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Amir, let me give you another direction to consider.

A few days ago, I had a very interesting date. The woman was well developed intellectually and practiced various Eastern philosophical traditions. She acknowledged the presence of spontaneous insights and symbolic serendipity, and she recognized their importance. Then suddenly, the difference between her and me came to me with a certain ironic clarity.

She is a woman, and her primary psychological orientation to be recognizing patterns and creating circumstances within which she can navigate life successfully while acknowledging serendipity. I am a man, and my psychological orientation is to go into the world and reshape (and frequently to fuck it up) it according to how I feel it should function. For me, acknowledging serendipity is only the first step — just a knock on the door of reality. I am an engineer, and I approach it from a completely different perspective. I want to know where it comes from, what within me is responsible for it, what it represents, what it means, and, most importantly, how to integrate this serendipity with everything I know about the world. Learning is comparison, but only through learning can you, as a creative person, construct something meaningful in order to take advantage of what appears to be “unpredictable serendipity.”

Yes, it may sound as if I want to control serendipity. That control does not have to be narcissistic. When you water your plants or provide them with fertilizer, you are influencing their growth, and there is no negative stigma attached to that. It is about investing time and attention, and trying to understand how those subtle acts enter the subconscious and whether they have their own underlying mechanisms and reasons.

We attended an ecstatic dancing event where the organizers seemed to believe that intention could be established through the introduction of what I consider the ugliest form of techno music. I have an exceptionally low tolerance for this genre. Years ago, when I lived in the city and this music was played loudly during a gay parade, I forced myself to move to the suburbs simply to escape what felt like sonic aggression. But I stayed at this event not because of the music or the dancing — I stayed because of the woman, and I remained there for a prolonged period.

Then a strange kind of serendipity came to me. I suddenly felt as though I were a first-generation German born after World War II — it was the 1970s, and I was in West Berlin, in a decadent club filled with drugs, darkness, hopelessness, guilt, and meaningless music. I began to experience what I imagined the generation of Germans might have felt at that time: the pain of belonging to a once prosperous and industrious culture with extraordinary cultural roots, and then feeling complete detachment from it, along with a deep confusion about how to become proud of oneself again.

It goes without saying that I have never been to Germany through that period, and everything I felt was a product of imagination. I was naive enough to share this experience with the woman, and she understandably felt it was an insult to the event she had helped organize. But this story is not about the date.

The point is that a musical event — let us call it that, although I experienced it more as a form of sonic identity assault — triggered a state of consciousness in me. Simply acknowledging it was not enough. I began diving inward, trying to understand where it came from, how it related to other elements of my psyche, and most importantly, what mechanism in the sound produced this psychological response. In my engineering mind, I am convinced that if I can understand the mechanism, I can understand — and perhaps influence — the message. This investigation is what I have been pursuing over the last year, and it defines my current understanding of audio.

I have made many discoveries in this process. Unfortunately, communicating them using conventional audio language is almost impossible, because most of the technical vocabulary we use in audio has little direct relationship to the listener’s consciousness.

 I believe there is a great deal here to unpack for yourself, Amir.

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