In fact, I invite you to join me on this ongoing, collaborative project that embraces both the nuance of individual artistic minds and the temporality of sound art. All of the material I used to create this musical piece here is available for anyone who wants to re-work it. That can be as simple as adding a track or as complicated as changing it entirely. Once finished and submitted, your work overwrites mine and becomes the new subject for alteration. The only stipulation for what you can do is that it must be hostable on my website. When a participant uploads a project, the timer at the top of this page resets. If the countdown reaches zero, this page is deleted and the project is dead. 

After reading the Oxford Handbook on Music Psychology, I became interested in the idea that all sounds heard, from birth on, shape musical expectation and preferences. I wanted to create a project that highlighted this dynamic; To Preserve This, It Must Change is just that.

I conceive of the log of all sounds heard, whether remembered or not, as sonic experiences. Regardless of one’s mental or physiological response to these sonic experiences, they act as a precursor to the way your brain manages audio stimuli in the present. What interested me the most was how a musician’s sonic experiences shape their musical mind, which in turn shapes the music that they create. The music they create becomes a single sonic experience as part of a large and diverse body of sonic experiences, unique to each individual, which in turn shapes their musical mind, and thus the music that they create.

As both an experiment and a celebration of this process, I’ve started To Preserve This, It Must Change. All the materials I used to create the work presented here are available for download. For those that choose to participate, they can re-create the work in any way they like as long as what was downloaded is the starting point. This can be audio, midi, form, compositional approach, musical material, instruments, cross disciplines, etc. They can add, subtract, change; anything to make it their own.

Upon re-upload, their new work will overwrite the original one and become the next available download for future participants. In that manner, the work is re-iterated and the individuality of each musician is imprinted on the project.

This project will run as long as there is participation. If 3 weeks pass without any activity, I delete this page, and the project is brought to an end.

If you would like to participate on this project, click the link below for detailed instructions.