I Ching or "Book of Changes" is an ancient Chinese text and an organizational structure that mathematically corresponds to both the genetic language of DNA and the binary language of modern computing. Each of its 64 symbols is known as a 'hexagram' - a six-bit binary number which may also be interpreted as a pair of 'trigrams' containing three bits each.

   This brief musical track "Astral Pagoda" is an example of the musical potential encoded within a particular pattern of the I Ching. The melodies and rhythms of all musical-parts* were established by converting a particular ordering of I Ching hexagrams into musical elements: a sequence of yins & yangs mapped directly into a list of musical attacks & rests, while also mapped by groups of three in order to select tones from the eight steps of a musical scale**. 

There is a 2000+ year-old partition of the I Ching into eight sequences of eight hexagrams each, called the 'houses' or 'mansions' of the I Ching. Since a sequence of eight hexagrams may be viewed as a sequence of 48 bits, the melody, counter-melody, bassline and rhythm of each of the eight six-bar sections of music were generated by interpreting each of these distinct bit sequences according to a single set of rules defining how to map a sequence of 48 bits into music. In the track, a cymbal crash is heard every six bars, signaling the start of a new house with its corresponding bit-sequence determining its distinctive musical content. Since the mapping is kept exactly the same while the sequence of 48 bits changes with each house, what we hear as the music progresses from section to section is a direct musical interpretation of an elemental pattern whose form was encoded over 2000 years ago. No subsequent modifications were made. Thus we experience this ancient sequence of yin and yang unfolding in musical time as an ordering of notes & rests maneuvering about the tones of a musical scale. It's interesting to consider that ours is only one out of any number of possible musical interpretations, merely the one derived via our chosen mapping. Who knows what further musics might be there just waiting in potential, abiding patiently for some chance to be revealed!

(* all music except the drum loop was generated by a mapping from the I Ching pattern to musical elements)

(** When a binary sequence is grouped into packets of three, it forms a shorter sequence of three-bit values with eight possibilities for each value. These eight value-types may correspond to the eight tones of a full diatonic scale from tonic to octave, denoting a particular musical interpretation of the eight trigrams of the I Ching.)

Astral Pagoda (music generated from patterns of I Ching)

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