MindDrift

1. A Calculated Expression of Suitable Emotions
   
2. Whispering Galleries ^or Smooth, Digital, Genderless
   
3. Hiding in the Acoustic Shadows of the Psyche
4. MindDrift

MindDrift is a piece that bridges my life in Singapore and my life in Hong Kong. I started writing these pieces about a month before I left Singapore and completed them after a three week quarantine and living in Hong Kong for two months. Each piece in MindDrift is like a chapter in a book.

The opening chapter, “A Calculated Expression of Suitable Emotions” is a study on what it would be like if I were a person who felt emotions like others. Evidently, the right/natural way to feel emotions is to receive them from some internal font and then when you express their inherent characteristics others know which emotion you are expressing by way of empathy. Since I lack this supposedly innate ability, it seems my brain has found a way to express these feelings through music.

“Whispering Galleries” are usually circular rooms in which you can whisper in one area of the room and your whisper can be heard clearly from very far away in another part of the room.  This phenomenon is quite cool to experience, and to create this piece I made an impression of  hearing all the secret conversations in the whispering galleries. This piece’s secondary title “Smooth, Digital, Genderless” is my description of hearing the sound of a hundred voices whispering.  In some whispering galleries, when it  is extremely crowded, and you listen in to what people are saying, you can’t actually make out any real words. You hear this quiet, white noise static with occasional burbles and smooth undulations of volume. 

I wrote “Hiding in the Acoustic Shadows of the Psyche” as a sort of game between the violin soloist and the ensemble. This piece opens like an idea forming slowly in the back of your mind. The opening texture, which recurs throughout the piece in various guises, is really just an extension of the violin’s sound. It is scored so that the ensemble seems to be emanating from the solo violin’s sound. As the piece progresses these underlying sounds start to take shape of their own and gain some independence from the soloist. The interplay between soloist and ensemble occasionally utilises textures reminiscent of the concerto. This relationship changes throughout the piece and eventually the violin fades back into the inner reaches of the psyche.

The final chapter titled “MindDrift” is about the mind’s consciousness becoming less and less engaged in its immediate surroundings and more and more engaged in the unreal world of internet video streaming. I first noticed this to an extreme extent when a friend of mine would often tell me that he ‘lost’ a day. He told me that from the moment he woke up and for the next 16 hours he did nothing but swipe his phone. He said this happened often to him, and the day after one of these episodes he would be wishing he were back on his phone.  He had no recollection of any of the videos he had watched and could only vaguely remember the physical sensation of swiping to watch the next video. I thought this was so bizarre and I began to write MindDrift about him. 

︎MindDrift Merged.pdf

Violins
Viola
Cello

Double Bass

23:00

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