Surfing the Sonic Sky's video: Surfing The Sonic Sky

9 years ago I put this music doc up on Vimeo and am just now getting around to posting in here on Youtube as well. This film sheds light on what happens when a limited system of thought is suddenly placed within a larger context. In such a case new ideas and materials are instantly born. Those who have explored the work Ervin Wilson find it easy to feel but very difficult to describe what he does. That is why we made this film. If you saw him at his desk, making one of his geometric drawings, you would have no idea that he is actually creating and mapping clusters of new musical frequencies and note relationships. Out of the chaotic expanse we call the "sound spectrum", Wilson found a way to carve out meaningful and useful constellations of pitch. His work has expanded the vocabulary of musical pitch elements in the same way quantum physicists have expanded the lexicon of concepts about matter, perception and existence itself. If you look at the universe as an infinite set of parallel universes, Ervin Wilson has shown us the same is true for musical pitch systems. The twelve notes on the piano that make up the entire pitch vocabulary of contemporary Western culture is not only one of many historical pitch sets coexisting on this planet, but is merely one of an infinite number of stable tone universes, yet to be explored. And because his subject matter is music, unlike physics or astronomy, we can mock up one of these new tone worlds quickly and experience it directly. As a composer I feel Wilson's discoveries/inventions set the stage for the next several centuries of music in a way even the most trained musicians may not have foreseen. The phrase, "transcendent tonality" describes this vast expanse of all possible pitch systems and relationships For further videos, music files, and discussions about Wilson's influence go to: www.thesonicsky.com