Pharmaco-Sonic Cells: A Reimagining of the Notational Object

 

Pharmaco-Sonic Cells: A Reimagining of the Notational Object

“Each notation-object is not a note. It is a pharmaco-sonic cell, a site of energetic discharge, and regulation."This statement functions not as poetic hyperbole, but as an ontological pivot—one that moves musical notation away from referentiality and toward therapeutic agency. In the tradition of Damien Hirst’s medical interventions into visual art, the pharmaco-sonic cell refuses the historical role of the note as an inert symbol. It becomes instead a prescriptive capsule: performable, affective, and metabolically unstable.

“Each notation-object is not a note.”

Displacement of the Traditional Note: In conventional music, a note is a symbolic placeholder: a fixed pitch, duration, and sometimes intensity. It presumes the score is a prescriptive map that the performer translates into sound output.

By contrast, the “notation-object” in this framework is neither a symbol for pitch nor duration. It is not representational in the way a note is; it does not refer to a singular sonic event but instead to a complex system of potential energies and interpretations.

This is a fundamental ontological shift. The notation-object is no longer a pointer to a sound. It is the event.

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“It is a pharmaco-sonic cell...”

Pharmaco-sonic Cell: Hybrid of Biopharmacology + Sound Cell

• Pharmaco-: The prefix introduces a set of biological and therapeutic expectations—the idea that this object has effect, dosage, absorption, contraindications, and latency.

• Sonic: The cell is audible, resonant, and vibrational—its output is not merely audible sound but sound as physiological or symbolic experience.

• Cell: The term cell here refers to both biological units and modular musical microstructures. It implies an autonomous structure, capable of interacting with others, containing within it a blueprint for performance but also a logic for transformation.

Thus, a pharmaco-sonic cell is a compositional micro-organism: it can be activated, interpreted, and recombined; it possesses affect, effect, and agency.

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“...a site of energetic discharge, regulation...”

Here, the metaphor transitions into a physiological and kinetic realm, aligning with systems theory, somatic practices, and sound healing traditions.

• Energetic discharge: When the notation-object is performed, it releases energy—not in the abstract musical sense, but in the modeled analogy of biological discharge: like a neuron firing or a medicine metabolizing.

  In performance, this could manifest as:

  • Sudden bursts of microsonic articulation.

  • Frequency collisions or harmonic ruptures.

  • Sound-sculptural interactions that physically move or affect air, skin, breath.

• Regulation: The notation-object is not just chaotic. Like a drug with homeostatic goals, it also carries protocols:

  • It modulates surrounding sonic material.

  • It may suppress or amplify particular performer gestures.

  • It demands discipline and dosage in its realization.

In this way, each notation-object acts like a pharmaceutical mechanism: releasing something into the system and simultaneously trying to regulate its systemic integration.

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“...and healing friction.”

Healing and friction are intentionally paradoxical terms here:

• Healing suggests restoration, soothing, recalibration.

• Friction suggests abrasion, conflict, tension.

This concept draws directly from the dialectics found in:

• Acupuncture (where friction triggers recalibration),

• Psychoanalysis (where healing arises through resistance),

• And even experimental music, where destabilization is used to reconfigure perception.

In this model:

• Friction is not an obstacle but the mechanism of healing.

• The performer must engage with the dissonance, misalignment, and tension embedded in the circle-object in order to fulfill the work’s purpose.

• The healing, therefore, is not sonic per se, but performative and relational: it occurs through transduction, embodied decoding, and interpretive struggle.

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In Summary:

The statement suggests that in this notational paradigm, each notation-object:

• Is not symbolic but active—a site of meaning production, not just representation.

• Holds within it the properties of a pharmaceutical agent—structured, targeted, timed, and transformative.

• Engages the performer as a clinician and patient, requiring enactment through discipline, absorption, and calibration.

• Demands from sound the same rigor as a drug demands from the body—interpretation must be careful, contextual, and ethical.

• Provides not clarity but productive conflict, which, like therapy, offers resolution through engagement with disorder, not the avoidance of it.

It is, in short, a semiotic medicine cabinet for the performative discourse.

These Scores Do Not Ask to be Played. They Ask to be Reckoned With.

 

Mental Mechanics: The Performer as Disrupted Executor

My notational strategy—placing signs within, under, next to, and inside one another—functions as a dysfunctional transmission. What results is a kind of mechanical metaphor for the failure of seamless communication. The performer is rendered a subjective engine, working through layers of visual obfuscation, symbolic misdirection, and embodied presence.

This disjunction is key: The scores operate on a logic of material compatibility, not performative comfort. The signs, images, textures, and figures  used are relationally coherent within the architecture of the score itself—but may resist translation into performative gesture. This is a radical proposition: that the score-machine exists not to be executed, but to be inhabited, like one of Roussel’s linguistic devices or Picabia’s eroticized camshafts.

From Notation to Imagination Machine

In this framework, the score becomes a new kind of imagination machine, one in which the laws of musical grammar have been bent to accommodate psychological interference, bodily proximity, and material seduction. This is not notation for performance—it is notation as experience, notation as artifact, notation as site of metaphysical experimentation.

Much like Duchamp’s bachelor machine, the scores embody a tension between desire and delay, between symbolic motion and erotic failure. They perform not just as texts to be read or sounds to be made, but as complexes of action, image, and concept. The machine no longer produces—it suggests, interrupts, withholds.

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Toward a New Poetics of Notation

In this work, we see a revival—not of function—but of metaphysical invention. The score becomes not a vessel but a mechanism of contradiction. A chamber of relations. A surface of layered symbolic interference. Like Roussel’s instruments, it is full of language disguised as device; like Duchamp’s glass, it is full of ghosted motion and deferred consummation. And like Picabia’s drawings, it is irreverent, recursive, and iconoclastic.

These scores do not ask to be played. They ask to be reckoned with. To be understood not through the hands, but through the eyes, the skin, the resistance of thought to sound. In this, they are notational descendants of a long lineage of impossible machines—machines that seduce not with their efficiency, but with their refusal to function on anyone’s terms but their own.

Musical Notation as Machine-Skin: Human Modeling and Photographic Intervention

A RADIANT CARNIVAL OF ASSEMBLED NARRATIVES for Piano:

15 Pages. 22” X 17”; 55.9 X 43.2 cm.

Inks, Adhesive Tapes, Sulfolane, N-Methyl-2-Pyrrolidone (NMP), Hexamethylphosphoramide (HMPA), Nitrobenzen, Tetraglyme on Canson Infinity Velin Museum Rag

Edition of 8 with 2 APs

The use of human modeling within scores—carefully photographed, posed, and embedded—intervenes upon the expected abstract neutrality of music notation. The body becomes an axis of referential instability. This is not simply figurative illustration, but an infiltration of corporeal presence into an otherwise regulated system. Much like Roussel’s machines that performed non-functional rituals, or Duchamp’s non-erotic eroticisms, these figures are not emblems of sensuality—they are data points in a mechanical ballet of disjunction.

Photographic realism, when collaged into score-space, recalls Picabia’s mechanical diagrams: found, borrowed, repurposed, stripped of original use-value and repositioned within an invented context. The score ceases to be a system for encoding temporal sound and becomes instead a tableau of embedded forces—optical, haptic, symbolic. The system collapses figure and function, performing a self-referential machinic theater.

Chromatocellular Ataxia for Trumpet

 

Chromatocellular Ataxia for Trumpet

2025

Bil Smith Composer

Broke and Broken Cogito

 

Broke and Broken Cogito

2024

40” X 30”; 101.6 X 76.2 cm

Ink, Graphite Pen, Charcoal, Ash, Color Ink on C-Print

Edition of 5 with 2 APs

Morphotism: A Treatise on Form, Drift, and the Aesthetics of Compositional Transformation

Morphotism: A Treatise on Form, Drift, and the Aesthetics of Transformation

Morphotism is not a style, but a sustained inquiry into the behavior of form. It is a practice grounded in the instability of visual identity and the plasticity of image matter, wherein a single origin-image becomes the site of exhaustive transformation — not to discover a truth within it, but to exhaust its outer limits through procedural reworking.

Morphotism is the aesthetics of drift, a commitment to perpetual reformation, where each iteration reflects not a deviation, but an articulation — a contour of thought expressed through the malleability of visual matter.

Ontology of the Image

At its core, Morphotism presupposes that no image is fixed. An image is not a representation; it is a territory, a terrain through which light, memory, and perception are routed. Under Morphotism, an image is treated not as a singular object but as a morphological condition — a field in flux.

This condition is subject to:

• Chromatic reconstitution (alterations in tone and color profile)
• Spatial displacements (rotations, croppings, or refocalizations)
• Juxtapositional transgressions (overlay, mirroring, reversal)
• Textural remediations (filters, grain, clarity, distortion)

Thus, the image becomes a body in continuous self-reconfiguration — a visual organism.

Methodology

Morphotism manifests as a serial discipline, producing sets or suites of images. Each is derived from one visual source, yet rendered distinct by methodical variation. These variations are not ornamental but ontological recalibrations — each version asserts a slightly different worldview, a marginally shifted claim about the original’s identity.

This may take form in:

• A 64-page sequence where each page is a chromatic evolution of the same photograph
• A diptych wherein the original and the reoriented inhabit tension
• A grid series in which slight morphological deviations amplify across the composition
• A photobook where sequencing is the aesthetic engine, rather than singular capture

Morphotism is not repetition. It is iterative excess — a maximalist logic applied to minimalist sources.

Philosophical Grounding

Morphotism is aligned with post-structuralist thought, particularly where meaning is deferred, unstable, or constructed through difference. It owes debt to:

• Jacques Derrida’s différance (the endless deferral of fixed meaning)
• Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge (visual artifacts as contingent, historical)
• Gilles Deleuze’s difference and repetition (multiplicity as generative force)

Where modernism sought the essential image, Morphotism seeks the relational image — its meaning always shaped by its neighbors, its position in sequence, its treatment history.

Anti-Finality

A key tenet of Morphotism is resistance to closure. The series is never truly complete. Even the most exhaustive treatment retains within it the ghost of further transformation. The final form is provisional — an aesthetic pause rather than a conclusion.

This aligns Morphotism with a generative ethos, one that encourages reproduction, reinterpretation, and even computational continuation. It is a visual strategy built not for iconicity, but for intellectual promiscuity — a willingness to be shaped anew.

Applications and Future Inquiry

While rooted in the photographic, Morphotism can be expanded into:

• Generative AI image sequences
• Printmaking re-inkings of a single plate
• Video frames treated as morphic intervals
• Archival reinterpretation (where existing images are subjected to morphotic recovery)

In this sense, Morphotism is medium-agnostic — it is not bound by material, only by method and intent.

To practice Morphotism is to engage in material introspection — not of the self, but of the image itself. It is to treat form not as an endpoint, but as a relay of becoming. Each variation is not a derivative, but an instantiation. Each shift, a question.

Morphotism does not ask, “What is the image?”

It asks, “How far can an image be re-formed before it loses its name?”

And in that question, it finds its power.

Morphotism and the Musical Score

If Morphotism treats the image as a mutable territory, then the musical score becomes its acoustic analogue: a field of structured potential, awaiting both interpretation and transformation.

In this frame, the musical score is not a static artifact. It is a visual syntax of sound, subject to the same morphotic processes as a photographic image — chromatically, spatially, and temporally mutable. Under Morphotism, a score is no longer the authoritative origin of a sonic event, but a generative artifact, open to deviation, drift, and serial manipulation.

The Morphotized Score: Visual and Sonic Layers

Each iteration of the score — each “page” in a series — represents a treatment, not a revision. These treatments may include:

• Graphic reorientation: rotation, inversion, mirroring of staves, noteheads, or articulations
• Color treatment: assigning chromatic shifts to different rhythmic cells, registers, or dynamics (implying emotional timbre)
• Notational erosion: removing elements to introduce silence, openness, or interpretive ambiguity
• Spatial distortion: stretching, compressing, or reorganizing notation to reimagine rhythmic or harmonic structures
• Image-score hybridization: incorporating photographs, diagrams, or marks that abstract or overlay traditional notation

Thus, the score becomes a morphotic field, where each page is not a repetition, but a divergent instance — a sonic potential with altered genetic instructions.

Morphotism as a Notational Philosophy

Unlike traditional variation form in music (theme & variations), Morphotism does not begin with a theme but with a form-substrate. That is: the score as a visual system of instruction, subject to visual and procedural subversion.

The question is not: How do I vary this melody?

But: What happens to this score when I re-encode its grammar?

It is a philosophy of notation as mutable language, inviting performers, readers, and listeners into a field of interpretive instability.

Precedents and Philosophical Kinships

Morphotism finds resonance in:

• Brian Ferneyhough’s notational density, where legibility approaches visual abstraction
• Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, which uses graphic notation to open sonic possibility
• Jani Christou’s Epicycle and Anestis Logothetis’ symbolic systems
• John Cage’s Fontana Mix and *Atlas Eclipticalis, where form is mapped to celestial or chance-based systems
• The tradition of eye music, where visual elements of scores (e.g., Baude Cordier’s heart-shaped notation) imply interpretive framing

But Morphotism departs from these by committing to seriality — a sequence of shifting forms from a single origin, as in photography.

The Performance of Morphotism

A morphotic score is not meant to be mastered, but encountered. Each page becomes a new ecology of sound, interpreted not in isolation but in relation to its sequence.

The performer becomes a translator of transformations, enacting drift across the series:

• One page may sound formal and metered
• The next: amorphous and gestural
• Another: sparse, barely legible — a map of silence

The score unfolds as a temporal polyptych, where the audience witnesses not a theme, but a process, not a piece, but a becoming.

Toward a Morphotic Compositional Practice

To compose morphotically is to:

• Begin with a fixed visual-musical object
• Subject it to rule-based transformations
• Sequence the results into a processual scorebook
• Accept that no singular version is the “work”, but that the trajectory of change is the work

This opens the score to curation, performance variation, and perpetual reinvention — echoing the logic of the image-series in visual Morphotism.

The Score as Morphotic Archive

In Morphotism, the musical score becomes an archive of its own reformation. Each page is an index of a choice, a deviation, a reframing. Like the image set, the score sequence reveals not a singular vision, but a landscape of near-versions — a speculative cartography of sound.

Just as the eye follows the photographic drift, the ear begins to sense a sonic morphology — a vibration not of melody alone, but of notation’s becoming.

The result is not a “piece” but a score-object that maps the space between intention and mutation.

Equative Tablature

 

The Confluence of Radical Innovation and Artistic Aesthetics: How the AACM, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Visionary Artists Shape My Compositional Futurisms

 

The Confluence of Radical Innovation and Artistic Aesthetics: How the AACM, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Visionary Artists Shape My Compositional Futurisms

By Bil Smith

Throughout my career as a composer, I have continuously sought to break free from the traditional confines of classical music. In my explorations, I have found myself deeply influenced by the radical innovation of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and the pioneering performances of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Their dynamism, characterized by unrestricted improvisation and artistic freedom, has fundamentally reshaped how 

I think about composition and performance. This influence is not just limited to the music itself; it extends into the visual aesthetics of artists such as Tacita Dean and Hanne Darboven, whose conceptual art and systems-based structures have inspired new ways of conceptualizing a musical score as an immersive, performative event.

The AACM and The Art Ensemble of Chicago: A Legacy of Radical Innovation

The AACM and the Art Ensemble of Chicago have long been at the forefront of avant-garde music. Emerging in the 1960s, the AACM’s mission was not just to innovate through free jazz but to create an entirely new musical language—one that was dynamic, unpredictable, and, above all, freedom-driven. The Art Ensemble of Chicago, as one of the most celebrated ensembles within this tradition, took these ideals to new heights. Their performances were characterized by fluidity, spontaneity, and an embrace of improvisation that blurred the lines between composition and performance.

This approach directly challenged traditional Western music, which typically adhered to fixed structures and predictable paths. Instead, the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s performances were more akin to living organisms, constantly evolving in real-time. The dynamic nature of their music opened up new possibilities for musical expression, where individual voices were allowed to blend, contradict, and reconfigure into ever-changing soundscapes.

The Influence of Tacita Dean and Hanne Darboven: Time, Structure, and Visual Aesthetics

While the AACM and Art Ensemble of Chicago expanded the possibilities of sound, the work of artists like Tacita Dean and Hanne Darboven has greatly influenced my approach to the visual and structural elements of my compositions. Their conceptual art practices—rooted in time-based narratives, systems thinking, and visual abstraction—have prompted me to reconsider how musical time and visual space can intersect.

Tacita Dean’s films, particularly her explorations of analog film, time, and the ephemeral nature of the medium, have had a profound impact on my conception of how time can be manipulated in a musical context. Dean’s use of film as a time-based medium reflects an understanding of time not as a linear progression but as something more fluid and perceptual. Similarly, I began to explore ways in which the time of the performance could be represented visually, rather than as a sequence of notes tied to a traditional timeline.

In my future works, I envision scores that evolve in real-time, where visual elements such as film projections or interactive displays dictate the tempo, dynamics, and phrasing of the music. The score itself would become a collaborative partner in the performance, where the visualizations of the score—whether through projected film clips, abstract shapes, or dynamic patterns—would serve as a guide to the performer, directing and interacting with their musical interpretation.

Hanne Darboven’s numerical systems and grid-based compositions also provided fertile ground for my exploration of how structured visualizations can influence the performance of a piece. Darboven’s work is meticulous in its use of repetition and counting systems, creating a visual and conceptual framework that governs how the work is perceived over time. This approach inspired me to incorporate systematic structures into my compositions, where the score itself becomes not just a collection of notes but a system of organizing sound.

In the future, I see musical scores transforming into visual documents that integrate both musical notation and abstract representations. These representations could be in the form of graphs, mathematical symbols, or geometric grids that guide the performer’s movements in time and space. The performer would be asked not only to interpret the music but to interact with the visual systems that accompany it, creating a dynamic performance that is both musically and visually innovative.

Hypothetical Scenarios for the Future Score as a Performative Event

The confluence of the AACM’s improvisational heights, the time-based aesthetics of Tacita Dean, and the structural experimentation of Hanne Darboven opens the door to a new kind of musical performance—one where the score becomes a living entity, no longer bound to the page, but instead emerging and transforming during the performance.

Scenario 1: The Score as a Time-Based Visual Map

In this scenario, the score would no longer be a series of static symbols on a page but instead an interactive visual map that evolves throughout the performance. The musicians would follow the score, which is displayed as a dynamic projection in real time. This projection could include film fragments from Tacita Dean’s works, which represent moments of time that correspond to different sections of the composition.

As the musicians play, the visuals would change in response to their movements and musical choices, creating a synesthetic experience where the sound and visual elements are inseparable. The improvisatory nature of the AACM would shine through as musicians use the changing visual cues to navigate the piece. In this future score, the boundaries between composer, performer, and audience would become blurred, as all participants are invited into an experiential exchange where time, sound, and vision are constantly reshaped.

Scenario 2: The Systematic Score as Spatial Structure

Taking inspiration from Hanne Darboven’s use of counting systems and geometric patterns, imagine a future scenario in which the musical score is constructed as a spatial structure in the performance space. Walls of sound, represented by physical grids or projected patterns, would surround the performers, dictating their movements and interaction. The musicians would not simply read a static score but would be guided by visual cues that represent the temporal flow of the composition.

For instance, the performers might see abstract geometric shapes shift in real time, pushing them to adapt their playing in response to the changing visual landscape. The interaction between sound, space, and motion would turn the performance into a living organism, where both the music and its visual representation are constantly in flux..

A New Era of Performative Scores

The future of music, as I see it, is not one confined to traditional notation but one that embraces a multi-sensory, performative score—one that is dictated not only by sound but by the visualizations that accompany it. Inspired by the radical innovations of the AACM, the artistic exploration of Tacita Dean, and the structural systems of Hanne Darboven, I believe the musical score can evolve into a performative event that bridges the gap between music and visual art, composition and improvisation.

As this new era unfolds, the score will no longer just be a static blueprint for sound but a living document that interacts with the performers and audience, creating a shared, evolving experience. The possibilities are limitless, and I am excited to continue pushing the boundaries of how music is not only composed but experienced in this exciting future.