto's intelligence and emotions are genuine- some still believe they aren't and I have argued and will argue again their error with them- then so are er dreams. Marid translates them into a form I can comprehend. Callisto's dreaming is primarily auditory. Marid plays me a storming chatter of notes and clicks, titanic bass and infra bass swells and clusters of rushing triads at the very upper limit of my hearing. It sounds like chaos. It sounds like the throb of black holes, the drone of the cosmic microwave background, the slow tick of entropy towards dissolution and chaos but if you listen, if you really listen, if you go beyond the human instinct to analyse, to structure, the pareidolic need to see rabbits in the moon, faces on Mars, gods in the alignment of the stars, then a titanic music unfolds. Themes, harmonies- though by no harmonic laws we recognize- modes and variations, unfolding over a time-scale longer than any human attention span. It is magnificent and beautiful and quite the eeriest thing I have ever heard. I drop into the dream-music and when I return, reeling, hard-of-breath and dazed, hours have passed.

 

I used to try to imagine what it must be like to dream constantly, to have this music rattling and burbling along the bottom of your consciousness like water over rocks. I understand now. The thing it must be like is imagination. That not-conscious but not-dreaming state of images, scenarios, illusions where we pursue potentials, alternatives, what-ifs. The imagination never closes, never quiets. It is the root of our humanity."

......

I have no idea of how I might end up interpreting this compositionally without going super-Stockhausen, but I feel sure I'll think of something. It has 'synthesizer' written all over it.