You Know Its Hue

Try imagining a new sound. Like imagining new colors, shades, or hues, or new smells and tastes, it is difficult. It is only by experimenting and making prototypes that we can realize what the possibilities are.

Trying on new identities works the same way. We see ourselves as a set of possibilities but we keep the default, perhaps because of the way we are genetically built. But changing a style is a way to try out new possibilities and possibly create a new you ("hue").

This relates to the idea I had concerning music being more about sounds than it is about music itself. You can't deny that music is based on the construction of patterns, based on a pre-existing framework or system that we have been using for hundreds of years (the way it's genetically built). I think moving towards a more textural or sonic or ambient kind of music is actually kind of boring. I did ambient music for some time, and I still love it and weave it into my work, but I can't imagine doing that for my entire life. If you've ever had any experiences at any prior point in your life, a revisitation of that will probably emerge in the future. This is exactly what happened to me. And you can try it yourself: Replace anything you are doing now with something that you used to do and you used to enjoy. Many of us want to explore new territories, but very often we become nostalgic for the things that we used to do. And it stands to reason that this is happening because the pre-wiring is already there. I don't think you could completely get rid of the pre-wiring, but there may be a plasticity there that allows for just enough variation based on set personality types. Although some people might want to get rid of that wiring, and it is certainly a possibility that in the future we'll be able to rewire our brains and become different people. There will be no such thing as a consistent personality, and we will become other people.

I recall many years ago I had an experience while on public transportation where I saw someone that resembled someone that I knew, and they didn't acknowledge that I was there. And then I quickly realized that I didn't know this person but they looked exactly like someone that I knew.  This is how it will be in the future if we can rewire our brains at will, or by the will of others.  Obviously, this is a common trope in many works of fiction. But as I said before, the more we run these scenarios and works of fiction, they become works of non-fiction; they become reality. New technologies in the future will follow Zuckerberg's philosophy that social media is a way to find the authentic Self.

I think it has tremendous promise is a form of therapy, such as imagining the person that you really want to be, and becoming that person, or simply creating characters in works of fiction, or voices in songs. There have always been ways of doing this, with style, fashion, hairstyles and so on--and to some degree this works, but it has to be done consistently. We do this now as a form of self-portraiture or taking selfies as a way to experiment with looks. I find that I can also do this with music, where I go into different sonic areas and textures. A large part of my musical upbringing was in prog bands, and I still dip back into that. There's this whole idea in society that one has to grow up and use one style throughout their life. If you carry this over into your music, you're kind of trapped into that box, where you can't experiment with any other looks ("yous"/hues).  You can always come back to the foundations. 

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I recommend the new David Eagleman book, Livewired which partly inspired my thinking as to how identity is about "wiring", and could be re-wired.