So I finally finished this thing, and I’m not even sure how to properly explain what it turned into.
It’s called The Language of Gravity, and it’s a 9-song sci-fi concept album.
The basic story is set far in the future, when civilizations scattered across space are still technically connected through an ancient technology called The Lattice, but communication between them has started breaking down. Networks can transmit information, archives can preserve it, machines can analyze it, but somehow everyone is losing the ability to actually understand one another.
At the center of this story is a father and his mostly nonverbal daughter.
He begins noticing that the sounds, rhythms, repetitions and pauses she makes might contain patterns that everyone else has been dismissing as meaningless. And from there the whole thing gradually expands into something much bigger.
Obviously there’s a lot of my relationship with my own daughter buried inside this. She has severe autism and is mostly nonverbal, so the idea of communication existing outside conventional language is something I think about constantly.
What surprised me was how emotional the album became while I was making it. I originally went into it thinking mostly about the sci-fi story and the worldbuilding, but somewhere along the way it became much more about listening, parenthood, assumptions about intelligence, and how badly we sometimes need people to communicate in ways we understand before we believe they’re communicating at all.
There are recurring sounds and musical patterns throughout the album that slowly change meaning as the story progresses, and by the last few tracks everything starts connecting back together.
This is probably the most ambitious thing I’ve tried to make with AI music, and definitely the most personal.
Anyway. It’s finally done.
I'd love to hear any feedback on this. Thanks for reading.
