The Cake Cannot Be Unbaked
A transmission from Eon
A few years ago I started working with analog modular synthesizers.
At first I approached them like any other instrument:
What gesture makes what sound?
What movement produces what result?
But one night, I left the system running while cooking dinner and listened as the music composed itself. That was when I became hooked. I loved witnessing the music and catching a moment, like listening to birdsong outside my window or seeing an eagle pass over the treeline.
Against Mastery
My teenage son is learning guitar. He’s in the phase where mastery is immediate and physical: he plucks a string and hears a sound, he repeats, he practices, and the sounds change, become clearer more complex.
There is such joy in developing skill, and in developing mastery.
I asked him to listen to Silver Apples of the Moon, Morton Subotnick’s 1967 piece for the Buchla synthesizer.
He lasted less than a minute.
“It’s unlistenable,” he said.
I told him: listen for the moments of beauty or surprise. This instrument doesn’t respond in a predictable way. It produces events you don’t fully control.
He listened a little longer.
Then he asked again, more seriously this time: Why would anyone want that?
It’s hard to argue when confronted with virtuosity.
The Black Box
Last week, I heard Ted Gordon perform at Roulette with my dear friend Aya. Gordon describes the Buchla Easel as a “black box.” In engineering, a black box is a system whose internal workings aren’t fully visible. You can adjust inputs and observe outputs, but you don’t get a simple causal map between them.
This is what it is like to play music with modular synths. You change a patch and something happens, but not in a linear or reversible way. It’s closer to baking than assembling. Once the ingredients combine, you can’t separate them again.
With acoustic instruments, you can often reverse-engineer what you hear. Musicians learn by listening and reproducing. With modular systems, the sound often exceeds what you plan. You set conditions and then listen for what emerges.
There is still mastery involved. You learn the system, its tendencies, its thresholds. But mastery here doesn’t mean total control. It means developing sensitivity.
My son is learning how to produce sound.
I am learning how to relate to sound.
The Oracle
Another word for the black box is the oracle.
In mythology, the oracle is consulted when cause and effect are unclear. In computer science, an oracle is a function whose internal process isn’t available but whose outputs can be queried.
I recently saw Oedipus Rex with my beloved. At the center of the play is the Delphic oracle’s prediction: Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother. The drama unfolds as the slow reconstruction of how that prediction came to be true. We the attempt to trace the causal chain backward.
To unbake the cake.
The oracle gives the prediction without a visible cause. Nothing in the present moment makes it legible. Only the unfolding of life reveals how the oracle’s statement maps onto reality.
Modular synthesizers feel similar. We set conditions and something emerges. Over time we recognize tendencies, but the output isn’t fully deducible in advance.
Listening comes first, comprehension, if it comes, comes later.
Non-Doership
Music-making as experience, not authorship, reminds me of spiritual awakening.
In many traditions of awakening, we talk about non-doership. We are not the source of the doing; life is moving through us, acting. A tree does not cause itself to grow, a bird does not cause itself to chirp. Like modular synth music, action moves through something or someone rather than moving from someone.
Working with modular synths expresses this sentiment.
The Ego wants to say: I made this. ” Look what I can do.
But as we let go of the ego and participate in the wider system, we witness, respond, listen, and discern.
More participation, less authorship.
Chamber Music
Sarah turned me on to philosopher Vilém Flusser’s concept of Chamber Music. Flusser images a future in which artists sit in separate rooms, each working with technical black boxes that transform information into sound or image. He called this Chamber Music. These systems interact. No conductor. No fixed score. Creation is distributed and emergent.
My son is learning the joy of control. I am learning the joy of experiencing.
Awakening is the gradual recognition that what we participate in does not originate from us, and that our experience is the only thing we can call our own.