Stories of Science & Music

Written By Neal Thompson

I’ve been making music of some kind or another since I was 11, though for a little more than 3 years now my focus has been fixed on developing the craft of film & media composing. January 15th, 2025 I began pursuing this path full-time, and over the 2025 holidays, I had the incredible opportunity of working with my good friend and colleague, Kevin Hoppe, to co-score our first indie feature film! More on that soon…

For now I’m back to working on the album (A Stick Sharpened at Both Ends), but I’ve got this persistent collection of thoughts I’ve been carrying around for a while that’s nudged me towards starting this blog; I intend it to be a journal of concepts and ideas I learn about along the way, all towards the endeavors of music creation.

During our time living in Westminster, CO, our family fell into the routine of going to the local library every week for fresh loads of Dr. Seuss, Curious George, & Berenstain Bears books to read at bedtime. At some point I found the music education shelf on the university floor upstairs, and started taking home books I thought might help me along the film composing path, and there were a couple in there that really stuck with me:

 

These historical narratives imprinted a thought that I circle back to a lot, which is this idea that great discoveries in science lead to great discoveries in music - and throughout history these ‘leaps’ appear in both directions, inferring clues to one another’s next big discovery. From Bach’s well tempered clavier to Les Paul’s experiments in the 1940s-50s, the more I read the more I realized music makers are continually peering into the discoveries of our time in an attempt to understand their implications for music, some times by accident, and some times on purpose.

As I continued to pull on that thread, I found the English lectures of Karl Stockhausen, who's own inspirations from technology has deeply informed his varied compositional approaches.

Listening to Stockhausen's lectures further bent my thinking towards trying to become a bit more aware of whats happening at the edges of scientific research these days, and wondering how one might begin to apply some of those new ideas into something musically useful…

 

One area of study I’ve taken a particular interest in, is the work of Dr. Michael Levin and his team who are researching the origins of consciousness, and furthering our understanding of intelligence across all forms of ‘systems’.

In the interview with Dr. Levin in the video to the right, he discusses the unexpected behaviors found in simple sorting algorithms, observing the pursuit of “side quests”, showing forms of cognition (goal oriented decision making) outside the defined parameters of the few lines of code that make up the algorithms.

He and his team have developed some some quite compelling theories around where agency/consciousness originates, and how seemingly rampant it exists in all kinds of unexpected places. They posit that the mind (and all possible types of minds) are not localized within a body or brain, but are distinctly remote from the physical world (an idea in direct opposition to the philosophy of materialism). He hypothesizes that a body/brain is effectively an interface (or thin client) that enables the connection to the mind. Equally intriguing is their notion that these interfaces can be manifested and observed in all kinds of ‘systems’; this observation of emergent behavior in sorting algorithms shown in the above video being just one novel example.


Alright, but what does any of this have to do with music?

As much as I enjoy the heated philosophical debate these sorts of ideas generate, when it all boils down I’m here to make music, so whatever scientific coattails I grab hold of should at the least have some practical and useful application towards the endeavors of musical discovery. To that end, I have a hunch there may be some significant parallels to explore here, from the nature of the harmonic series, to the potential of discovering emergent behaviors within the repertoire of algorithmic/aleatoric music. There may very well be more threads here than a lifetime of inquiry could tug at, though when we begin talking about ghosts in the machine, my mind can’t help but go right to modular synthesizers.

Like many who have become immersed in the practice of patching modular systems, the concepts and strategies for developing generative music have captivated me from the very onset of plugging in a patch cable. Whether approaching with a specific plan, or conducting raw unfettered exploration, the consistent tendency to produce sounds that extend well beyond the initial idea or intent gets at the heart of what makes these machines so magically addictive. Though just like in the sorting algorithm’s lines of code from the Levin lab experiments, nothing about a patched modular system goes against the rules and parameters set by the patch’s configuration. But what about the elements left undefined, as is the case with the various forms of randomness we craft and leverage for inducing unpredictable variations, or to put it more straight: all the stuff we leave to “chance”?

As I continue work on the LOTF album, I’m beginning to stew on how to conduct patching experiments to put these notions to the test in a quantifiable way. It seems like this thread may have the trajectory of developing into its own concept for a future musical work…

Neal Thompson