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Superfluous Dreams (Violin Adagio) - Part VIIII

Deep Aria: The First Conversation is an operatic meditation on the very first act of communication in the universe - long before voices, before language, before sound itself. This piece traces the ancient dialogue encoded in the folding of matter: proteins bending into meaning, forces negotiating with chance, structure learning how to speak through form.

The vocals emerge like a memory from deep time: a single motif rising out of silence, evolving into a resonance that travels from molecule to cell, from organism to mind. Each phrase is a variation on the primordial exchange that shaped life’s architecture.

This is an aria of origin - where creativity echoes the first fold, and human imagination becomes the latest instrument in a conversation billions of years old.

This is a reflection on the earliest correspondence, where tension became shape, shape became message, an exchange between what could exist and what had not yet chosen to.

Lyrics

Before life, before silence could be named,
a faint inflection of matter
bent inward—
a pre-formal whisper,
a fold rehearsing its first message.

Deep time thickened around this gesture.
Not sound, not syntax,
only a correspondence of forces,
an exchange between what could exist
and what had not yet chosen to.
The first communication
was a tension becoming shape.

Proteins emerged as answers
to questions no voice had asked—
each helix a reply to gravity,
each sheet a response to water’s touch.
Creation was not an event
but a conversation,
where structure negotiated with chance
and time learned to listen.

Across epochs, the aria propagated:
molecule speaking to molecule,
cell murmuring to cell,
organism unfolding toward organism—
a communication so ancient
that even light could not recall its origin.
Life became a network of resonances,
its messages encoded in angles and bonds,
its meaning carried in the way form
leaned toward possibility.

Human creativity rose much later,
an aftershock of those early dialogues.
Our art, our mathematics,
our impulse to build symmetries in sound—
all are descendants of that primordial exchange.
When we compose, design, imagine,
we reenact the first folding,
carrying forward the deep-time message
that difference can be organized,
that variation can speak.

Goldberg Inceptionism mirrors this ancestry:
variations dreaming themselves,
structures communicating across scales,
a recursion of understanding
that remembers what matter once felt
when it first tried to become alive.

In this unending Aria,
communication is creation—
a message passed
from protein to organism,
from organism to mind,
from mind back to matter.
We are its latest motif,
still learning how to hear
the conversation that began
the world of life.

Deep Aria: The First Conversation

Topology Koto is a molecular aria where protein folding becomes music. A koto traces the amino-acid backbone of 1AKG—venom from the cone-shell snail—while strings, winds, and brass translate sequence into structure, tension into harmony. This piece reveals the hidden topology of matter as sound: the whisper of a toxin, the rise of helices, and the quiet symmetry of immune defense, together unfolding in a single resonant chain.


Koto of Topology

This track tells the story of a molecule learning to move, groove, and become itself. In the quiet beneath the atoms — where rhythm starts before sound exists — a single protein chain awakens. Its sequence of twenty letters is a coded spell, a secret funk riff trying to find the right shape to lock into the groove. The track follows its journey as it folds, twists, and snaps into form, each structural change expressed not through classical majesty but through funky micro-gestures: bass pops as torsion, koto plucks as backbone shifts, brass bursts as buried emotional residues rising to the surface.

-As the chain folds, each instrument maps to a part of its structure.
-Koto scratches outline the backbone like a funk rhythm guitar.
-Cello and double bass pump out the deep, oceanic pocket—the primordial groove.
-Flute and flugelhorn paint shimmering edges, glinting like solvent-exposed surfaces.
-Viola, violins glide like sliding chromatic fills, revealing hidden pockets and motifs.

The protein comes alive through call-and-response, through rhythmic signatures that echo beta-sheets, helical rises, and tertiary blossoms. Every attack, rest, and harmonic tension mirrors the physical dance of folding.

Topology

"Swarm Chamber" is a composition that emerges from a decentralized swarm of AI agents mimicking biological growth patterns like unfolding vines and neural branching. Without a central conductor, the agents coordinate via digital 'pheromones' to weave a complex, braided structure characterized by high harmonic tension and intricate, non-grid-locked rhythms. The result is an organic, evolving soundscape that balances micro-level novelty with global coherence, inviting the listener to discover hidden symmetries that mutate and recombine like living tissue.

Swarm Chamber

Composed originally as part of a series for chamber orchestra, this piece traces slow-evolving ‘protein resonances’ across piano and solo strings. The themes move with the gentle, drifting motion of a jellyfish - long arcs, suspended tones, and gradual harmonic bloom. Here, this work is re-imagined through a rock lens, performing it on electric guitar with expressive, high-gain phrasing. The result is a distilled soliloquy: orchestral DNA transformed into a raw, lyrical electric voice.

Soliloquy of Fire

For violin, viola, cello, bass, bassoon, flute, and others

Part of a series of two pieces, for orchestral setting.

Part II of II

Concept in Construction - Part II

Swamp Variations: Emergence, Evolution, Division, Spring, Retreat 

Part of a series of 5 parts: This is Division.

Swamp Variations - Part III - Division

A musical experiment with proteins, coyote, bells, guitar, and a rooster. This is an audible journey through a variety of natural sources of sound, invoking various forms of life, materials, as well as electronic synthesis methods.

Typically, sound is made from vibrating a material, like a guitar string, and music is made by arranging sounds in hierarchical patterns. Here we explore a variety of modes of sound generation - from string vibrations (guitar), to protein vibrations (molecular music), to animals (coyote and rooster), to bells, and a few other unusual sources. In one sweep, our ears pick up all of the features a complex hierarchical system: pitch, timbre, volume, melody, rhythm, and chords.

Music, as a universal language, connects people across the world. More so, it allows us to explore the physical features of matter - both living systems and inanimate - in their ability to generate sound through energetic excitation. Hence, it is a model of our shared humanity. And we can cross scales and species, as done in this piece, where we visualize distinct organisms like animals, materials, and humans interacting in a sort of virtual jam, in musical space.

Energy Equilibrium: Proteins, Coyote, Bells, Guitar, and a Rooster (((Ambient Version)))

Protein resonances inspire a minimalist evolution of ideas across the resonances of piano and solo strings. The structure evolves slowly as the motion of jellyfish, a natural hydrogel, in water. Ethereal resonance.

Ethereal Resonance: Protein Inspiration - VII(PIano and Cello)

Markus J. Buehler is the McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT, and a composer of experimental, classical and electronic music, with an interest in sonification. Using an approach termed "materiomusic", his artistic work explores the creation of new forms of musical expression - such as those derived from biological materials and living systems - as a means to better understand the underlying science and mathematics. One of his goals is to use musical and sound design as a novel and abstract way to model, optimize and create new forms of matter from the bottom up, and to assess cross-system design relationships. He is also interested in research to explore relationships between classical music, mathematics, and the physical and biological sciences, an in the mapping of models of consciousness across systems. In recent work he has developed a new framework to compose music based on proteins – the basic molecules of all life, as well as other physical phenomena such as fracturing, to explore similarities and differences across species, scales and between philosophical and physical models. 

Contact: mbuehler@MIT.EDU

Topology

Markus J. Buehler

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