Michael Garfield's Love Without End Tour Newsletter: technology
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts

09 October 2013

What We Can Learn From Mass Extinctions | Metaphors & Meta-organisms | The Science of Transformation | Back in the Hat Game

"You don't own your reputation. Most people think they do, but the reality is different. Your reputation is the accumulation of what other people think about what they think you have done or said. In other words, your reputation consists of other people's projections. You don't own that and you don't control it. You can influence it, but only up to a point."

“If you don't have enemies, you don't have character.”


Thank you to everyone who supported my recent crowdfunding campaign!  We managed to raise enough to keep me warm and fed this winter as I get cracking on the backbone of my new book and continue to freely share more videos and writing through and about Google Glass (and living through intense technological change in general).

I've started a new FB group – "Life in the Glass Age: Technology, Art, & Consciousness" – to keep the conversation going.  Please join us there with your questions, comments, and news items.

If you'd still like to donate but missed the window for contributing to my Indiegogo campaign, don't sweat it - you can make a paypal donation, and just let me know in the "note" section which of the perks from my campaign you'd like as a gesture of my appreciation for your support.

And now for some big new stuff:



From catastrophe, new life.  Luckily I've been a compulsive note-taker for the last eight years...


My summer tour is over and I'm ready again for cozy months of painting while I listen to inspiring podcasts.  If you'd like a custom hat, feel free to drop me a line.  Orders start at $150 (including the hat) and I am not doing any more Bassnectar or Pretty Lights designs.  (Sorry, kids, but I'd rather not capitalize on someone else's stardom – and you'll thank me when you can still wear the hat in ten years.)


Since “no problem can be solved from the level of thinking that created it,” let’s look at our ecological crisis from the only angle that will help us solve it: not as an invasive species separate from the rest of the biosphere and “killing the planet,” but as something the Earth is doing, part of the story of life, participants in the distributed intelligence of the evolutionary process and thus performing a valuable function we cannot fully understand. This is the sixth mass extinction, so let’s look at how we (identifying with life as a whole, since we have never been completely removed from the layer of life that covers this planet) made it through a comparable crisis before.  (Read more...)


Or if you're more of a video person, here is the article above in improvised rant form.  Not as articulate, perhaps, but you can read along to the transcript and listen to the stirring musical accompaniment!


"Metaphorical thinking — our instinct not just for describing but for comprehending one thing in terms of another, for equating I with an other — shapes our view of the world, and is essential to how we communicate, learn, discover, and invent. Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words."

My talk from Rootwire Music and Arts Festival 2013 on how to use a suite of new metaphors to navigate the shifting landscape of 21st Century self and society. Topics include:

• What "The Great Oxygenation Event" of 2.5 billion years ago has in common with our current industrial eco-catastrophe, and how it might inform a solution;
• Why the universe is equally well-described as ramping "up" and "down" – and how these forces merge in the ever-morphing now;
• How every act of communication is both a manifestation of mind and an attempt to promote a specific perspective;
• How experiencing the Earth as a superorganism informs a more responsible theory of economics;
• And more ideas from the fractal horizons of human experience...


Mark Heley, author of The Everything Guide to 2012, speaks on taking a galactic perspective at Fractal Planet, Burning Man, 29 August 2013.  I sit in, along with my friends Mitch Mignano and Jonathan Zap, on the conversation.  We discuss the cosmic timing of mass extinctions, our need to understand the dynamic environment of interstellar space, and how we are learning to pilot "Spaceship Earth" into a new and stranger century...

24 April 2013

Taking A Cosmic Perspective + My Latest Cyberacoustic Guitar EP

"Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to 'die before you die' – and find that there is no death."
Eckhart Tolle

"What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?"
Hal Borland

It isn't autumn – at least here in Austin.  But everyone I know is going through so much change – so much letting go, so much making room for new things – that the theme of autumn is timely nonetheless.

I'm proud to share with you my latest record, as well as the talk I gave at AURA Music Festival back in February – both of which center on facing the transcendental unknown with our heads up and our hearts open.  They're both free downloads.  Enjoy!

And stay in touch – I'm putting together a tour of the Southeast United States in early August and if you live nearby it would be great to connect.  Friends near Austin, Dallas, Denver, Boulder, and Kansas City, check out my concert calendar to check out the wonderful dates I already have planned to spend with you.  Love and blessings!

Yellow Leaves
Stream/Download for Free
Join the conversation on FB

Recorded in a single take at a private backyard concert on Thanksgiving 2012, this 33:33 of improvised "cyberacoustic" instrumentals is my most spacious and poignant yet – evoking big autumn skies, far horizons, and the crunch of fallen leaves by bonfire light – but it defies expectations, remixing the familiar conventions of acoustic music with a fifty-pound pedalboard of beat slicers, filters, delays, and multi-channel loopers, welding fingerstyle technique into a cybernetic bed of live hardware production.

Picking (or often bowing, with an electromagnet) while twisting knobs and DJ'ing live samples with my toes, I perform as an embodiment of my training as an evolutionary biologist and futurist – liberating the organic into the digital, and the idioms of Americana into a new species of transcendental trance. 

Yellow Leaves is a definitive take on the adventurous and visionary musical attitude that earned my tenure as ReverbNation's #1 Experimental Musician in the world.

This performance was recorded on Thanksgiving 2012 and is a kind of musical fossil of that atmosphere of abundance and gratefulness. I hope that it serves you in your self-discovery. That its folksy-yet-futuristic vibe lends itself to your integration of past and future into the ever-blooming now. That it gets you laid by faeries.  (Based on the feedback so far, it may also be good for driving, painting, doing yoga, etc. I encourage you to experiment with set and setting.)

Pay whatever you like if the music works for you. I've had people reporting kundalini experiences, mad love sessions, and other wild shit going on with what I consider to be a pretty tame, if pretty, release.

Regardless, I would deeply appreciate it if you would share it with your people, and tag my music page.

Have a beautiful time with it, and thank you for receiving what I have to give!  Feedback welcome.

My talk from AURA Festival 2013
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My latest fleet jaunt through the wooded trails of the human imagination.  A philosophical performance examining our relationship to the transcendent – whether through awe and wonder or good old Fear of God, we all have an intense relationship with the Mystery – and how that relationship is due to change.

This time I took on the illusion of the individual, the evolution of technology, and the strangely familiar ancient future – weaving them all into a ripping speculative yarn on worlds beyond our imagination. I discuss right and wrong motivations for transhumanism, the prehistoric origins of the internet, and how the next industrial revolution might bring about a #festivalearth...

Here's the track list, to pique your interest.


Download it here.  Talk about it here.  Feel free to tag or email me with questions!

Customized MGxGRC Signature Flatbills

I still have a few hats in every size except 7 3/4 and 8.  If you'd like to order one of these with or without custom paint, email me and I'm happy to give you the details.




Custom Painted Hats

I don't have a lot of time to do hats before debarking for summer tour; but if you'd like one, hit me up!





29 May 2012

Creative Overflow Before Summer Tour

[If you're reading this in an email, I promise you'll enjoy it more on my website.]


"It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile.  That is not imagination.  No, it kills it..."
E.M. Forster, Howards End

A good thing to keep in mind as I load up the Windhorse, my beloved 1995 Subaru station wagon, to embark on an ambitious eight-week summer festival tour.  My new Texas driver's license in my pocket, I'm bittersweet about leaving my new home to embark on another shoestring adventure...but this is 2012, the year to either do it or forever hold your peace.  So here we go...!

Below is a list of all the festivals I'll be attending this summer – most of them as both a musical and visual performer, as well as a speaker on mind-bending topics like this.  But first, here is a smattering of creative offerings that fell in the cracks between bigger projects over the last few weeks:

"We Are Machines In The Ghost"

The next in my series of spontaneous rants about the collision between human-technology co-evolution and mystical spirituality.  This four-minute video examines how hard it is to draw the line between our minds and our tools – and it's only getting harder, as those tools become increasingly lifelike...

Custom-Painted Hats

Even with a busy summer looming ahead, I'm still open to talk with you about your own custom lid...because we all have a freak flag that needs flying, and I'm totally excited about helping you trigger sympathetic peak experiences in strangers as you walk by.  Here's the whole gallery of my hats so far.  I'm open to all kinds of suggestions for new work...


A few customers asked me to personalize the already-too-cool embroidered signature series hats I made in collaboration with Grassroots California.  I still have plenty left, although not in every size – if you'd like one before they're gone, drop me a line as soon as you can!  (And, obviously, I'll gladly accept a tip to make your 1-of-420 lid a one-of-a-kind.)



"The Crowd From Above"
2012 03 26 Ruta Maya (Esoteric Mondays)
16"x20" – paint markers on masonite panel
11"x17" signed poster prints: 1/$20, 2/$30, 3/$40 – email me

A quickie, after the last two epic dragon paintings...short and sweet and to the point.  For some reason this reminds me of an x-ray aerial image of everybody's dog stuck alone in the house all day – a metaphor for how so many of us are stranded in the lonely cubicles of our suburban modern hearts.  It doesn't have to be like this!  It won't always be like this.  And from above, we are just as much a sea of rippling grain...


Getting Into The Meme Game


Like a true friend, I turned my buddy Jeremy McDonough (aka Space Panda)'s least flattering photo ever into a web meme.  And it blew up!  Click that link above to share it on facebook, because Lord knows you have a friend who needs to see this.  (Here's a link to "Festival Keyboard Guy" on quickmeme if you want to browse other people's captions or make your own.)

...And this one's little too heady, maybe, to ever go viral.  Nonetheless, the resemblance is uncanny:


For The Readers...

• Spirit of Spider recently republished my awesome conversation with fellow live painter and geometry-head Kris Davidson – the guy who originally inspired me to start painting in the first place – in which we rap at length on what "realism" means in art, and exactly what kind of reality our art describes.  I still go back to this chat every once in a while for inspiration, and am super glad to see it's still getting mileage.

• My latest album, Golden Hour, got a lovely short review from the new avant-guitar website, New Wave of Acoustic Guitar, where I now stand alongside such incredible talents as Adrian Belew and Jon Gomm:

"I found myself getting lost in the music a lot, often forgetting I was listening to one guy!  Definitely a unique voice in the world of solo acoustic guitar."

Free copies of the album are available for anyone who'd like to blog about it.  Get ahold of me if you're interested, or have friends who are looking to feature something fresh...

Let's Meet Up This Summer!


...my second year as live art director means more artists and better gallery placement.  Come hang with us!


...my first main stage set at a festival is also my first sunrise set!  Luxuriously sacred, that's what this'll be.


...my first time on stage in Georgia, for a first-year event shaping up to be really great!


...my fourth year as live art director at Sonic Bloom, now graced with an amazing gallery by Tribe 13!


...one of my favorite places on this entire continent is Northern Arizona; I can't wait to be a part of this.


...resort accommodations will make this the plushest festival all summer.  Looking great for a first-year!


...absolutely my favorite small festival in the Midwest, this one balances art, music, and learning superbly.

17 March 2012

A.I., Angels, Mass Extinctions...and Benefit Compilations

"For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture."


The new benefit compilation from None Backwards features ALL UNRELEASED TRACKS from Mochipet, Up Until Now, D.V.S*, The Malah, Kappa, Benny Loco, This Is Art, and many more!  Plus, gorgeous cover art by my friend Chaeli Cardenas.

My track's a recent live performance of "Extinct," a crowd favorite from last year's A Million Anniversaries: CyberAcoustic Guitar For Lovemaking, recorded back in January with Austin chanteuse Toni Lane Casserly on vocals.

All proceeds from this album go directly to Rock Against Cancer, a nonprofit organization that supports the emotional needs of young cancer patients with music therapy and special music events.  Next week I'll share the video of this song live in concert – in the meantime, enjoy Spring Forward, Vol. II and put some money toward making a few children's hard situation a little easier.


When I'm not painting at concerts, or playing my own, I spend my time thinking and talking about deep time, radical evolution, and the transformation of humankind – you  know, the crazy science-fiction-level questions playing out in real-time all around us these days.

Recently I had the wild good fortune to speak with one of my philosophical heroes:  William Irwin Thompson, former M.I.T. Cultural Historian, founder of the Lindisfarne Association, friend of Marshall McLuhan's and Buckminster Fuller's, and yogic poet world renowned.

Thompson wrote one of my favorite books, Coming Into Being: Artifacts & Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness – a paradigm-busting exploration of the ancient world and human history from the very different perspectives of the people who lived in it.  And his lectures are just as brilliant and far-ranging – he has a way of "speaking in hypertext," connecting wildly divergent ideas with expansive (yet surgically precise) metaphors.

Using my research position at Hybrid Reality Institute as an excuse, I called up Bill Thompson on Skype back in December and this is what came of it:  an intense, luminous, challenging, wild conversation on the origin and destiny of the human species:


The whole thing is in audio format over at my lecture & interview archive.  So you can follow up on all of Thompson's encyclopedic references, the hyperlinked transcript is bundled in every free download:



"Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe."

The man's a genius.  Even if comparative mythology, cyborg anthropology, evolutionary biology, and science fiction aren't your thing, this is a conversation that will rock your world – possibly forever.  Not for my own sake but for yours, I highly encourage you to set aside the two hours and change the way you think about being human...

More Custom Painted Hats

This is just not getting old for me...I love the blend of challenge, creativity, and intuition involved in making someone a hat that fits their spirit.  If you'd like one of your own, email me with the specifics (budget, hat style, favorite colors, etc.) and we can get right to it!

(Also, I've had a crazy run of preorders for my upcoming fully-embroidered collaboration with Grassroots California – and I'm still taking preorders, so now's your chance if you want one before they're sold out!)


Next week: New paintings and music from my adventures at South By Southwest!  Austin's wildest week a year is still in the throes, but I'll have some of my finest work yet online soon.  In the meantime, thanks for your ongoing support, and have a beautiful day...

20 January 2012

Godhood Is Boring


“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”
– Albert Einstein, physicist

"We live on an island of knowledge surrounded by a shore of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."
– John A. Wheeler, physicist

'All scientifically possible technology and social change predicted in science fiction will come to pass, but none of it will work properly.'
– Neil Gaiman's Second Law

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
– Jellaludin Rumi

Perhaps within our lifetimes, humankind's coevolutionary dance with biomedical technology will extend the lifespan of our bodies to currently inconceivable lengths.  There are a lot of brilliant minds today waxing poetic about such a future, in which our newfound immortality makes existence an ongoing act of creative bliss where the medium is reality itself.

But these Singularity pundits almost entirely neglect the obvious psychological effects of such radical life extension, imagining that we would continue to trundle on as a species with similar needs and desires.  This is about as sophisticated as 19th Century lithographs of the year 2000, when everyone rides to their formal affairs in sleek dirigibles and flies masted ships to the Moon.

It also forgets the initial rush of power we all felt when taking our first steps, or shaking a rattle.  The thrill of control is the seed of the self, the earliest and most primitive emotional response to discovering our participation in reality.  This rush sustained the growth of modernity as it magnified and became dams, skyscrapers, and space shuttles.  But what sustains our awe into adulthood is not the continued magnification of the control thrill – for which we quickly develop a tolerance and require even more bombastic displays of control – but the deepening recognition of a world finally and utterly beyond our ability to rule.

Science is, in the final count, not about the increase of knowledge, but the increase of ignorance – if every question answered means two more questions asked, what we don't know is growing faster than what we do.  And so a mature science, grounded in the same wonder at mystery that impelled natural inquiry in the first place, welcomes this mystery.  It is not a program of rapturous domination, or prideful power en route to ultimate mastery of the matter, but the cultivation of wisdom through the exploration of nature as macrocosm and the self as microcosm, of the ego embedded in a world defined by interbeing.

This is the curve ignored by graph-happy Singulitarians when they give the hockey stick chart argument for our impending divinity.  We're spiraling increasingly out of control, not into it – evermore aware that control is actually the delusion of a not-actually-separate self, woven dynamically with uncountable feedback loops into the rest of the world.  We are participants, not lords – not creators, but co-creators.  We will learn to work with, not upon.

But even if we don't end up as the Lactobacillus in Google's intestinal tract, even if we become the genie we let out of this bottle, it'll undoubtedly disappoint us.  "Turning into gods" may seem exciting now, but eventually every new plateau becomes the norm, every age's fancy new garb goes out of fashion – and it seems pretty likely that one day, moving planets will be as prosaic as moving chairs is to us today.  When that age comes, will we still seek the awesome creative power of even greater deities?  Or will we finally accept the horizon of our knowledge and ability as an ever-receding target and, humbled to the transcendental mystery of life, find the transhuman here and now, deeper in the present?

After all, it only takes a cursory study of world mythology to realize that the gods are BORED.  Omnipotence is a dead-end street.  Once you have it all, the only way forward is to imagine yourself as a lesser and lesser being, like Alan Watts' lucid dreamer who eventually hides himself so deep he forgets he is dreaming...and here we are, imagining in a distinctly un-Copernican fashion that meaning and purpose exist only in the head, and ours is the first and un-simulated world.

2011 11 22, Orlando FL

Post-script:

"'Transhumanist' comes from 'transhuman,' a word that seems to have received its modern meaning in correspondence between Julian Huxley and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist and theologian. Teilhard distinguished the 'transhuman' from the 'ultrahuman,' with the latter meaning a kind of souped-up version of the human, and the former indicating an actual transformation – evolution – of who we are. The challenge of the transhuman is to actualize our unique individuality within the much larger planetary collective he saw emerging...he insisted that planetary 'communion' could only come about through the difficult work of individuation: In order to evolve, we each must become who we are, together.

"Now most recent usages of 'transhuman,' it seems to me, have forgotten most of this, and mistaken the 'transhuman' for the 'ultrahuman' – a kind of upgrade to the same basic model, still denying our connection to each other and the environment. Huxley, a biologist, very much intended 'transhumanism' to indicate a change in who and how we are, and this change centered on a recognize of our radical interconnection with the cosmos, a perception of unity. Now 'transhuman' etymologically suggests 'beyond the human,' and in my view much of what we call 'transhuman' these days – the technological enhancement of our already existing nature to cling to life and deny the role of death, for example – is, as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, 'human, all too human.' It is an individual ego’s vision of evolution."
Richard Doyle, information scientist

17 August 2011

An Emergent Syntax of Stuff

Originally published in a barely-recognizable edit at Octa.
Technological progress is a double-edged sword. More subtle and pernicious than the threat of disastrous new weapons, rampaging dinosaur clones, and other Science Gone Wrong, our species now faces the exponential growth of stuff – not only endless acres of disposable packaging, but items designed for ludicrously specific applications (and useless in every other way).

Consider the dubious innovation of glove dryers, laser-guided scissors, and the motorized ice cream cone. (Plenty more where those come from...) Items like these – as well as the mounting hours we spend tending to this mountain of over-specialized equipment – are an affront to our long-held belief that the future would make life easier, more streamlined and efficient. Our minimalist visions of gleaming starship bridges are in stark contrast to the rat’s nest of wires and adapters that seem increasingly necessary to connect our devices.

There is hope, however, that this inelegant mess of gear is on the verge of a radical reorganization. In chaos theory, systems on the verge of transformation tend toward wilder, noisier behavior – imagine the wobble in a top right before it leans over, or the parade of random images that flash before our eyes as we pass into sleep. Maybe, all of these shoulder straps for our iPads and battery-powered wi-fi detection t-shirts are the frustrating precursors to a new and saner relationship with design.

One person who would seem to agree is Harvard mathematician and biologist Martin Nowak. In his work on the evolution of syntax in human language, he turned to the science of emergence – how greater levels of order and complexity appear from the interactions of simpler parts. In addition living chemical systems, language itself obeys these rules.

Nowak argues that at some point in human history, the number of situations we needed to describe exceeded our ability to easily remember a new word for each unique scenario. It became easier to develop new parts of speech and combine them for a multiplying effect, than continue creating new distinct calls to mean “lion behind you,” “lion in front of you,” “lion to your side…” Humans were suddenly able to talk about many different kinds of lions, and apply “behind you” to any number of objects, without having to memorize a new term for every situation.

Incidentally, this is what makes written Chinese so much more difficult to learn than written English. Chinese is an older language that uses hundreds pictographs to identify every unique referent, whereas English has only twenty-six letters that can be endlessly reassembled to make new words.

Likewise, the more sensible end of the design community today is dedicated to multiple-function technologies. First came the Swiss-Army Knife…then a screwdriver that fits most sizes of screws. (What took so long?) TV is now online, in case you don’t feel the need to purchase both a desktop and a flatscreen. (But if you do, thank God, more and more of them connect wirelessly.) We no longer need to carry around a discman and a cellular phone and a note pad and a pocket calendar and a flashlight; a single smart phone puts all of these functions and more at our fingertips with computer power beyond what NASA used to reach the Moon.

Admittedly, the modern corporate focus on propriety and profit means many items are still designed with intentional shortcomings that force users to make additional purchases. (Why on Earth did Apple not just add an HDMI port to the MacBook Pro? Do we really need a unique wall charger for every new cell phone?) Fighting the insanity, however, some designers actually accessorize gadgets in ways that expand their utility. Take, for example, how the brilliant minds behind the iWatch made the world just a little lighter. Similarly, gripping tripods have rendered innumerable specialized camera attachments irrelevant.

Nowak’s logic is indisputable. We may not all have tricorders yet, but as our complexifying world demands an emergent syntax of stuff, there will come a day when smart devices interact intelligently to evolve new functions, and planned obsolescence is a thing of the past.

28 September 2009

The Coming Revolution In Audio Design

Design is not merely about changing our objects, but about changing our lives. It is not merely about improving the appearance or utility of our surroundings, but about the way we relate to them, and thus who we are. A revolution in design shakes both inner and outer worlds – and rarely is this more apparent than with new media technologies that reshape the sensory environment of our everyday lives. I recently stumbled across one such innovation – a radical twist in the world of sound engineering – and it immediately spun me into speculation on a bizarrely probable near-future world…

It’s 2015. I’m attending the premiere performance of the Houston Audioplanetarium, a marriage of science and art that guides the audience by the ears on a tour of our night sky’s celestial bodies. Using fantastic new technology, each star and planet’s radio frequencies are detuned to within the range of human hearing, then placed on a virtual speaker within the planetarium’s sophisticated audio software. Sonic qualities of each signal are modulated to trick our brains into assigning a specific, independent position, distance, and velocity for every sound source – animating the simulated sky with a vast choir of outer space’s spooky resonances as if we were actually listening to the night.
The more distant a star, the fainter its humming and moaning. The projectionists isolate constellations one at a time, and we are reacquainted with our familiar myths as they ring out in thick cinematic chords. Our virtual observatory moves through space and there are gasps as the sky comes unhinged and whizzes past everyone, each point of light and its radio howl zooming like a freight train, new stars up ahead announcing themselves with new tones. We have just navigated to the center of the galaxy to catch the opus of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Then we zip off to listen to the strange beauty of the Crab Nebula, the Cat’s Eye Nebula, the rotary duets of binary stars, the cannonball roar of a supernova.

This virtual voyage is awe-inspiring and terrifying in its scope and realism, opening an entire sense to the realms of astronomy, revealing unexpected relationships between stars and galaxies, restoring us to wonder at the “music of the spheres” ancient science had predicted and modernity had all but forgotten. My mother, blinded by diabetes, cries tears of awe and joy at her first “glimpse” of the night sky in years.

Driving to the airport the next morning, I’m guided by a field of traffic alert signals my car stereo projects into my environment. Developed for pilots, my car’s sensors (in conjunction with a saturating network of handheld electronic devices, mounted civic sensors, and GPS satellites) notify me audibly of approaching vehicles and pedestrians, objects and obstructions in the road, and invisibly-distant traffic jams. Standard issue hardware on the nicer civilian automobiles now creates such a vivid real-time audio environment, every alert placed at actual distance in the virtual sonic sphere, that even the legally blind can drive (they have to pass a hearing exam).

Later, at work, I’m on a trans-Atlantic conference call in which the voices of my European associates seem to come directly from the mouths of their high-resolution holographic projections. I haven’t made a business trip in almost a year, down from two a month just a few years ago. The sense of “there-ness” is so compelling that sometimes I forget we still can’t actually shake on a deal.
If I’m to believe the rumors my friends are circulating, this means a new age for interrogation…a new form of psychological torture to break political prisoners by dangling their loved ones and enemies right in front of them. Fugitives are lured out of hiding by familiar voices (the technology to simulate a person’s unique vocal spectrum has existed for well over a decade). The “fireside chats” of internet media personalities have risen to a whole new level, celebrity spokespeople projected onto the street next to us. Porn stars really whisper in your ear, now.

A few years ago, when the first of these convincing phantasms saturated Hollywood, the surround sound industry disappeared overnight. Now, nobody trusts perception like we used to. Just as Photoshop made us learn to doubt the testimony of our eyes, so too do we now question our hearing. We’re no longer such a naïve culture, but something else has replaced our childlike confidence in the reality of our senses: a rigorous discernment, an eagerness to reach out and touch, a scientific sensibility that – day by day – erodes our assumptions about the nature of “reality” and has created a generation of philosophers.

It’s all due to the innovative work of one company, GenAudio, which in 2008 released a new level of “4D” audio processing software. Founded in Englewood, Colorado in the middle of the 21st Century’s first decade, their AstoundSound technology quickly exploded from its original applications in home theater and music production, rattling and rattled our society to the core, growing a new layer of thought and experience on the scaffold of our wild brains. We live in a new world of sound, and nobody saw it coming. But a few of us had our ears to the ground.
(Written for d/visible magazine.)

10 March 2009

Playing The Body Electric, Part One

I believe that we as a species are currently witnessing the evolution of a new relationship between the inner and outer worlds, renegotiating that tricky self/other boundary...and in the process we might ultimately reach a new platform of musical development at which the individual has internalized not just the other players, but the instruments themselves.

But first, a bit of necessary exposition in the field of developmental psychology, so bear with me, here...

I went to grad school for Integral Theory, which meant studying the intricacies of human mind/body development. One of the recurring themes of "growing up" (which of course extends into ongoing adult development, although most adults seem unwilling to admit that such a thing exists – as if someone with their own job and car has reached the goal posts of maturity) is that we all rely on our environment to take care of things we eventually learn to do ourselves. As we grow more accustomed to assuming personal responsibility for some psychological or physiological function, we go from not even noticing that we're being taken care of, to seeking sources in the external world that will satisfy that need, to satisfying it ourselves.

One example would be how newborns don't even know they need to eat; but eventually learn to inform their parents when they're hungry, and finally manage to feed themselves. Again: young children are unaware of "the rules;" older kids learn to follow them (but don't know how or why they are in place); and adults can not only obey or disobey, but explain why certain rules are necessary for a functioning society.

(Quick check: If you think that the statement "Murder is wrong" is true "because God said so," I love you but you don't qualify as an adult in the modern world. You're still relying on external support for your moral system. If this concerns you, go read Robert Kegan's book In Over Our Heads and then find a few more literate friends.)

So what does this all mean for music? Well, it means we were born right in the middle of a revolution.

Archeologically speaking, instruments appeared first as more or less extensions of the natural environment...hollow reeds, rocks, sticks, and animal gut strung across a bent frame. The earliest instruments emerged from human experimentation with accidental noises and animal calls...what po-mo sophisticates such as you and I would call "found sounds." Ethnomusicologists observe a trend from these earlier instruments, capable of a limited expressive range (typically only a handful of notes, and only one at a time) toward more intricate devices capable of producing complex polyphony. (Think about the difference between relatively ancient intruments like a shaker or hand drum and relatively contemporary instruments like a guitar or piano...or even more contemporary instruments like the laptop.) In other words, the history of human musical instrumentation follows that same developmental curve: first, a symphony of natural sounds; then, a symphony of humans playing simple instruments; then, one human playing an entire array of chords, with remarkable tonal variety, on one instrument. Like so:

Music Starts Here

Egyptian Instruments - A Halfway Point

Internalized Orchestra on the Chapman Stick

These trends seem likely to continue even further as we continue to deepen our relationship with technology. Groundbreaking child psychologist Lev Vygotsky built his developmental model on observations that use of tools within a cultural substrate are often the means to new levels of development (that a child learns to write letters exactly as taught before developing his own handwriting, for example...take it one step further and eventually the child learns to write with any marking object or create his own). From a different field, but with a similar understanding of the flow of things, technology writer Kevin Kelly says that we don't really live in "The Age" of something until it's so much a part of the background of our experience that we don't even notice it until it breaks. We don't live in The Age of Computers...yet. But we will, as soon as computers shrink to invisibility and are embedded in everything.

Likewise, I think we don't live in an Age of Instruments...but we're about to. We're coming up on a new world in which playing music by crude manipulation of some boxy device will be left to the retro-ers and traditionalists. An era when we can speak symphonies as easily as we can form sentences.

This may sound somewhat akin to claiming that soon we'll be able to give up scissors and cut paper with our bare hands. But what I mean is that we may learn to exercise not only conscious control over our hands and voices, but over the subtler biological circuitry of our bodies - those systems responsible for our breath, heartbeats, and brainwaves - in order to make music that is directly translated from tiny electrical potentials through novel electronic interfaces into sound. Not only are people already rigging electroencephalograms to synthesizers, but some are developing full-body suits that communicate musical dimensions of dance in a much more intricate and expressive way than any keyboard-and-pedal control surface ever could.

As a compulsive futurist, I have little doubt that this would bring the evolution of instrumentation to the logical conclusion of a trajectory along which the means of music are increasingly internalized. And of course, music itself grows in complexity at every step along this path - of course, the music made by a group of people all playing polyphonic instruments is potentially much more complex than one guy trying to imitate bird calls by blowing across a blade of grass. There isn't an end point; each new development opens up an entirely new realm of musical expressive possibility, in which each person becomes the entire orchestra of the previous realm. So what will this mean when we have polyphonic synths hooked up to each of a person's once-autonomous bodily functions, have trained that person to operate each "instrument" independently of the others, and throw him in a room with forty other people similarly prepared?

What kind of music can we expect to grow out of early experiments, such as these...

Phil Stearns has bent circuit boards through a biofeedback unit and uses his body as a variable-resistance conductor to make experimental noise music.

Daito Manabe has attached myoelectric sensors that turn the electrical impulses of his muscles into sampling, trigger, and loop controls.

And THIS guy is processing an EEG (electroencephalogram) signal through mediating algorithms to turn raw brainwave data into an intelligible composition (although the guy with the helmet is certainly able to use his info of the device to "compose Beethoven-like music, and make it fast and loud!"

(Written for Colorado Music Board.)

03 June 2007

Psychoactive Vibes: Light and Sound in Navigating the Spectrum of States

by Michael Garfield
for David Zeitler's States of Consciousness class (JFKU Fall 2007)


Abstract: Light and sound have long been used as both art and science, to affect mood and evoke myriad experiences. In this paper, I briefly explore humanity’s unfolding understanding of the relationship between physical waves and states of consciousness. I also consider the future of both auditory and visual tones in state control (both utopic and dystopic), in light of contemporary technologies. States and waves appear to be the respective irreducible units of mind and body, and the study of either informs the study of the other. Their complementary and co-causative nature suggests a simple and elegant mechanism underlying the emergence of the entire manifest world.

Introduction

Had René Descartes lived to share coffee with James Clerk Maxwell, he might never have articulated that bête noir of modernity, the “mind-body problem.” Many thanks to plodding philosophical progress: contemporary dictionaries tie the word “wave” to swells of both the physical and the affective, matter and mind. Bliss can be “oceanic,” just as a saw-tooth synthesizer tone can be “aggressive.” Vibration is a language that we use to mediate experience and description – or, perhaps more accurately, it is a medium beyond language, allowing us to bypass intermediary signifiers and communicate with a directness and clarity inaccessible to contemporary tongues. Physical vibration is fundamentally psychoactive, and its study reveals the long-sought-after explanatory bridge between matter and mind, description and experience. At the heart of the world, there is a wave that throbs, coiled and twisting.

Although this esoteric wisdom hidden in common parlance did finally penetrate the skeptical shell of modern science, the artists have always known. On a rainy April afternoon in 2007, I packed myself into a cleared keyboard showroom with seventy other groove fanatics to see the legendary bassist Victor Wooten give a clinic at my local music store. Rather than guide us through his intricate techniques, he expounded on the importance of the mind in playing, and the importance of viewing music as a language. Both English and music are best learned by immersion, by playing before you know the rules; both require you to forget your instrument and focus on your message (Wooten, personal communication, 2007). And after all, Wooten reminded us, everything is music – the same tones we pare into octaves can be followed all the way down into seconds, minutes, and hours (so we stop measuring on a metronome and start using a clock), then weeks, months, and years (so we use a calendar). The unvoiced implication of the day was that we are all riding one long, slow word.

Alex Grey would most definitely agree. In his manifesto, The Mission of Art, he argues that artists have an ethical responsibility to realize art as a powerful and sacred medium of transmission (Grey, 2001). His conviction is that the state of consciousness in which a work is created is recapitulated in those that perceive it, and so artists are – with more or less awareness and intent – acting as conduits for their modes of being. His injunction is that if we want a beautiful world, we have to be it, first.

Grey expresses himself through painting, but he dismisses the differences between sound and light as trivial – and rightly so. As waves, both are periodic disturbances of a medium; sound is a mechanical wave that passes through the particles of a substance, and light is an electromagnetic wave that passes through fields. Whereas most scientists regard light as essentially merely “wave-like” in nature due to its paradoxical double life as a particle, sound is a wave without particulate form, one that rolls through substances without permanently displacing their parts. However, this difference may be illusory. Although the “luminiferous ether” was discredited in the early 20th century, the notion of a material substrate for the propagation of light was recently revived after explorations into the quantum vacuum and its frictionless “zero-point field” (Laszlo, 2004). Newer models suggest that when we observe a photon, what we see is less a single particle of light in motion than an excited form of stationary, subtle “matter” through which the wave’s energy is conducted, and which bobs about in wave-like patterns for the same reason that we can watch a sub-woofer thump to the beat. Light may technically be no more the wave itself than the speaker is – and following this line of thought, light and sound may both be emitted in suitable conditions by every wave, even if we are not equipped to experience it directly.

Sometimes, however, we are equipped to observe cross-sensory correlations between light and sound. After the work of Ernst Chladni and Jules Antoine Lissajous, Hans Jenny pioneered the field of cymatics – or the study of the visual patterns that sonic vibrations form on surfaces and in three-dimensional objects. Particles scattered on a plate, for example, will respond to a continuous tone by dancing into a stable reticulation. This fractal imprint of the sound’s interference patterns is called a Chladni figure. As the pitch of the tone is raised, the Chladni figure periodically melts into chaos and spontaneously reassembles into similar, but increasingly intricate shapes (see Figure 1).

[Note: Recently, it was announced that mysterious inscriptions in the stone blocks of Rosslyn Chapel – famous for its role as the climactic locale in The DaVinci Code, and as a nexus of esoteric knowledge – appear to encode a form of written music in cymatic diagrams. Thomas J. Mitchell, the researcher who cracked the code, has arranged the music for a motet performance at the chapel on May 18, 2007 (The concert quickly sold out). For more information, visit http://www.tjmitchell.com/stuart/rosslyn.html]

Figure 1. “Water Sound Image 232,” a Chladni figure created by Alexander Lauterwasser. These are ripples on the surface of a water sample that has been disturbed by a sonic pulse.

This correlation is mirrored by the testimony of chromaesthetics, those afflicted by a common form of synaesthesia in which neural pathways are crossed and auditory stimulus also evokes a visual response – flickering colored hallucinations dubbed “photisms.” Although the color of any particular note varies between chromaesthetics, these phenomena do have universal qualities, or form constants, which include inverse relationships of pitch and tempo to photism size and smoothness (respectively). It has also been observed that the paintings of these hallucinations closely resemble early cave paintings, which lends some credence to the hypothesis that spoken language and art developed from similarly intertwined synapses in the brains of early humans.

The cave paintings may be evidence of “true” synaesthesia, or they may merely be indicative of a primitive fusion of the senses, which likely differentiated into sight and sound due to the evolutionary pressure of an increasingly diverse linguistic ecosystem (Nowak & Komarova, 2000). The artifacts of either configuration, prehistoric or contemporary, would be similar enough that it may be impossible to determine which is historically true – another instance in which post-conventional development so closely parallels pre-conventional development that the advanced re-integration of components is easily confused with their primitive, undifferentiated state (David Zeitler, personal communication, 2007). Regardless, even non-synaesthetics can find vestiges of an ancestral sensory fusion in our language: the color or pattern of someone’s t-shirt can be “loud,” just as the tone of an instrument can be “bright” or “dark;” a scrambled television image can be “noisy,” just as music can move through expressive “shades” (including “blue” and “black”); a group of colors can have “harmony,” and a sonata can be “radiant.” The list goes on; and what more, each of these terms also applies to a state of mind – usually one engendered by a sight or sound that is similarly described. But that is hardly the end of this symmetrical affair.

The Song of the Rainbow Body

The “phase changes” undergone by Chladni figures as they are subjected to an increasing pitch are strikingly similar to the “switch points” proposed by philosopher Ken Wilber as thresholds between states of consciousness. In Wilber’s model, a person cannot simultaneously occupy multiple states of consciousness (his favorite example is that a person can not be both drunk and sober); however, in a moment of transition between states, there exists a turbulent interstice that can exhibit qualities of each (2006). One such switch point would be the hypnagogic state, which combines elements of both waking and dreaming. Although integral theory disallows strict state superposition, it does allow for the possibility that states are arranged holarchically, such that the subtler and more expansive states of consciousness contain (and are constituted from) a number of their juniors. Causal consciousness – the formlessness through which we all pass in dreamless sleep each night, and which most of us forget each morning – has been unequivocally declared by the world’s spiritual traditions to literally contain the waking and dreaming states of being, and to itself be enfolded within the state-beyond-states of the nondual – much as the circles and stripes of one Chladni figure can be found miniaturized and multiplied an octave “up.” Allan Combs has proposed a related model of consciousness in which increasingly sophisticated stages of development are represented by multimodal strange attractors, like the Lorenz attractor, in which elaborate chaotic basins are connected by spindles of probability – the mathematical transliteration of Wilber’s switch points (Combs, 2002).

Furthermore, states have historically been correlated with different local activations of the body’s subtle energy system. The chakras, in their traditional lotus blossom representations, bear evermore-numerous petals as they ascend the spine (culminating with the infinite petals of the crown chakra, located near the pineal organ, which both Descartes and contemporary researchers have argued to be the physical seat of consciousness). On the one hand, we have the branching complexity of nested states of consciousness; on the other hand, the nest appears as an onion of interpenetrating matter/energy fields. This chirality has not been lost on pioneering neuroscientists, whose research over the last half-century suggests that waves ligate the two (more on this in a moment).

The intimacy of light, sound, and experience in the subtle body is unfathomable. Each chakra opens in response to the intonation or contemplation of a specific Sanskrit vowel, releasing the practitioner into that chakra’s correlative state. These syllables are arranged according to the frequency of their overtones, starting with “ah” at the root of the spine and proceeding to “ng” at the crown. Curiously, Jenny noticed that when he created Chladni figures from these tones, the resultant patterns contained the written letters for each respective syllable (2001). He hypothesized that written Sanskrit could have been born from the patterns left in sand on the ground or the head of a drum during ritualized chanting – in other words, it may be that Sanskrit’s legacy as a sacred language may be related to its purity, its origin in direct light/sound relationships, unlike extant languages for which the spoken word is arbitrarily attached to a written signifier.

Additionally, each node in the column of chakras is associated with a specific color, arranged into the visible spectrum (red to violet) long before Western science had decoded the significance of electromagnetism and wavelength. David Lewis-Williams and Jason Godesky, presumably unaware of this, have proposed a branching spectrum of states, bifurcating at various points into paths of increasing and decreasing awareness – an uncanny, independently derived, linear version of Combs’ model (Godesky, 2006).

The point of insistence is that we draw boundaries between states with abandon where, in nature, there are no such obvious delineations. And this understanding can be followed to fascinating conclusions. The wavelength of each band of color in the visible spectrum (measured in nanometers, nm) can be halved repeatedly until the rate of its vibration falls within the octaves of the audible spectrum (measured in Hertz, Hz), giving a table of musical notes that correspond to each color (see Figure 2). Contemporary standard tuning, for which A = 440 Hz, is actually about a half-step above where it has been for most of history. By restoring the original standard pitch (or “Renaissance tuning”) at around A = 415 Hz, the color spectrum aligns such that A corresponds to the color red (echoing the chakra system’s red root chakra and the syllable “ah”), and the relatively narrow bandwidths of orange and blue lines up with B and E, which lack the additional semi-tone of the other lettered notes (Perry, n.d.).


Figure 2. Correlations between the visible spectrum and A = 383.57 Hz tuning (381 Hz is the lowest frequency to which A can be assigned and remain in visible red).
Reproduced from Sneddon, 1981.

There is a spooky similarity between visual harmony as mapped by the circle of complementary colors and auditory harmony as mapped by the circle of fifths. Eschewing any attempt to ascribe specific Kosmic significance to this, the two charts can be seamlessly superimposed – regardless of how the notes are assigned to colors. The relationships between pleasant sounds and pleasant sights are geometrically identical (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. The circle of fifths, superimposed over the color wheel. Harmonic relationships between color and pitch are geometrically identical. Graphic layout by Michael Garfield.

This scientific synthesis came millennia after Hindu sages started using similar knowledge to manipulate the energetic body. Just as a chakra’s vowel is intonated in order to open its potentials, so too is its color often emphasized in contemplation or decoration to engineer certain states of mind. In recent years, the numerous cultural traditions of using color to influence states have evolved into a common, if under-examined, practice of alternative medicine (Yousuf Azeemi & Mohsin Raza, 2005). This discipline, called chromotherapy, seeks to correct imbalances in a person’s energetic body by activating subtle energy centers through sympathetic resonance with the appropriate colors – just how hammering middle C on one piano will cause the same note to vibrate on every other piano in the room (Burns, n.d.). Red, associated with the primordial vital energies, is worn or used to raise energy levels; yellow, associated with the social identity, can be employed to raise self-confidence and boost happiness; and so on. Particularly interesting is the use of white to denote priesthood and to contemplate spiritual purity, since white contains all other colors, just as the nondual state contains all states.

[Note: Although Wilber does not consider emotions or moods to be states proper (you can be both awake and happy), I will recognize them as states for the purposes of this paper – albeit junior states, subholons of the waking state (which would be, according to AQAL, a subholon of the dreaming state, which is a subholon of causal awareness, which is a subholon of nondual One Taste).]

Listening Your Way To Enlightenment

Another domain of state manipulation research is psychoacoustics, or the study of the relationship between sound waves and experience. As was implied above, chromotherapy and psychoacoustics are essentially sister disciplines; they are separated by a quantitative gap of about twenty-two octaves, rather than the qualitative gap that conventional sensibilities have assigned color and sound. Nonetheless, chromotherapy remains largely a fringe discipline, whereas psychoacoustics has been widely embraced by academia, especially in the last few decades.

One consequence of this blooming research community has been the advent of innumerable state-control tools that use the modality of hearing to jettison people into non-ordinary states. The most common form of this technology is neuro-entrainment via a binaural beat generator – a device that sends a stereo signal to the listener from which each ear receives a “carrier” tone slightly offset from that received by the other ear. According to Bill Harris, the founder of Centerpointe Institute and a vanguard researcher in neuro-entrainment, the interval between the tones creates a standing wave that synchronizes brain activity at that frequency; for example, a binaural beat with carrier tones of 104 Hz and 108 Hz will produce synchronized neural activity at 4 Hz (n.d.).

This is where the mind-body problem falls overboard and drowns, because every major type of brain wave, as classified by frequency, is correlated with a particular state of consciousness. Listed in order of decreasing frequency (from 30 Hz to 0.5 Hz), the four major brainwaves are designated Beta, Alpha, Theta, and Delta. Jeffrey Thompson, head of the Center for Neuroacoustic Research (CNR), explains that these are measured in the average person during states of outward concentration, inward contemplation, creative visualization, and deep relaxation, respectively (or, while asleep: external/linear mental activity, internal/non-linear mental activity, dreaming sleep, and deep dreamless sleep) (1999). Common sense: the more relaxed the state of mind, the more languorous the brainwave that describes it. Furthermore, Thompson continues, these levels of brainwave activity are also powerfully evident at various depths of spiritual practice; Alpha activity is associated with Zazen’s diffuse concentration (gross meditation), Theta with astral travel and deity yoga (subtle meditation), and Delta with the luminous void and formlessness (causal meditation).

As if this were not enough, CNR scientists have identified additional classes of brain activity on both ends of the spectrum and inaccessible to standard electroencephalograms. Epsilon waves, below 0.5 Hz, are associated with the deepest levels of meditation, whereas Gamma (about 40 Hz), Hyper-Gamma (about 100 Hz), and Lambda (up to an incredible 200 Hz!) waves appear to be responsible for synchronizing regions within the brain to integrate spatially separated cognitive activities. According to Thomspon, Gamma activity “[binds] information from all the senses together for a higher-level awareness of unity of the objects of our perception” (1999).

[Note: This would explain why, when advanced meditators enter nondual awareness when hooked up to EEGs, their brains appear to flatline. Activity has not stopped; it has just dipped below the threshold of detection.]

Phenomenological reports from Hyper-Gamma and Lambda brain states describe experiences identical to those reported from Epsilon states, leading Thompson’s team to propose that the former are actually modulations riding upon the latter and that states of consciousness and brain activity actually meet at the extremes. To put it another way, most of us spend our lives totally ignorant of the fact that we live on a Mobius strip of states that is eating its own tail at the opposite pole. These empirical findings are completely consistent with the traditional practicums for entering meditative consciousness – namely, you either stimulate or relax yourself until you trigger some form of regulatory neural feedback that propels you into the nondual. Either way will do (and has done, for thousands of years) – hence the alchemical slogan, “as above, so below.”

The meat of all of this is, binaural beats can “entrain” a person’s neurophysiological state, and thus, their state of consciousness, with at least the consistency and ease of conventional ritual methods such as fasting, dancing, drumming, meditation, and/or the ingestion of psychedelic chemicals (although, let it be noted, these are all, ultimately, wave-based technologies).

[Note: In the name of stability through redundancy, I will take all of the above. (And that is the buffet-line exuberance of the integral shadow.)]

Additionally, the intensity with which one enters a state through neuro-entrainment can be adjusted by modulating the carrier frequencies – the lower they go while maintaining the same interval, the more stable the entrainment, and the deeper and more vivid the experience of that state (Harris & Wilber, n.d.). The relationship between exterior and interior wave-states appears again, albeit in a different form.

A Magnetized Personality

D.R. Hill and M.A. Persinger at Laurentian University have conducted related research with magnetic fields instead of sound waves. (Remember that electromagnetic “wave-like” phenomena may be much more akin to mechanical waves than some scientists have been willing to admit.) By applying magnetic plates to the temples of their subjects (they call them “experients,” with blatant disregard to homonymy), they were able to obtain a fascinating set of phenomenological reports (2003). The most curious thing about these testimonies is that they are almost identical to those from clinical studies with DMT (n,n-dimethyltryptamine), a powerful endogenous psychedelic that is secreted from the pineal organ – the crown, the supposed seat of the soul – in psychoactive amounts at birth, death, and periods of incredible stress). The details were too close to be dismissed; visions of hyperdimensional but mundane neighboring realities, washes of intense anxiety, and the feeling or seeing of nonhuman sentient entities were common to both. Their resultant hypothesis was that these fields were actually triggering a release of DMT by the brain by simulating (or inducing) the correlated brain activity. Hill and Persinger note,

"The experiences are enhanced if the strength of the fields over the right hemisphere are [sic] about 10% greater than the fields over the left hemisphere and if the complex structure of the applied field contains a variety of intrinsic temporal patterns. They include burst-firing configurations containing a frequency-modulated or phase-modulated component."

In other words, these doctors were using offset waves that met and created complex interference patterns at the center of the brain (where the pineal organ is located) –bypassing the auditory pathways altogether to stimulate synchronized neural activity. Their results were more stunning if they made “music” with the magnets; in compositional terms, “a variety of intrinsic temporal patterns” means “polyrhythm and harmony.” Frequency and phase modulations created standing waves just like sonic neuro-entrainment technology; and there it is: an exceedingly clear relationship between electromagnetic vibration, brain activity, and chemical correlates to consciousness.

It gets a step kookier. Mere hours after writing the above paragraph, I discovered a new article on Wired magazine’s website describing a process called “transcranial magnetic stimulation.” It is a non-invasive procedure that uses a handheld device to focus magnetic waves on the prefrontal cortex, where they alleviate depression by increasing paralimbic blood flow, releasing serotonin, and improving the function of dopamine and norepinephrine (Graham, 2007). The technology is in the final stages of its FDA review and has the attention of the American Psychological Association for its potential to help with otherwise intractable cases (and is also being tested for the treatment of migraines). Five companies in the U.S. and Europe are already producing prototypes. Which begs the question: Are we at all prepared for where is this taking us?

The Ethics of “Pushing A Vibe”

Wilber has written extensively about Karl Marx’s Dialectic of Progress – how advances in technology lead to the exacerbation of both positive and negative forces in the world, or what he calls the “good news, bad news” scenario of evolutionary unfoldment (2002). The crux is this: a given technology requires a certain degree of cognitive complexity to imagine and create, and thus is the artifact of a particular altitude of consciousness (for example, the wristwatch is the mascot for modernity); however, most artifacts do not require the same degree of development to use as they do to build (even a child can wear and read a watch).
Starting with the myth of Prometheus and barreling forward to the present day, the consequences of this dialectic have been writ large time and time again. Albert Einstein issued a famous, tearful apology to Japan for helping decode the physics that led to the atom bomb – but which also led to significant advancements in clean energy and space travel (Pellegrini, 1999). Alfred Nobel went so far as to create his eponymous Peace Prize as a reparation for inventing dynamite (Frängsmyr, 1996). Mary Shelley’s tragic novel Frankenstein, so commonly misinterpreted as a warning against “trespassing in God’s domain,” was actually intended to remind us that we are permanently responsible for the consequences of our actions, that the neglect of an inventor assures that his inventions will be misappropriated. If you dream up the handgun, it is your duty to keep it out of the reach of children; and yet, over and over, the secret leaks – or bleeds. As Guy Garvey laments in his anthem, “Leaders of the Free World,” “The leaders of the free world are just little boys throwing stones / and it’s easy to ignore, ‘til they’re knocking on the door of your homes” (2006).

So it will be with consciousness-altering wave-based technologies. If there has ever been a time to consider the ethical implications of binaural beats, magnetic neuro-stimulation, chromotherapy, and other related means of engineering states, that time is now – before these technologies are ubiquitous in a world that has shrugged off its parental duties. Before its collapse, the Soviet Union devised a number of military applications for electromagnetic and sonic technologies that were originally developed for medical use. These “psychotronic weapons, ” designed in the 1970’s, include an ultra-sound gun capable of killing a cat at 50 meters, electromagnetic field generators used to debilitate interrogation subjects, and sound-based brainwashing techniques (Matthews, 1995).

[Note: There is already an Association of Victims of Psychotronic Experimentation, which has filed suits against Russia’s Federal Security Service. However, since most of the plaintiffs are now clinically insane, the cases have faltered in light of credibility and verification issues (Matthews, 1995)]

Israel has already employed a device called “the Scream” for riot control purposes; it emits bursts of sound that disturb the internal organs and cause dizziness and nausea, even at low volumes. In 2005, a spokeswoman from the Israeli military declared her nation’s intent to use the Scream against any settlers on the Gaza Strip who resist evacuation orders (Block, 2005). Numerous sources have confirmed that these technologies have been adopted, and their efficacy and applications vastly expanded, by the United States (Tapscott, 1993; Opall, 1993; Ricks, 1993). Bombs destroy physical infrastructure, and diseases take time; sound, however, inflicts nearly instantaneous damage to exactly the desired degree. It may be that the battles of the 21st century will be decided by psychotogenic “music.” (And the Devil always wins the fiddle contest.)

Of course, not all morally questionable applications will be governmental. On the one hand, we have the enticing prospect of being able to “dial in” any state of consciousness we desire, and of being able to receive prescription sonic therapy for psychological and somatic disorders (in this new era, the two are inseparable). Something of the sort is already being offered by the good people at www.iDoser.com, who offer the discerning customer “binaural brainwave doses for every conceivable mood” and claim that they have engineered legal mimics for everything from French Roast coffee to LSD to methamphetamine.

[Note: Philip K. Dick, genius futurist that he was, featured a similar bedside device called the “mood organ” in his 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick, 1968).]

This is all well and good if it remains a matter of choice, but there remains the possibility of using the same technology to control consumer behavior. Kiersten Sanford and Justin Jackson, hosts of the popular radio program, “This Week In Science,” have suggested that magnetic technologies such as those employed by Hill and Persinger could not only be used for “God spot cafés” where people could go for a shot of mystical experience, but also installed in vending machines to make people feel “at one with Coca-Cola” (2006).

Grey has furiously criticized this application of the wave in The Mission of Art, condemning advertising agents who draw false associations between the transcendent and instant gratification by depicting glowing auras around hamburgers (2001). He would certainly level an even sterner reproach against organizations brash enough create mystical states of consciousness in unsuspecting consumers as a form of mind control. Thankfully, pre-emptive legislation has already appeared in both Russia and Bulgaria to prohibit this kind of subliminal manipulation by the private sector (Matthews, 2005). Nonetheless, history shows that declarations of illegality are essentially useless to prevent the mobilization of advanced technology against law-abiding individuals – often, and most tragically, by their own leaders. It is little wonder that only a pitiful fraction of this research has been publicly disclosed.

Conclusion

Much more could be said about the history and potential of using sound and electromagnetism to affect states of consciousness. Waves are more than a fascinating natural phenomenon; they are the literal Word from which, traditions claim, our entire world is created – and their manipulation has always played an essential role in accessing states far deeper and more illuminating than ordinary wakefulness. With exponential advances in wave-based technologies, it will be a historical instant before we have common access to the realms of the shamans and sages – before we have harnessed the incredible power of psychoactive vibrations, and discover as a species a yogic techno-mastery of the ocean through which we once merely floated about. The advent of language was a monumental achievement for humanity; but soon enough, even language might be cast aside in favor of newer, more direct methods, by which we can transmit experience with flawless fidelity at the speed of sound – or light.

Nonetheless, as with all such advancements, this newly elaborated power will demand a tremendous moral responsibility from our species. If anything in the world can be said to provide fertile soil for abuse, it is the capacity to alter states of consciousness – either one’s own or another’s – on a whim. We are on the verge of mastering the wave as we once mastered the plow, and with consequences a thousand times more far-reaching and extreme. It is foolish and naïve to suppose we can halt progress – but those of us who can be mindful stewards of state control, must. It is our duty to make sure that the “vibe” we are spreading is a good one.

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