The Primacy of Musical Intent

By Ezra Sandzer-Bell

Sound and music are not the same thing. One is primal, the other intentional. The intelligence that arranges organic audio signals into
discreet musical events is the same intelligence that a sorcerer calls Intent.

To understand magic, we need look no further than our favorite piece of music; it is a supreme act of magickal Will that transmutes raw signal into listenable and effective Song. We imagine the psychotic yelps of a teenager at their favorite band’s concert, their bodies coerced into moving by the rhythm of a beat, and the tremendous amount of money (energy) which successful musicians harvest at the end of each performance.

Of course, there are a number of intermediary factors that contribute to the success of a musical sorcerer. There is too much psychic noise in the sphere of collective human thought to affect the mundane spheres of consciousness through musical thought alone. Musicians sing, play instruments, and program audio loops as a means of activating their intent and willfully manipulating their environment.

Academic music theory focuses on traditional structures of audio manipulation. There are a number of word games that hint at the method by which this traditional harmonic form was derived.

TONES are audio signals without harmonic pitch-values.
NOTES are audio signals with specific harmonic pitch values.
TONES are free from any fixed tonal system until they are turned to
STONE, which is to say that they become hard and fixed, at which point
tonal harmony recognizes the tones as specific NOTES.

The punch line of this Joke: Note-consciousness is consistent and measurable, like the Perfect Ashlar of stonemasons.

Tone Color Alchemists embrace note-consciousness as a way of exploring the way in which we have been and are being manipulated by audiomancers. By entering all the way into the control system, we become free of it. We become fully conscious of the audio techniques used to control us, so that we are no longer enslaved by them.

Verbal language and musical language cooperate at the Tone Color Alchemy forum to provoke a thorough investigation of the True nature of Musical Intent.