THE COLD, HARD TRUTH:

#1.

Version #1 – Stars Over Louisiana

My concept for this project has undergone several iterations since this course began. I know that I tend to change my mind often, and I rarely finish projects, so I expected this. It has definitely made the process quite a bit harder, however. For my first proposal presentation, I came up with a 7-track concept album that takes place in the late 20th century in Louisiana. The project was supposed to be a grand critique / examination of the 'American Dream', modern American imperialism, and life in the Deep South. I wanted to examine and reflect upon these concepts by subjecting the naive main character to various tragic / traumatic events such as 9/11, and the Columbia disaster. By documenting her gradual disillusionment with the nation she once loved, I would subject the listener to the same emotions she experienced.

My musical references included Ethel Cain, and Slowdive. At the time, I was really into Ethel Cain; I found the themes in Preacher's Daughter incredibly compelling, and her music really resonated with me aesthetically. I soon began to doubt this concept, because to me it seemed to be deeply derivative, and not truly my own. I mean the aesthetics, instrumentation, lyrics, and concept were basically bar-for-bar Preacher's Daughter.

Anyways, in terms of aesthetics, I chose writers like Tennessee Williams and Flannery O'Connor. These two authors are prominent figures in the Southern Gothic movement. I was drawn to Southern Gothic again because of Ethel Cain. I found the themes of tragedy, denial, loss, grief, and The Grotesque highly engaging and felt that writing something in that style would help me reflect upon and process the way that I felt at that time.

I did not fully consider what it would take to write this album as I was so blinded by my fascination with the themes discussed in it and my love for Ethel Cain. I don't play any instruments. Especially not the fiddle, steel guitar, or harmonica. I am not trained in songwriting or writing of any kind for that matter. I believed that if I put enough effort in, I'd be fine, but I soon found myself no longer willing to put so much effort into this specific concept. So, I changed my concept almost completely, as detailed in my next blog post.

#2.

Version #2 – The Sounds of Kepler-432b

Within 2 weeks of my initial presentation, proposing my Southern Gothic concept album, I deeply regretted it. Luckily, it was not too far into the module for me to completely change my concept. I've always been deeply interested in space, spaceflight, science fiction, and the idea of intelligent extraterrestrial life. During a Wikipedia rabbit-hole session I rediscovered the Voyager Records. These were two identical golden records launched by the USA on two deep-space probes in the 1970s, intended as a representation of humanity for an alien civilization to discover and decipher. These records contained recordings of the sounds of Earth, images of humans, animals, machines, and emotions, and 29 pieces of music that a NASA committee deemed to be the best representations of humanity. My concept was to invert this. A world where in the 1960s humanity received a transmission from a distant star containing the music of an intelligent alien civilization. Dubbed 'The Kepler Transmission', Earth's greatest scientists came together to try and unscramble/decipher any meaningful message from it.

This concept has also been altered quite a bit since I came up with it (as you will see in the following blog posts).

At this stage the album was going to be a critique of dominant societal views and how they dictate what 'proper' music is. I always found it weird that of the 29 tracks on the record, the vast majority were by white, western classical composers. Many non-white or more modern compositions were rejected by the committee because they were deemed 'improper'. I felt that this clearly shows how limited the records were in their representation of humanity, rather serving and further amplifying the voices of those who are capable of sending such a message. The project would have worked as a critique of what was chosen for the record, and how hegemonic systems (re-)write history and decide who is represented in discourse.

To make this critique, I would have had the alien album act as a sort of foil to the Voyager records. I would contrast the Voyager record's under/overrepresentation of certain cultures with the more advanced aliens' message's 'true' equality. To be honest, I did not give this version of the concept too much thought, as I altered it pretty soon. However, if this were to be my final concept I would have probably tried to make some points about the impossibility of so-called 'true equality', and how even a more advanced alien civilization would struggle to properly represent all its cultures. Or maybe actually I would have had the album be not representational at all to mirror what the Voyager records did. By making it clear to the viewer that some voices in this society are silenced, while others are disproportionately represented, I think it would have gotten my point across well.

#3.

Version #3 – The Kepler Transmission

As with the previous two versions of my concept, the reason it changed again is mostly an issue of personal interest in the concept. This final version still maintains a lot of the features of version #2, but rather than a critique of how hegemonic systems decide representation, it is a much broader look at what humans define as 'art'; an analysis of what makes certain sounds 'human', and how these conventions can be subverted to make something truly alien sounding. I also gravitated towards this version because I feel it more closely aligns with my creative instincts. I think I would rather write about composition, synthesis techniques, and speculative xenobiology than the previously mentioned social issues.

Essentially, the sounds within the transmission are considered by most humans as being meaningless, garbled, noise. The receipt of the transmission was still a huge event that had Earth's scientists spending decades trying to decipher any 'meaning' from it. After many years they all gave up, chalking it up to be a random radio transmission that happened to be aimed right at us. However, a small number of scientists (and harsh noise fans probably) argue that the meaning everyone is searching for so relentlessly is right there. They claim that this is in fact a transmission from an advanced alien civilization intended to showcase their culture, similarly to the Voyager records.

In this way, I can use the music and the website it will be displayed on (more on that later) to make the audience question:

• 1. What makes a sound 'human',
• 2. What makes a sound 'alien',
• 3. Why we place value on certain art, while other art is dismissed.

#4.

Conceptual Contention

In the final weeks of this project, the concept once again became a point of contention. Most of the tracks I had written at this point felt too human to be seen by anyone as, 'meaningless, garbled noise.' A friend gave me the idea of changing the fiction of the concept to one where these aliens somehow intercepted the Voyager Record and sent us back a transmission that crudely tries to imitate/mirror our sounds. I really resonated with this idea for some time, as some of the more 'interesting' sound experiments I had done relied on the aliens having heard the sounds of humans, trying to imitate speech with synthesis (more on this in a later post).

However, after much more thought I felt that the original concept held much more academic depth than this new one. With the original concept I am asking "what is music?" and "who gets to define art?". These questions open doors to conceptually rich frameworks like ethnomusicology, Musique Concrete, the institutional theory of art, and Xenomusicology among countless others. This new concept would actually undermine my most interesting argument, and the whole reason I wanted to do this project because it anchors everything back to human reference points.

As for the very human music I have already written, I feel that it can still be included within the project, as long as I reframe it. I could present these tracks as the works of human scientists trying to reconstruct and interpret the sounds of the transmission. After receiving this incomprehensible signal, they attempted to find familiar patterns in it, projecting their human logic and aesthetic tendencies onto the sounds. The harsher, abstract tracks in the album are the original sounds of the transmission, where the human-influenced tracks are portrayals of human bias, where people hear what they want to or have been conditioned to hear in the noise. I find that this framing really strengthens the original concept's point about how we impose meaning on sound.

#5.

The Aesthetics of Aliens

The concept of extraterrestrials has been deeply engrained in popular culture since H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds came out in 1898. This, along with Hugh MacColl's Mr. Stranger's Sealed Packet (1889), and Robert Cromie's A Plunge into Space (1890), defined an early version of what would become the aesthetics of extraterrestrials. You know it well, the grey or green skinny humanoid with big beady eyes, or the soulless, faceless war machines of Doctor Who and The War of the Worlds. These tropes have remained even until today; uninspired, bland, overdone depictions of aliens dominate these kinds of stories. These aliens no longer feel 'alien' as they are so intertwined with human aesthetic sensibilities.

Similarly, the alien sounds and music that were established in 1960s and 70s cinema have become so engrained in our culture that they no longer sound alien at all. The classic UFO sound effect, the wobbly sine waves meant to convey alien technology, and the more modern clicks and pops of alien speech are (in my opinion) overplayed, overdone, and uninspired. Sure, when these books and films first came out these things probably seemed alien (also I mean synthesis was already very alien to the people of the time), but by now they have become as recognizably human as the sound of a person singing. I guess that for these sounds to work in a film they have to be aesthetically appealing to some extent. Millennia of human aesthetic conventions dictate not just what sounds good to people, but also what makes something sound human. Something that is nicely resonant and not harsh is much more human than dissonant harsh noise.

I was so drawn to the idea of developing a truly alien language for music because of my disdain for the aforementioned sounds and aesthetics. Moreover, the creative possibilities I am afforded with this concept are very rich and allow for very interesting sonic experiments. As I try to divorce myself completely from cultural references, I have and will continue to learn many new sound design techniques (more on that later) that I can apply to my own music in the future.

#6.

Inventing Aliens

When I first came up with the alien music concept, I felt the first step was worldbuilding. I thought about the physiology, planet, and culture of the Keplerians. This is the creative foundation that everything else rests on. In order to justify my sonic choices, I first needed to establish what beings were making this music. All sorts of questions came to mind, and unfortunately, I found myself quickly overwhelmed with the sheer number of possibilities there are.

I asked myself questions like: What is their atmosphere composed of and how does that affect how sound propagates? What do they look like? Do they have vocal cords, limbs, vibrating membranes? Do they even hear the way we do? Do they perceive vibration through another sense? How is their society structured? What place does music have in it? Do they even have a concept of music? Below is an excerpt of my notes from January:

The first real decision I made was for these aliens to have five ears. I mean why not? Who is to say that they should have two ears, or even any ears? This was a stylistic choice, as I thought it would be cool if the music was presented as a 5.1 surround sound installation. Unfortunately, this did not make it to the final version of the concept as it would have required much more work than I feel I am capable of under the time constraints.

I got really bogged down in worldbuilding until I came to realize that all of these questions can be answered by literally anything I want. I don't need to have a hard sci-fi answer to all of these questions; that is totally out of the scope of this.

In the end, I came up with a few, very basic ground rules. The planet Kepler-432b (which I chose pretty arbitrarily) is a hot super-Jupiter, named so because it has a higher mass than Jupiter. It has a surface temperature of 500 degrees Celsius, a mass almost 2000 times higher than Earth, and a gravitational force 6 times higher than Earth's. These incredibly harsh conditions would only be survivable for an extremely robust species. They would probably have a rock-like exoskeleton to survive both the atmospheric pressure and temperature, several legs to hold themselves up under the extreme gravity. I am quickly running out of space in this post, so I will continue this in the next post.

#7.

Inventing Aliens pt.2

Carrying on from the previous post, here is where I got really into the speculative biology of it all.

The extremely dense atmosphere of Kepler-432b is the biggest factor in the aliens' biology, especially in terms of hearing (which is what I really should focus on). This planet's atmosphere is incredibly thick and heavy. Sound travels faster and with more energy in denser media, low frequencies in particular propagating very well over long distances, like how whale songs can travel thousands of kilometers. Knowing this, the environment would naturally favor low-frequency sounds, where high frequencies would attenuate quickly and be less useful for communication. The Keplerian's hearing would as a result be tuned to sub-bass and bass ranges, well below what humans would find aesthetically pleasing or even be able to hear.

An ear drum like what humans have would never survive such conditions, so they probably wouldn't have 'ears' in any sense we could conceive of. Instead, they perceive sound though vibrations through their exoskeletons in the same way some insects use tympanal organs on their legs. I imagined them as having some kind of mineral embedded in their exoskeletons that convert pressure waves into electric signals (like a piezoelectric microphone), so in this sense sound is not something they 'hear' per se but feel across their whole body.

Also, multiple legs are significant. With many points of contact with the ground, they would be extremely sensitive to seismic activity. Maybe they would not even be able to distinguish between air-based vibrations or ground-based vibrations like we can. This means that rhythm would be much more important to their music than pitch or melody.

The implications of this speculation form the foundations of the works in this album. The key guidelines I followed while writing the music were:

• Their music is dominated by low frequencies. Drones, complex sub-bass patterns, intricate bass sounds that are felt as much as they are heard,
• Rhythm and texture matter much more than melody or harmony,
• Their music is spatially complex, designed to be experienced from multiple directions (although this did not make it into the final product unfortunately.)

By setting these rules, I will be able to justify my design choices within the essay more effectively. Using these guidelines, I then set out to write tracks that align with the aesthetic sensibilities of the Keplerians, as outlined in the following posts.

#8.

Xenomusicology and Why We Like Music

In chapter 22 of Robert Freitas' Xenology (1979), he outlines what he calls Xenomusicology, or the study of alien music. Freitas tries to work out what alien music would sound like completely removed from human contexts. I'm sure you can see why this is the most important text for this project. Freitas poses the question: "Why do humans listen to music?". He posits that if a rational, scientific answer can be found to this, we can apply it to any species and figure out their hypothetical musical conventions.

Freitas draws from Ethology (the study of animal behavior), (Ethno)Musicology, and Biology to build his conclusion. He cites that ethologists believe that humans have 'releasing mechanisms' that automatically respond to rhythm, percussion, and melody. He says, 'There is no question that the perception of musical sound causes distinct physiological reactions that affect just about every part of us.' Essentially, our response to music is not purely cultural, but also biologically hardwired into us. If this is the case, then any species with a nervous system and sensory organs could develop some form of music shaped by their biology.

This framework is incredibly useful for my project because it gives me a rational basis for designing the music of the Keplerians. If releasing mechanisms are tied to physiology, and the Keplerians perceive sound through vibrations across a mineralized exoskeleton rather than through soft eardrums, then their releasing mechanisms would respond completely different to stimuli than ours. Where a human might feel a surge of emotion from a triumphant vocal melody, the Keplerians might experience something similar from sustained low-frequency waves or complex rhythmic patterns. This justifies many of the compositional choices I have made, particularly my reliance on heavy sub-bass drones and granular textures, rather than conventional melody.

However, Freitas' approach has its limitations. His framework is very rationalist; it assumes that understanding the biological function of music is enough to reverse-engineer what any species' music would sound like. But human music is much more than biology. It can be anything. From a ritual, an expression of identity, protest, or storytelling. These cultural aspects are not easily rationalized and reducible to releasing mechanisms. So, while Freitas gives me a strong foundation for the biological side of the Keplerians' music, I need to go beyond this framework to truly conceptualize their music. This is where ethnomusicology comes into play, as it provides me with a foundation for understanding how culture, environment, and social structure shape musical traditions, as detailed in the following post.

#9.

Ethnomusicology and Why We Like Music pt.2

Western musicology historically dismissed entire musical traditions as primitive or meaningless because they did not line up with what was held as 'proper' music. John Blacking's How Musical is Man? (1973) is a foundational study comparing the act of and reasoning behind music-making across different cultures, particularly the Venda people of southern Africa. Blacking's central argument is that music is something deeply embedded in specific social and cultural contexts. What one culture considers music, another might not recognize as such at all. This relates directly to one of my central questions in the making of this project: 'who decides what counts as music?', and challenges the western assumption that certain musical structures or conventions are somehow inherently 'correct' or more valuable than others.

Ethnomusicology, the study of music within its cultural context, is a central part of this project as it treats all musical traditions as equally valid systems rather than measuring everything against western conventions. In my concept, the human scientists dismissing the transmission as meaningless noise is a direct reflection of what early western musicologists did when they encountered non-western music.

Blacking's work with the Venda showed that musical ability and meaning are culturally constructed. A Venda communal song has a completely different relationship to rhythm, participation, context, and structure than a western orchestral piece, but neither is more or less 'music' (or even art) than the other. This really reinforces my concept, where the humans are making the same mistake by hearing the transmission through their own cultural framework and finding nothing because they are looking for the wrong things, and it does not line up with their aesthetic sensibilities.

Anyways, where Freitas gives me the biological foundation, Blacking gives me the cultural one, and together they shape how I decide what the music sounds like and gives insight as to why the scientists failed. It is two-fold: they lacked the biology and the cultural knowledge necessary to hear it as music.

#10.

Electroacoustic Music

Electroacoustic music has a rich history of trying to divorce sound from recognizable sources and cultural associations. For this reason, I felt that this style of music would best suit my aims for this project. It is the closest thing humans have made to genuinely abstract sound.

Pierre Schaeffer's work on musique concrete, particularly his concept of 'reduced listening', is deeply valuable to this project. The idea of hearing a sound stripped of its source and meaning, purely as sonic material, is exactly what I am trying to do in creating sounds with no identifiable human origin. Schaeffer's whole concept was forcing listeners to hear sounds as pure sonic objects rather than as representations of something. A door slamming stops being 'a door' and becomes just a set of sine waves. My project takes this a step further by trying to create sounds that never had a human source to begin with.

Denis Smalley's concept of spectromorphology is also useful to me. Spectromorphology is a framework for describing and analyzing electroacoustic music based on how sounds change shape over time, instead of through traditional concepts like musical notation or theory. This gives me a framework to talk about my compositions without relying on purely human-made concepts like melody, harmony, or rhythm. Instead, I can describe my sounds in terms of their spectral qualities, movement, texture, and evolution. This feels much more fitting for music that is supposed to come from aliens who would have no recognizable (to us at least) concept of chord progressions or time signatures.

However, my approach differs from electroacoustic foundations in that Schaeffer and other artists worked with recorded real-world sounds which they manipulated until they were unrecognizable. Even in their most abstract form, these sounds still have an origin rooted in the human world. I am working entirely with synthesis, generating sound from scratch using the basic waveforms, granular synthesizers, and FM processing rather than transforming existing things. I feel that this allows me to get closer to true alienness because there is no real-world sound it can be traced back to. The sound never existed in a physical space; it was never made by a human or a human machine and thus carries none of those associations with it. Of course, I am still a human with human tendencies and aesthetic sensibilities, making these sounds with human-made software, so I am limited, but the way I am doing it removes at least the most obvious signifiers of humanity.

#11.

The Role of Parafiction

Carrie Lambert-Beatty coined the term Parafiction in her 2009 essay Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility. Lambert-Beatty defines it as art that operates in the space between fiction and reality, presenting invented scenarios with enough plausibility that the audience genuinely questions what is real. A great example of a parafictional work is Walid Raad's The Atlas Group, an entirely fictional archive of documents about the Lebanese civil wars presented as real historical records, imploring the reader to question the authenticity of historical records. Also, Peter Falconer's What Happened to Seaton Snook documents a fictional town that vanished mysteriously in 1968. The project asks the audience a wide range of questions that are rarely spoken of because they lack historical significance. Parafiction works very well for raising issues with audiences by using the uncertainty between real and fake to make the audience think more critically.

I chose parafiction as the foundation of this project because if I had just presented it as some experimental tracks that I made, listeners would engage with it as student work and judge it as such. By framing it as a decoded alien transmission presented through a historical archive, the listener's relationship with it changes entirely. They are asking themselves, "what is this? is this real?" rather than "is this good art?".

The use of parafiction also removes many creative boundaries. Within this frame I don't need to justify my sounds against human musical and aesthetic standards because the fiction has already established that these sounds come from somewhere else, giving me permission to make harsh, uncomfortable, and unfamiliar sounds without the listener immediately dismissing them.

Parafiction invites active participation, where the audience becomes investigators rather than passive listeners. In this way, the audience is confronted with something that demands interrogation. They have to decide for themselves whether what they are hearing is meaningful, whether the story is plausible, and what it would mean if it were real. This kind of engagement is far deeper than what it would have been had I presented it in a more traditional way.

In a sense, I am placing the audience in the same position as the fictional scientists. They are receiving this strange collection of sounds with minimal context and are forced to make their own judgements about what it means, whether it is art, and whether it has value. I'm sure some will dismiss it as just noise, but others might find something in it, some element they resonate with despite its alienness. Both reactions are valid, and both prove the point of the project: our assessment of what counts as art is shaped entirely by who we are and what we have been conditioned to expect.

#12.

The Presentation

Continuing from the last post and its parafiction, the presentation of the project is crucial to maintaining this frame. I chose to present the album and its materials on a website designed to resemble a decrepit early internet site that hasn't been maintained in decades to reflect the growing general apathy around the transmissions. This choice grounds the project in a specific time period. The transmission was first received in the 1960s, and a rudimentary, dated website feels like a plausible way that a small, still dedicated group of researchers might have shared their findings in the early days of the internet before losing interest like everyone else. The amateur, unpolished quality of the design reinforces the idea that this is not an official or institutional source, but something put together by a small group of passionate 'I WANT TO BELIEVE' types, aligning with the narrative of a fringe group of scientists who refused to accept that the transmission was meaningless. Also, presenting the project on a website rather than a conventional platform like Spotify or Bandcamp removes it from contexts the listener associates with human music, further supporting my fiction.

#13.

Designing Alien Music – FM Synthesis

Throughout this project I rely heavily on FM synthesis, so it is worth using a blog post to explain why it suits my goals. FM synthesis was developed by John Chowning in the late 1960s and published in his 1973 paper The Synthesis of Complex Audio Spectra by Means of Frequency Modulation. Essentially, one oscillator produces an audible tone, while a second alters the first's frequency. This interaction generates sidebands, additional frequencies above and below the carrier that produce complex spectra from simple inputs. When the modulator's frequency is a non-integer multiple of the carrier, they result in an inharmonic spectrum. These metallic, bell-like percussive timbres do not correspond to natural producers of tones like a vibrating string or air column. Chowning himself noted that FM can produce sounds, "both known and unknown," the latter being what interests me.

FM synthesis has had associations with the alien and the futuristic since its conception. Electronic sound has been used to convey non-humanness in cinema since Forbidden Planet in 1956. By the 70s composers were frequently contrasting synthesizers against orchestral instrumentation to separate the alien from the familiar. In Tarkovsky's Solaris, Bach is used to represent Earth and humans, while the ANS synth scores the alien world. When Yamaha commercialized Chowning's research through the DX7 in 1983, the sounds of FM were genuinely new and strange. However, within a few years the DX7 had sold over 200 000 units, and its factory presets appeared on just about every charting song and film score of the decade; one preset even appeared on 50% of number one singles in 1986. By the late 80s these once alien sounds had become cliché. In less than 2 decades FM went from the uncanny to as recognizable as an orchestra. This is exactly the cycle I touched on in my post about the aesthetics of aliens; a sound that begins as alien is absorbed by human conventions and aesthetics until it is no longer alien at all.

My use of FM deliberately goes against this. FM synthesis went through this cycle because it was used only within conventional musical structures. The potential of FM was largely avoided because it was too harsh or abrasive for commercial music. I work in the exact opposite direction by pushing it towards those inharmonic extremes, placing the results (as far as I can) outside of my human aesthetic framework.

#14.

Designing Alien Music – FM Synthesis pt.2

In blog 7 I established a few guidelines for the music based on the biology of the Keplerians: their music is dominated by complex low frequencies, and rhythm and texture are much more important to them than melody or harmony. Through my use of FM synthesis, I was able to closely follow these rules. Almost all the sounds on this album were generated using Serum 2, as I am already accustomed to it, and it allows for deeply complex and rich sounds thanks to its routing flexibility and visual feedback.

Working within the guidelines I set, the following patch emerged through hours of experimentation. The complex, texturally rich drones of track 3 were achieved using a saw wave as the carrier, and a square wave with 8 voices, 3 octaves higher as the modulator. The saw wave is FM'ed by the square and vice versa. The MIDI consists of a single note that lasts 1.25 bars, repeating every two bars with some slight variation. What tied everything together was my heavy use of automation (as is true for every other sound). I wrote automation for the FM amount on both oscillators, the phase distortion of the carrier, and the fine tune of the modulator. Altogether, and with lots of fine tuning I created a punchy, grinding, unstable, frankly scary sounding 'bass' (if you can even call it that) that really kicks the listener in the face at some points. The sound is felt as much as it is heard, exactly what Keplerian biology demands, thanks to its textural depth, especially when listened to on bassy speakers. Through all this I was able to create what I deemed to be a sufficiently 'alien' sound that was also aesthetically appealing to me. The fact that I was evaluating alienness through my own human sense of what sounds good (massive, fat, screechy basses) is itself part of the problem this project is trying to examine. Although these qualities I just described are rooted in human conventions. A Keplerian wouldn't find these appealing for the same reason I do. I was drawn to these because of my musical history, meaning that my attempt at alienness is filtered entirely through my human taste. Although I'm not sure if this is a flaw. I mean, the whole project is super paradoxical. I can't escape being human and having human sensibilities, I guess that my attempt to do so is the point?

#15.

Designing Alien Music – The Reliance on Randomness?

Across all the synth patches in this project, I seem to use randomness as a proxy for something I cannot actually ever achieve: alien intentionality. For example, the patch detailed in the previous post has many parameters like pitch, detune, and reverb modulated by random LFOs. Much of the automation I draw in is mostly done at random with intentionally little thought behind it. This is especially prominent in track one where the three different layers each are pitch-bent and stretched and brought in and out almost completely arbitrarily.

Random LFOs give me unpredictable behavior, which sounds alien to human ears. Unpredictability and alienness are not the same thing though. Alien music (especially the few songs selected for a deep-space transmission) would be highly intentional, structured according to logic I have no way of knowing. It might be perfectly predictable to a Keplerian. I am conflating unfamiliarity with alienness, which is in itself a very human assumption. Still, I can't think like a Keplerian or make the choices they do, so I removed my own choice from these parameters and let randomness fill these gaps. I still chose which parameters to randomize, their ranges, and their amounts. I listened to the results and adjusted based on what I liked or didn't. So, the randomness expands the creative possibilities beyond what my own instincts would normally generate, but my human judgement is still the filter that decides what stays and what doesn't.

The fringe (putting it lightly) scientists in my parafiction hear this transmission that most dismiss as just noise, and they insist there is meaning in it. I am working in the opposite direction where I feed random processes into my compositions and then curate the results into something I find musically meaningful. Both acts involve a human imposing their structure onto chaos. Where the scientists find music in noise, I generate noise and decide which parts sound like music. Neither of us can prove that the result is genuinely alien over a reflection of ourselves. This connects directly to the central question of the project: our assessment of what counts as music is shaped entirely by who we are.

In a way, the randomness is maybe the most honest part of this project. Every deliberate compositional choice I make is human by definition, filtered through my history with music and aesthetic sensibilities. The random elements are the only ones that might accidentally produce something actually alien, though I will never know because I am still the one deciding what to keep and what to scrap.

#16.

Designing Alien Music – Why Synthesis?

Very early into the project I made a deliberate choice to work entirely with synthesis. There are no samples on the album, no real-world sounds, no acoustic instruments. This was partly practical in that I don't play any instruments and have always preferred keeping the entire workflow within my computer. There is more to this choice than just convenience though.

No matter how much you process a sample, it still originates from a source. A heavily time-stretched, warped, vocoded, granulated recording of a metal pipe hitting a concrete floor still began as a (human-made) metal pipe hitting a (human-made) concrete floor in a (human-made) room. Schaeffer has tried to strip recorded sounds of their associations, but even at their most abstract the sounds are still rooted in the human world. For a project that is trying to imagine music from a completely non-human source, that remaining connection is a problem that synthesis solves. A sine wave has no origin or geography or culture or politics or biology. It was never made by anyone in any room. When I shape a sine wave through FM, the result has no origin the listener can trace it back to, giving me the closest thing possible to a blank slate.

Even if I had sampled something completely unrecognizable, it would still have begun as a real thing in a real place. I feel its origin would forever haunt the sound, even if it was totally undiscernible to the listener. I'm getting a bit wishy-washy here, but I really believe there is something different about the brain's response to a sound that was once real and a sound that never was, even if they are indistinguishable. I know that this isn't really a rational argument, but it's my project, so I get to do whatever I want with it.

Of course, Serum 2, Ableton, the computer I wrote this album on, were all designed by humans, based on human math and science, and shaped by decades of human design conventions. The waveforms even exist in a framework that human engineers built. I am a human selecting, shaping, and curating these sounds according to my aesthetic sensibilities, which were in turn shaped by the aesthetics of billions and billions of humans before me. However, I have never claimed that this project is truly alien, but that I have removed as many of the most recognisable signifiers of humanity as I can, and synthesis was a critical part to this removal.

#17.

Art Review – Rashad Becker

Although I only listened to Rashad Becker's Traditional Music of Notional Species towards the end of this project, it completely transformed how I saw it and even some of the music. The album, released in 2013, does almost exactly what my project attempts: imagining the musical traditions of a species that doesn't exist.

The album is eight tracks of entirely synthetic sounds, split into what Becker calls 'Themes' and 'Dances'. There are no conventional melodies, harmonies, or rhythms. What struck me most was how clearly structured it is despite sounding so alien. There are obvious arcs within, and across, each track, textures that build and rise towards climactic moments, and a real sense of dynamic range. There is rhythmic material throughout, but it sounds random or arbitrary. This relates well to my post on the use of randomness, where I use randomness to come closer to a logic that I have no way of accessing. I found the vowel-like sounds across the album striking. They are deeply eerie and they sit just in the uncanny valley between human and synthetic. In fact, right after listening to the album I wrote another track that heavily features similar vocal tones using FM and other things I don't truly understand.

Becker's project succeeds most in creating sounds that feel intentional without being comprehensible. You feel that there is a logic to it, but you cannot access it. This is exactly the feeling I want my project to convey. However, Becker's human touch is still definitely audible. The tracks feel deeply dramatic in a very human way. The way tracks build to climaxes, the way tension and release are managed are conventions rooted in millennia of human aesthetic conventions. A truly alien species would have no reason to structure art this way. This is in no way a criticism of his work, however. I think what he did is really impressive and quite novel, but this observation reinforces the whole point of my work, that you cannot ever escape your own context and framework.

I did not listen to the album until I was nearly finished with the project, but it had a significant impact on the aforementioned final track I wrote. Hearing Becker's work made me feel confident that the direction I was going in was worth pursuing.

#18.

Art Review – Florian Hecker

Where Rashad Becker's Traditional Music of Notional Species gave me a model for what non-human music could sound like, Florian Hecker's (hey that rhymes) Natural Selection demonstrated what happens when you strip away everything, including the structure so prominent in Becker's work. Released in 2026 on the same label as Becker's, the album is nine tracks ranging from forty-seconds to over half an hour long. Hecker describes it as a constellation of pieces from related investigations rather than a single unified concept. What holds them together is his shared approaches to synthesis and an interest in how timbres transform over time.

The first thing I noticed was how aggressive the album is. The sounds are often harsh, gross, and genuinely scary at points. It is deeply overwhelming, like you are buried under a swarm of millions of hostile synthetic bees. Hecker is known for making music feel physically uncomfortable and doing it well for that matter. On some tracks he repurposes analysis tools as synthesizers to generate terrifying sounds from processes never designed to make sound.

What struck me most is the same vowel-like sounds that were in Becker's work. These are especially prominent in the second track where through some combination of comb filters and EQs and FM synthesis he creates what sounds very close to human speech. I don't know enough about FM to know why, but in all my experiments there is a point where the synths start sounding like almost-voices. Neither human nor machine. Based off what I know about the uncanny valley, it makes sense why these stick out to me so much (they make you uneasy). For my project this is pretty significant because it suggests that even when working entirely in synthesis, something human keeps surfacing. This is very interesting to me, and I will give it some more thought. Is it because of how I interpret them or an artefact of the fact that these tools were made by humans? Either way, it further complicates what I wrote about synthesis being as far removed from humans as possible.

Compared to Becker, Natural Selection's tracks have much less obvious structure to them. Where Becker's tracks have very clear arcs, these pieces feel like you stumbled into a room where you don't belong, and nobody is going to tell you what is going on. I think this is what makes it feel more genuinely alien to me. The lack of human dramatic pacing removes the most human part I identified in Becker's work. But it also honestly makes the listening experience harder and less challenging. This raises a big question for my project. Is accessibility a human concept? If I make my tracks 'listenable' and structured enough for a human audience to sit through it, have I already failed at making it alien?

#19.

Can you make something aesthetically appealing while undermining millennia of aesthetic conventions?

This question really ties together my whole project pretty nicely. My first instinct was yes, obviously. Loads of experimental music is weird and appealing at the same time (see Merzbow, Ethel Cain’s Perverts). But the more I sit with the question, the less I am sure the question even makes sense.

What actually makes music appealing? Consonance, resolution, a satisfying structure, a rhythm you can dance to. But none of this is neutral; it is all millennia-old convention that the question is asking me to undermine. So, if appeal is mostly made of convention, then keeping the appeal while throwing out the convention is basically impossible.

Track two is a great example of this. It’s easily the most listenable track (other than track three, the scientists’ interpretation) on the album because it has a climax, builds, goes somewhere, and resolves. This is why it ended up being the most human track I made. The appeal and the convention work hand-in-hand here. Hecker’s natural selection, however, is harsh, gross and scary, and I still couldn’t stop listening. Is that appeal? Maybe appealing is the wrong way to phrase it; ’compelling’ feels closer. You can make something fascinating, unsettling, without it being ‘pleasant’ at all. The grotesque has its own long history (whoah check out that bookend), so does the sublime. None of this is new.

So, I think the honest answer is no and yes? No, you can’t undermine aesthetic convention and stay appealing, because appeal IS the convention. But you can be compelling, and compelling is probably a more interesting thing to aim for anyways. Which is sort of the role parafiction plays in this project. It stops people from asking whether the music is good and gets them asking whether it is real, dodging the appeal question entirely.

#20.

The Presentation pt. 2 – The Scientists

In my last post about the project’s presentation, I talked about why I chose to present it on a website, and why a broken GeoCities one specifically. What I didn't get into is the part I actually spent the most time on: the people supposedly running it.

The tone of the scientists' writing ended up being the most important thing for selling the fiction. They write in this capitalized, defensive, pleading way, over-interpreting everything. Ten seconds of vowel-like noise becomes "THE MOST SIGNIFICANT AUDIO IN HUMAN HISTORY!". A rhythmic pattern I generated completely at random (see my randomness post) gets treated as irrefutable proof of seismic-based Keplerian music theory. They cite their own unpublished analyses like they're peer-reviewed. They reference the Keplerian biology I made up like it's established fact. Basically, they hear exactly what they want to hear, which is the whole point Blacking (1973) makes and the whole point of the project.

The thing I'm proudest of is that they don't all agree. They never openly fight, but you can feel the tension, little disagreements about what a sound "means." One thinks the vowel tones are communal identifiers, another thinks they're emotional expression. I think this matters a lot. A single narrator would feel like fiction, like one author talking. Multiple voices that don't quite line up feel like actual people. That's the productive uncertainty Lambert-Beatty (2009) talks about, where you can't be sure it's real but you also can't be totally sure it's fake.

Anyways, here's where I have to be honest with myself. Is any of this actually believable? If someone stumbled onto the site without any context, would they think it was real? Probably not, if I'm being honest. I pushed the tone way too far. The constant caps, the exclamation marks, the insane claims, they're funny, and I had a genuinely great time writing them. But at some point the comedy starts degrading the believability. A real fringe group would be intense and defensive, sure, but they'd also be repetitive and dry and kind of boring. Mine are too self-aware, too performative. They read more like a parody of a conspiracy theorist than the actual thing. I think that's probably the biggest weakness in the whole presentation.

But here's the thing, I'm not sure full believability was ever the point? Parafiction doesn't have to fool you forever. It just needs that moment where you're not sure what you're looking at. And I think the site does do that, at least for the first minute. It looks real enough at a glance, and then the more you read the more something feels off. Whether that little window of "wait, is this real?" is enough to get my point across, I genuinely don't know. But honestly that uncertainty feels weirdly appropriate, because it kind of mirrors the whole project. I set out to make something convincing and ended up making something I can't even judge from the outside. Which, I mean, is sort of the whole thing isn't it.