Sound Formulary: The Score as Pharmaceutical Compendium
By Bil Smith
I’ve never believed in the sanctity of the score. I believe in its volatility. Its ability to behave like an unstable molecule defined by interaction, shaped by temperature, duration, resistance. In Sound Formulary, I have built not compositions but compendia...scores that behave more like pharmacological guides than musical texts. Each symbol, each material inclusion, is not a note or cue, but an active agent with conditional efficacy.
Much like a formulary, the curated list of therapeutics permitted within a health system, my scores prescribe sounds through layers of permissions, black-box warnings, delivery vectors, contraindications, and dosage thresholds. I’m not interested in telling performers what to do, but under what conditions they may act. A score isn’t a set of instructions; it’s a permission structure laced with embedded contradictions.
I’ve always admired the absurd specificity of the pharmacopoeia: a drug’s classification, its delivery mode, its systemic effects, its inactive binders. This architecture became a model for me. In these works, an “active ingredient” might be a harmonic artifact. A “delivery mechanism” might be a performer’s breath timed against a page’s margin. An “excipient” (what pharma would call a non-active filler) is, in my scores, the whitespace, the metallic ink, the absence of gesture that supports the act without being it.
There is a score in this series titled RECOMBINANT TEXT / for Aural Bioequivalence Studies. It includes boxed labels, sample vial silhouettes, schedules of administration, and sequence variability dependent on circadian staging. Not as parody. Not as gimmick. But as structural syntax. These are protocols the way extended technique was for 20th-century composition: an invasive, sometimes alien, vocabulary forced into the system until it naturalizes.
This is the kind of music that doesn’t get played; it gets metabolized.
I’ve included materials like powdered gallium, scored cellulose, metallic inks, and blister pack embossings, not as texture, but as data. These elements are not ornamental; they hold notational function, they mediate performance possibilities, and they invite compliance or resistance. Every performance becomes a clinical trial.
In the world of drug development, a compound is tested, dosed, evaluated for efficacy and tolerability. I view my scores the same way. A first performance is a Phase I trial (does the concept survive contact with the body)? Phase II is refinement. Phase III is confrontation. The FDA has no role here, but I have always imagined my notation under regulatory scrutiny: Is it legible? Is it dangerous? Does it induce affective disruption?
The musician becomes a pharmacologist. The sound becomes an off-label event.
The score: a diagnostic artifact.
The mistake: a necessary adverse reaction.
Music, in this formulary, is never safe.
It is investigational. And never intended for general use.
