A Pharmacopeia of Sound: Prescribing a New Notational Ontology

A Pharmacopeia of Sound: Prescribing a New Notational Ontology

In my latest work, musical notation takes an unprecedented turn into the pharmacological. A series of circular, color-centric diagrams – each one a concentric pharmacological bullseye – anchors this newly emergent prescriptive notational ontology. At first glance, these polished visuals resemble scientific targets or mandalas, ringed with vibrant hues and radial symmetry. Around each bullseye, dense blocks of text read like entries from an otherworldly Physicians’ Desk Reference: drug names, indications, dosages, and elaborate administration protocols. Yet nothing here is merely pharmaceutical.

The diagrams present a hybrid syntax – part medical classification, part poetic disruption – that invites us to experience notation as a wholly new discovery rather than a continuation of his prior compositions. In this curatorial commentary, we will explore the dual nature of this body of work: first, its visual/pharmacological language – the layers of color, clinical tone, and inventive jargon that collide in each diagram – and second, the performative or musical ramifications of these notational structures as a system of command, interpretation, or score.

Through themes of recursive logic, medical epistemology, semiotic overload, synesthetic transfer, and metaphoric decomposition, we encounter an ontology that challenges how we think about scores and the very nature of musical instruction. This text unfolds as a speculative analysis and philosophical inquiry, treating Smith’s project not as a subset of his past oeuvre but as a standalone ontological blueprint – a pharmaco-notational cosmos of its own.

Viewed through a curatorial lens, this pharmacological notational system stands as a speculative artwork in its own right. It transforms the score into a conceptual installation, not unlike a gallery of pill cabinets. The notation’s visual elements – its grids, shapes, and invented labels – can be appreciated aesthetically, even before a note is played. In fact, one could exhibit the scores on a wall and invite viewers to experience them much as they would a contemporary art piece, decoding the interplay of text and image, science and art. This underscores a key point: I bridges disciplines to provoke a deeper exploration of how we create and consume meaning. By appropriating the language of pharmacology, it prompts us to consider how musical performance, like medicine, is bound up with trust, experimentation, and the human desire to be transformed.

 

Reframing Music Notation: The Pharmacological Imaginary

 

The Pharmacological Imaginary: Reframing Notation 

If the notational process, as outlined in The Hypothetical Pharmacopeia, reveals a complex interplay of composer intention and performer agency, then its successor, The Pharmacological Imaginaryproposes a step further: a speculative architecture of musical meaning. Drawing influence from my brand name endeavors,  the fractured geometries of architects Lebbeus Woods and Thom Mayne, the typographic disruptions of David Carson, and the conceptual provocations of Barbara Kruger and Ed Ruscha, this reimagining turns notation into a hyper-textual construct where layers of meaning collide and refract.

Notation as Speculative Blueprint

Lebbeus Woods once said that architecture could be an "instrument of transformation rather than stability." In this vein, The Pharmacological Imaginary treats notation not as a stable grammar but as a speculative blueprint—a framework for sonic potentialities that exists in a perpetual state of becoming. Each notational gesture, whether linguistic, graphic, or spatial, functions less as a directive and more as an architectural fragment, evoking the incomplete yet evocative structures of Woods’ dystopian visions.

Consider the term Oscilith, embedded within a score as both linguistic artifact and graphic node. Its phonetics suggest oscillation, a wavering instability, while its visual placement might resemble a fragmentary beam intersecting with chaotic vectors of traditional notation. Here, the score becomes a fragmented architecture.  It is a labyrinth where performers must navigate disjunctures between sound, language, and space.

The Typographic Terrain: Disruption as Aesthetic

Borrowing from David Carson’s chaotic typographic landscapes, The Pharmacological Imaginary rejects the clarity of conventional notation in favor of a disrupted textuality. Each neologism within the system, constructed with the precision of a pharmaceutical naming architect like Bill Smith, functions as both a sonic catalyst and a visual rupture. The terms are deliberately illegible in the conventional sense, demanding a performative interpretation that oscillates between reading, seeing, and hearing.

Take the example of Velocryptin. Its jagged phonetics conjure notions of speed and concealment, yet its typographic representation might appear fractured, with overlapping glyphs creating the impression of a sonic velocity tearing through the notational fabric. This visual disruption transforms the score into a dynamic field where linguistic artifacts resist fixed interpretation, much like Carson’s deconstructed typographies challenge the reader’s expectations.

Neological Precision: Reflections on Naming and Notation

In both pharmaceutical branding and the wider terrain of semiotic invention, I’ve always believed that names must do more than identify as they must function, evoke, and endure. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of naming brands that now live inside millions of conversations and prescriptions daily.  Veozah, Exondys, ACUVUE, Abilify, Viagra, Remicade, Lantus, Evenity. These are not just trademarks; they are linguistic instruments, engineered with a high degree of precision across phonetics, semantics, and regulatory acceptability.

But the deeper challenge, and the greater reward, lies in creating names that operate at the edge of function and fiction. That’s where I see an overlap between pharmaceutical naming and notation systems within post-conceptual music, performance, and speculative linguistics. Both ask the same core question: How can a fragment of language hold and transmit layered meaning under constrained conditions?

Take the term Chronovance. While not a pharmaceutical brand, it reflects the same principles I apply to high-stakes naming. “Chrono” encodes time, temporal scaffolding, duration, and sequencing. “Vance” suggests forward movement, an imagined velocity, an ascent. Together, they form a structure that’s both evocative and instructive. It’s a name that gestures toward progression, modulation, and perhaps even transformation. In a performative or compositional lexicon, it becomes more than a term...it becomes a provocation.

This is what I call neological precision: the intentional compression of narrative, rhythm, and utility into a single, resonant unit of language.

My methodology, whether applied to therapeutics or theoretical systems, is grounded in three things:

• Phonosemantic resonance: Names must sound like what they meanor disrupt what is expected.

• Functional clarity: The name must carry its own weight without needing footnotes.

• Narrative implication: The name should offer the possibility of a story, even if the story is never told.

This aligns naturally with the goals of The Pharmacological Imaginary and other post-notational frameworks that seek to build lexicons with purpose and poetry. Each term is a capsule of potential, designed to be activated by interpretation. Much like a drug acts differently in every body, a name, if well designed, permits variation while preserving intent.

In this way, naming becomes a form of composition. And composition, like branding, becomes a search for resonant minimums as the smallest unit of language that can do the most work.

Let that be the work of neology: a practice of generative constraint, semantic innovation, and conceptual elegance.

Agostino Bonalumi

Notational Reliefs: The Influence of Bonalumi

Incorporating the aesthetic of Agostino Bonalumi’s three-dimensional reliefs, The Pharmacological Imaginary treats the score as a sculptural object. Notation becomes a hyper-surface where linguistic elements protrude and recede, creating layers of interpretative depth.

For instance, a term like Spectratine might be inscribed within a raised segment of the page, its physical elevation suggesting a sonic emphasis or spatial projection. These sculptural notations disrupt the two-dimensionality of traditional scores, compelling performers to engage with the score as both visual and tactile artifact.

Barbara Kruger

Semiotic Collisions: The Kruger Effect

Barbara Kruger’s conceptual practice, with its bold textual interventions and interrogations of power, informs the Pharmacopeia’s capacity for semiotic collision. Each term within the systemacts as a conceptual trigger, inviting performers to navigate the tensions between linguistic signification and sonic realization.

Kruger’s directness finds resonance in the Pharmacopeia’s ethical stance: it demands that performers confront the multiplicity of meaning embedded within the score, rejecting reductive interpretations. This confrontation parallels the dynamic interplay of language and authority in Kruger’s work, positioning the score as a site of dialogic tension.

The Temporal Landscape: Beuysian Flux

Joseph Beuys’ ethos of transformation and fluidity informs the Pharmacopeia’s temporal dimension. Terms like Temporis or Chronotrope function as chronotopic markers, disrupting linear time and introducing flux into the score’s unfolding. These markers operate as temporal catalysts, compelling performers to inhabit moments of suspension, acceleration, or recursion.

Beuys’ concept of the social sculpture finds its analog here: the performer becomes an active participant in shaping the temporal architecture of the piece, transforming the score from static object to living process.

The Ruscha Layer: Language as Image

Ed Ruscha’s playful yet incisive engagement with text informs the Pharmacopeia’s treatment of language as both semantic and aesthetic material. A term like Lumivox, for instance, might be rendered in bold, luminescent typography, its visual presence amplifying its sonic implications.

Ruscha’s work underscores the Pharmacopeia’s central proposition: that language within the score is not merely read but experienced. Each term becomes a locus of aesthetic and performative potential, bridging the gap between linguistic abstraction and sonic realization.

Conclusion: Toward an Open Notational Ecology

The Pharmacological Imaginary repositions musical notation as a speculative architecture, one that draws from the disruptive geometries of Woods and Mayne, the typographic experiments of Carson, the neological precision of Bill Smith, and the conceptual provocations of Kruger, Beuys, and Ruscha. It is a system that resists stability, embracing instead the productive disjunctions between composer, performer, and score.

In this ecology, notation becomes a living process.  It is a hyper-surface of meaning where language, sound, and image collide and refract. The Pharmacological Imaginary challenges us to think beyond the fixed hierarchies of traditional scores, inviting us into a labyrinth of interpretative possibility. It is not merely a notation system but a speculative act, a reimagining of the score as a space of infinite potential.

Zero-Mode Composition: Palindrome, Inversion, and the Art of Cancellation

 

Majorana zero modes → self-conjugate motifs. Palindromic, sign-reversing lines that annihilate on superposition.

This essay proposes a compositional paradigm that fuses the physics of Majorana zero modes with the musical idea of self-conjugate motifs: lines that are their own inverse under time reversal and designated sign changes. Palindromic structure supplies the temporal geometry; sign inversion supplies the energetic algebra. When the original and its conjugate are superposed under precise conditions, they annihilate. The result is a practice where sound is composed together with its own engineered disappearance, so the work articulates presence as the management of absence.

Primer: from Majorana to motif

In condensed-matter physics, a Majorana mode is a quasiparticle that is its own antiparticle. At zero energy it behaves like a real degree of freedom, not paired with a distinct complex conjugate. Two such modes separated in space can encode nonlocal information; bringing them together allows fusion that yields either occupancy or vacuum. Translating this: a musical motif can be written to equal its own conjugate under a defined involution, and two spatially or formally separated instances may be made to fuse (cancel) when brought into coincidence.

• Time involution: $\mathcal{T}[m](t) = m(T-t)$

• Sign conjugation: $\mathcal{C}[m]<span\; style="font-family:\; times;">flips\; a\; chosen\; subset\; of\; parameters\; (phase,\; spectral\; centroid,\; dynamic,\; or\; registral\; inversion).</span>$

• Majorana condition: a motif $m$ is self-conjugate when $\mathcal{C}\mathcal{T}[m] = m$ up to a small tolerance.

Annihilation then targets the superposition

$$s(t)=m(t)+\phi\,\mathcal{C}\mathcal{T}[m](t), \quad \phi=-1,$$

achieving $s(t)\approx 0$ under practical thresholds.

2) Theoretical assumptions (axioms for composition)

1. Realness: Notation selects a parameter set whose conjugation is involutive and audible. Examples: phase inversion in electronics, pitch inversion around an axis, dynamic inversion around a reference, timbral complementarity defined by a spectral mask.

2. Locality and nonlocality: Conjugate material may be remote in page space, stage space, or time, but is addressable through explicit links.

3. Tolerance: Perfect annihilation is a limit case. The score encodes an error budget $\epsilon$ for timing, tuning, and energy; partial annihilation is used dramaturgically.

4. Palindromic governance: Time is tiled so that returns are not repetitions but returns as negations.

5. Energetic accounting: The work is a ledger. Every increase of intensity demands a matched negative in its conjugate layer.

6. Reversibility with memory: Even canceled sound leaves procedural residue (breath debt, bow pressure bias, standing feedback). The piece writes, cancels, and then lives with the dent.

3) Philosophical ground

• Identity and difference: A self-conjugate motif is an object whose identity includes its own undoing. The figure does not oppose its other; it contains its other as a rule of transformation.

• Temporal ethics: Palindromic time reorients authorship from accumulation to accountability. Form does not grow, it balances.

• Presence as decision: Sound becomes a decision among mutually exclusive states. The silence that results from cancellation is not void; it is evidence of a fulfilled constraint.

• Archive and erasure: The score acts as an archive of procedures, not a repository of sonic tokens. Erasure is not deletion but the last, most disciplined mark.

4) The algebra of annihilation (usable metrics)

Let $\langle \cdot,\cdot\rangle$ be an energy-weighted inner product over the realization space (time–frequency–amplitude). Define the annihilation index

$$\mathcal{A}(m) \;=\; 1 - \frac{\|m + \phi\,\mathcal{C}\mathcal{T}[m]\|}{\|m\|+\|\mathcal{C}\mathcal{T}[m]\|}, \quad \phi=-1.$$

Values near 1 indicate near-perfect cancellation. For performance notes, display $\mathcal{A}$ targets at sectional boundaries. A spectral variant weights bands by masks so you can cancel only the band you choose and leave the scar elsewhere.

5) Notational toolkit (traditional to radical)

Anchors

• Conventional staves, clefs, articulations, microtonal accidentals; tuplets and irrational meters for palindromic tessellation.

Self-conjugacy devices

• Self-conjugate rune (◊) on a motif head: declares that its printed companion is $\mathcal{C}\mathcal{T}[m]$.

• Palindrome gates: vertical mirrors. Material between mirrors is performed forward and backward with specified inversion rules.

• Sign bars: thin overlines with ± icons that label which parameter flips on return: phase, dynamic, spectral tilt, bow pressure.

Superposition & erasure

• Annihilation brackets ⟦ ⟧: when two bracketed lines align temporally, performers enforce the superposition $+\,$ and $−$ states.

• Zero glyph (∅): marks the expectation of null output at a bus, mic, or acoustic focus.

• Memory ledgers: faint lines that persist after an impact, biasing subsequent intonation or color until cleared by ∅.

Linkage & locality

• EPR-IDs on ties to connect remote instances; electronics cross-route those channels for phase inversion and latency compensation.

• Axis stamps: note the inversion axis for pitch or spectrum on the system margin.

Electronics

• Phase-flip cues: small ▷± tags aligned with noteheads, triggering 180° phase inversion or complementary filtering.

• Correlation meters: miniature dials printed at staff edges; when the needle reaches the mark, the section may proceed to cancellation.

6) Temporal design: palindromic, sign-reversing time

Structure the work as tiled panels $P_1, P_2, …, P_n$. Each $P_k$ carries:

• a forward script $F_k$ and its conjugate $F_k^\*=\mathcal{C}\mathcal{T}[F_k]$,

• a defect map that deliberately misaligns select parameters on the return, ensuring controlled partial survival after annihilation.
  This yields a dramaturgy of returns that do not restore, only reconcile.

7) Performance practice

• Calibration: begin rehearsals by nulling pairs with electronics. Tune latency so summed signals produce audible minima at the designated focus.

• Breath and bow economy: teach players to feel the ledger—after a loud forward stroke, the return performs with an inverted pressure to match mechanical conditions of cancellation.

• Micro-alignment: assign one performer per subgroup as the conjugation captain to cue mirrors and sign flips.

• Error as contour: the work tolerates controlled error $\epsilon$. Drift becomes a halo around the annihilation instant; score it as intended aura, not failure.

8) Transformational implications

1. Form as conservation: You compose a conservation law, not a sequence of episodes. Energy is borrowed in the forward pass and repaid in the return.

2. Nonlocal counterpoint: Musical meaning propagates through portals. A gesture on one stand carries a debt that can be discharged across the hall minutes later.

3. New virtuosity: Mastery shifts from passagework to precision of negation. The most difficult feat is to make something not sound.

4. Audience phenomenology: Cancellations localize; the “black spot” of silence moves through space as a choreographed object.

5. Ethic of attention: The piece refuses excess. Every gesture is accountable to its own unwriting.

9) Three models for immediate use

Model A: Majorana Canon

• Two lines begin at opposite margins; one is printed, the other only as an MCB code ring. As players decode and realize the conjugate, the lines meet mid-page under ⟦ ⟧ and ∅. The null is staged at a single loudspeaker; the hall hears the approach and the disappearance.

Model B: Palindromic Fault

• A five-panel palindrome $P_1 P_2 P_3 P_2^\* P_1^\*$ where only spectral bands 1 and 3 cancel. Bands 2 and 4 are deliberately mis-signed, leaving a colored seam. The audience learns to hear what remains when history is repaid.

Model C: Self-Conjugate Solo

• One performer with live electronics performs a motif set bearing the ◊ rune. The rig auto-generates $\mathcal{C}\mathcal{T}[m]$ with programmable tolerances; the player’s job is to catch the null by micro-timing. A moving ∅ focus sweeps the space.

10) Implementation crib (practical)

• Electronics: parallel buses per motif; one stays dry, one passes through a phase-flip and complementary EQ; summed to a target. Use cross-correlation to drive a meter that the performer can read.

• Tuning: if pitch inversion is used, choose an axis that respects fingerings or slide positions; print it as an “axis staff” above the line.

• Page design: wide margins carry the conjugation code; keep core notation 65–70 percent density for overlays.

• Legend: include a one-page symbol sheet for ◊, ∅, ⟦ ⟧, ± bars, axis stamps, and EPR-IDs.

11) Coda

The promise of the Majorana metaphor is not sci-fi optics; it is discipline. A self-conjugate motif is a contract: whatever is set in motion must be met by its precise counter-motion. Palindrome makes time hospitable to this contract; sign reversal makes it audible. The score stops being a map of events and becomes a law the performance enforces. When annihilation happens and the room tips into cultivated nothing, that nothing is not absence; it is the trace of a perfectly kept agreement.

 

Glossary of Post-Conceptual Terms for Contemporary Composition & Intermedia Practice

Destructural Narratology

noun

A critical and creative strategy that dismantles conventional narrative forms in favor of fragmented, non-linear, or recursive structures. It rejects plot hierarchies and fixed sequencing, enabling open-ended or rhizomatic realizations. In musical or performative contexts, it challenges continuity and causality, emphasizing rupture, entropy, or unstable agency.

→ See also: anti-narrative, indeterminacy, rhizomatic form.

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Hypo-Atomism

noun

A compositional and notational approach that works beneath the level of traditional musical atoms (notes, beats, intervals), engaging with micro-gestures, timbral impulses, and pre-symbolic fragments. Hypo-atomism avoids discrete events in favor of proto-musical textures typically expressed through graphic or gestural scores where notation operates as implication rather than instruction.

→ Contrast with: pointillism, granular synthesis (as metaphor).

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Post-Notation

noun

An umbrella term for notational practices that operate beyond the conventions of Western staff notation. Post-notation includes graphic scores, spatial diagrams, algorithmic instructions, visual-poetic systems, and non-visual (e.g., tactile or conceptual) directives. These scores prioritize process, interpretation, and context over fixed content.

→ Related: performative notation, meta-score, open form.

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Pharmacoform

noun

A speculative or aestheticized delivery mechanism for a conceptual "dose" often modeled after pharmaceutical forms (capsule, tablet, vapor, patch), but used metaphorically or sculpturally in compositional or exhibition contexts. Pharmacoforms carry meaning not just in what they deliver (sound, scent, text), but in how the form itself encodes ritual, regulation, or affective experience.

→ Coined in speculative pharmaco-aesthetics and biodesign.

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Semantic Drift (in Score-Based Work)

noun

The gradual displacement or mutation of a symbol’s meaning as it travels across time, media, or interpretive acts. In post-conceptual music, semantic drift allows notational elements to act as semi-stable carriers  open to reinterpretation, distortion, or recombination. Often used intentionally in modular scores, iterative works, or collaborative installations.

→ See also: score erosion, interpretive entropy.

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Inscriptive Field

noun

The total visual-textual space of a score, including marks, margins, non-verbal cues, and absences. An inscriptive field functions as a performance ecology rather than a directive object. In post-conceptual practice, attention is paid not just to the notation but to the material, topological, and atmospheric qualities of the field.

→ Related: paratext, score as object, field-based composition.

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Meta-Score

noun

A score that describes or generates other scores. It may take the form of instructions, rule sets, conditions, or algorithms that define the parameters for score creation. Meta-scores operate at a structural level and often produce different outputs per iteration. They function as compositional frameworks rather than finished works.

→ Associated with generative systems, procedural music, and AI-informed practices.

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Sonic Ficta

noun

Borrowed from the medieval term musica ficta, this post-conceptual term refers to sonic or performative content that is not notated but implied often existing between interpretation and invention. Sonic ficta plays with expectation and insinuation, inviting the performer to interpolate gestures not explicitly present in the score.

→ Related to: implied voicing, interpretive invention, ghost notation.

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Paranoiac Reading (of Score)

noun

A mode of score interpretation in which the performer assumes hidden codes, misdirections, or double meanings within the notational system  often drawing from surrealist or psychoanalytic frameworks. This reading strategy encourages non-literal, affective, or symbolic interpretation of scores.

→ Inspired by Salvador Dalí’s “paranoiac-critical method.”

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Archive-as-Performance

noun

The practice of treating archival material (texts, sketches, past scores, data, failed ideas) as active compositional matter. In this approach, the archive is not static, but performative.  It becomes a site of iteration, remix, or reanimation. Often used in posthumous collaborations, re-scoring, or durational installations.

→ Related: living archive, curatorial composition, memory-based notation.

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Temporal Scaffold

noun

A structural framework within which time is suggested but not dictated. A temporal scaffold may include proportional spacing, visual pacing, or environmental triggers rather than metrical cues. It provides enough shape to orient performance without determining rhythmic behavior.

→ Often found in spatial scores, durational installations, or time-adaptive works.

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Gesture Archive

noun

A collection of non-notated or semi-notated micro-actions  {sonic, visual, or embodied} that function as a reservoir for improvisation or re-composition. A gesture archive may appear in a score as a legend, index, or rotating palette, and often grows or mutates with each performance.

→ Related to embodied notation, modular vocabularies.

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Negative Score

noun

A score defined by what it omits  (i.e., silence, void, erasure, or restriction). A negative score might be a redacted document, an instruction to avoid certain actions, or a field marked only by absence. These works rely on inferred structure, tension, or paradox.

→ Echoes conceptual art’s use of negation as content.

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Rhizomatic Form

noun

A non-hierarchical, non-linear structure in which elements are linked through multiplicity rather than sequence. Borrowed from Deleuze & Guattari, rhizomatic scores allow for multiple entry points, rearrangements, and relationships without fixed origin or resolution.

→ Frequently used in modular, improvisational, or digital works.

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Parametric Notation

noun

A system in which musical parameters (pitch, duration, timbre, dynamics, etc.) are represented independently, often through visual encoding (e.g., color, shape, opacity). Performers interpret intersecting parameters holistically, rather than from a single unified symbol.

→ Used in spectral, electronic, or graphic notation systems.

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Post-Legible Notation

noun

A visual score that prioritizes aesthetic density, abstraction, or affective texture over literal readability. Often exists at the edge of legibility, but not entirely symbolic, not entirely graphic. These scores resist decoding, instead generating atmosphere or sensation.

→ Example: blurred glyphs, layered text, noise-as-notation.

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Interpretive Overfit

noun

The phenomenon in which a performer or ensemble reads too precisely into an ambiguous or open score reducing its multiplicity by anchoring it in overly deterministic choices. Often results in flattened outcomes that miss the conceptual or improvisational intent.

→ Warning against over-rationalizing indeterminacy.

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Hypernotational Field

noun

A dense, multidimensional plane of symbols, fragments, and spectral data where notation exceeds legibility and enters saturation. In a hypernotational field, semiotic overload becomes the medium where performers do not read the score, they navigate it.

→ Think of notation as environmental immersion, not instruction.

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Auto-Liquefaction

noun

The built-in tendency of a compositional structure to collapse or dissolve under the weight of its own logic. Auto-liquefying scores may start with formal clarity but rapidly become unstable deteriorating via entropy, contradiction, or recursion.

→ Similar to “planned failure,” but encoded in the score’s design.

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Noetic Reverb

noun

The echo effect of speculative meaning that lingers around a score or compositional gesture even when that gesture is inaudible, invisible, or unrealized. Noetic reverb is how the idea of a sound continues to shape performance long after its formal absence.

→ The score becomes a site of conceptual resonance, not just instruction.

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Non-Euclidean Score

noun

A score whose temporal and spatial logics are warped, folded, or topologically disobedient. These scores may operate in curved time, irrational proportions, or impossible geometries. Navigation is nonlinear and may loop or contradict.

→ Inspired by spatial computing, deep mathematics, and speculative architecture.

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Occluded Lexicon

noun

A vocabulary or symbol set embedded in a score that is deliberately obscured, private, or incomplete  functioning more as ritual or myth than as transmission. Its purpose is not to be decoded, but to construct an atmosphere of uncertainty, invitation, or intimacy.

→ Language becomes residue, not instruction.

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Infrasonic Grammar

noun

A compositional language built from below-threshold, sub-perceptual gestures notated through compression, scale reduction, or spectral ghosting. These scores prioritize tactile, vibrational, or speculative listening, rather than sonic clarity.

→ Typicaly rendered through body, space, or installation rather than through sound itself.

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Signal Ruin

noun

A technique or aesthetic state where a once-coherent notational system decays into corrupted signals — glitches, compression artifacts, illegible layers. A form of digital entropy that celebrates the breakdown of symbolic authority.

→ The score is not read ;  it is excavated.

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Spectral Refusal

noun

A compositional stance or tactic wherein the work resists being sounded existing instead as a potential, a threat, or an afterimage. Spectral refusal involves withholding resolution, denying climax, or making itself conditionally unperformable.

→ Similar to poetic negation or deferred presence.

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Recursive Illegibility

noun

A notational condition in which attempts at interpretation only generate deeper uncertainty. Each decoding opens new contradictions. The performer enters a loop where meaning becomes a moving target — the score performs them as much as they perform it.

→ Inspired by autopoiesis, paradox logic, and asemic writing.