Music as Consciousness: Sound, Technology, and the Hidden Nature of Reality

Introduction

In the previous article, we discussed the recent work of Donald Hoffman and a paper titled “Scientists Discover a Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics” by Natalie Wolchover (2013). The paper describes the discovery of a geometrical form existing outside of space-time called the amplituhedron, which revolutionises the way we think about the world and ourselves. It suggests we live in a universe where the physical world is not fundamental, but emerges from a deeper, hidden reality. In this view, the world appears as a set of symbols that conceal the ultimate truth of reality. In other words, our physical reality is not as it seems, but emerges from a deeper hidden reality - an idea previously proposed by many ancient philosophies and religions, from Plato to Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism.

Based on these findings, Hoffman proposes a theory that the universe is an interface that enables relations between conscious agents (2014, p. 103), Conscious agents - which include you and me, animals, and birds - interact to create experiences that give rise to new conscious agents. For example, a love bond gives rise to a relationship, or a debate gives rise to new ideas and concepts. These emergent agents have “a life of their own” and affect the people and communities they encounter.

But what does this have to do with music?

From a musical perspective, musicians also collaborate to form new conscious agents, forming grooves, melodies, and facilitating altered states of transcendence, ecstasy, and euphoria. These new conscious forms that are brought into being and enable participation. This is made possible by musicians and their technological tools, which change from era to era and are pivotal to accessing new dimensions of experience.

Musicians and Their Tools

Traditionally, music technologies were acoustic instruments such as drums, rattles, sticks, and the voice. Modern advancements in music technology have led to new tools, including electronic synthesisers, digital computers, samplers, drum machines, and most recently, artificial intelligence (A.I.). Using these tools, musicians are able to explore new worlds or states of consciousness - what Hoffman would call “the hidden reality.” Exploring the deeper nature of reality through music technologies is something humans have been doing since time immemorial and continues today in many forms.

Historical Relations Between Humans and Technology

Humans have a deep curiosity for knowledge and development, which has led to countless religions, philosophies, secret societies, ritual practices, psychedelic medicines, and most recently, science - all aimed at exploring the hidden nature of reality and truth. Many of us yearn to know who we are, where we come from, and why we are here. While science is now the dominant method for exploring these questions, historically, music, meditation, and ritual were the primary ways our ancestors engaged this realm - and they remain relevant today.

Beginning with the ancient rituals of Indigenous and shamanic societies, music was used to commune with gods and traverse spirit worlds to gain knowledge and promote healing. With the emergence of science, electricity, and industry, music technologies have drastically changed, but our desire to continue exploring reality has not. The development of electronic and digital music systems marks a shift in how we pursue this exploration, using new tools that extend ancient ritual legacies rather than replace them.

The Evolution of Analogue and Digital Music Technologies in the West

The emergence of avant-garde electronic analogue technologies in the 1950s provided new tools for music composition. These included oscillators, filters, and modulators used to shape and position sounds in space. With these tools, composers created novel sounds, otherworldly textures, and complex rhythms. These sounds spearheaded a shift in consciousness, providing soundtracks for new conceptions of outer space and the cosmos, and foreshadowing a world in which humans and machines cooperate. This shift in collective consciousness also appeared across other art forms, such as visual art and film.

As with ancient rituals, music continues to be used to explore and expand human consciousness. Through the creation of novel sonic otherworlds, music engages the hidden, invisible, and latent, tapping into deep unconscious intuitions. By bringing these dimensions forward through music and the arts, it enables participation in new states of consciousness that influence future directions, attitudes, and innovations. While we may no longer invoke the same gods of old, we continue to bring forth hidden dimensions that provoke expansions of consciousness. The tools and approaches have changed, but the human impulse for exploration remains intact, with music technologies at the heart of consciousness evolution since pre-modern times.

1. Rituals and the Spirit World

Cultures across the globe have used music technologies to facilitate sacred experiences for millennia. Beginning with acoustic instruments, sound was used to evoke new forms of consciousness under the guise of gods or ancestors. In Indigenous and shamanic societies, music technologies aided communication between the physical and spirit worlds and were prepared for this role through ritual consecration, transforming instruments into sacred tools for trans-dimensional communion.

The drum is one such technology. Made of wood and animal hide, it reflects the reconstitution of nature into a tool for storytelling, entertainment, and sacred communion with the divine. In African and Latin American Indigenous cultures, drums were imbued with living spirit and assigned agency and power. During rituals, gods are evoked and directly experienced through possession, making the hidden world visible and allowing access to knowledge normally kept secret.

These cultural beliefs reflect a view of reality in which a hidden spirit realm directly impacts the physical world. Knowing how to access this realm was integral to survival, evolution, and collective healing. Such practices can be seen as precursors to modern psychology and music therapy. With the Enlightenment and scientific revolution of the 17th to 18th centuries, Western culture shifted toward a materialist understanding of the world. Rather than gods and spirits, attention turned toward atoms, quarks, and space-time. In parallel, music technologies emerged that enabled exploration of the primary elements of sound.

2. Analogue and Digital Electronics

The industrial revolution of the 18th–19th centuries introduced engines, motors, and urban noise that inspired new experimentation with sound. In 1914, Italian composer Luigi Russolo staged the first public “noise” concerts, building mechanical instruments that used noise itself as a sound source. This expanded prevailing ideas of what music could be.

At the same time, science offered a new way to understand sound - not merely as notes and intervals, but as waves, frequencies, and amplitudes. Oscillators isolated sound into fundamental sine waves, providing a new palette for sonic experimentation. Karl Stockhausen’s use of oscillators and tape machines in 1950s Germany revolutionised Western composition, expanding sonic possibilities beyond the limits of acoustic instruments.

Composers such as Pierre Schaeffer used tape machines to sample and loop environmental sounds, reframing music as recorded and manipulated reality. Tape orchestras soon emerged, extending collaboration between humans and machines. Like ancient ritual drums imbued with spirit, machines became autonomous co-creators, valued not only for technical capacity but for their ability to generate unexpected and evocative sounds.

The 1960s introduction of modular synthesisers by Bob Moog and Don Buchla made these tools commercially available, allowing musicians to work with sound at its most basic level. While science investigated atoms, music explored waves and frequencies. Electronic sequencers enabled rhythmic repetition, forming the foundation for drum machines such as the Roland 808 and 909, which proved pivotal to hip hop and dance music.

The Australian-made Fairlight (1979) integrated digital circuits, sampling, sequencing, synthesis, and visual interfaces into a single workstation. This marked a new era in digital music technology, leading to MIDI, DAWs, affordable synthesisers and samplers, and laptop-based production. These tools expanded creative practice by allowing musicians to link machines into increasingly complex systems.

The futuristic sounds produced by these technologies became central to films and art exploring the hidden dimensions of space and psyche, contributing to surrealism and science fiction. Otherworldly soundscapes enhanced visions of alien worlds, dystopian futures, and unrealised human potential, uncovering ideas buried within the unconscious and contributing to new forms of collective awareness.

A Spiritual Crossroad

Since the scientific revolution, efforts to remove superstition and religion from the cultural centre have brought us to a spiritual crossroads. Science, once committed to proving an objective material universe, is increasingly unable to uphold strict materialism. Instead, it confirms insights long held by ancient traditions - that the physical world may not be fundamental.

Music, once central to exploring hidden realms of experience, has been largely reduced to entertainment. In a worldview that treats matter as fundamental, music’s deeper role is diminished. Emerging science now suggests a paradigm shift: consciousness, not matter, may be fundamental. This reframes how we understand and use music, aligning more closely with ancient perspectives that treated sound as a trans-dimensional tool rather than mere sensory stimulation.

Hoffman and Conscious Realism

Donald Hoffman (2008, 2014) proposes a new framework for understanding reality. He suggests the age of materialism is ending, as science can no longer sustain its foundational assumptions. According to Hoffman (2014, p. 103), reality consists of conscious agents interacting within a virtual interface. There are no objective things, only objects of perception.

Hoffman (2008, p. 108) argues that brains do not create consciousness; rather, consciousness creates brains as simplified icons - tools that allow us to navigate reality without revealing its deeper structure. Conscious realism proposes that consciousness itself is fundamental: the “stuff” from which everything arises.

There is a reality beyond perception, Hoffman argues, but it is composed of dynamic systems of conscious agents rather than unconscious matter. Symbols simplify this complexity, much like a computer interface hides underlying code so the user can function without being overwhelmed.

The Merging of Science and Spirituality

The idea that the world is illusory is ancient, present in Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Indigenous belief systems, and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. These ideas are re-emerging at a time when religion has lost cultural authority and science is increasingly called upon to validate truths once accepted intuitively. As scientific inquiry deepens, we find ourselves rediscovering ancient knowledge through a modern lens - a genuine convergence of science and spirituality.

A similar shift is occurring in music. Traditionally used for spiritual and developmental purposes, music in modern society has lost much of this framing. Contemporary research by figures such as Daniel Levitin demonstrates music’s therapeutic effects, from alleviating Parkinson’s symptoms to reducing stress, pain, and anxiety. Research into entrainment further shows that humans are biologically attuned to rhythm and sound from birth.

These developments suggest that ancient intuitions about music were largely correct, even if articulated through different belief systems and languages. We now find ourselves at a moment where science is reaffirming music’s central role in a conscious universe.

As a musician, I propose that music has always served this function. However, as Western culture adopted a materialist worldview, we lost the conceptual framework needed to understand music’s deeper role. As we return to viewing reality through the lens of consciousness, we can reinvigorate our understanding of music. This is evident in how musicians themselves speak about and relate to music and performance technologies- often treating it as autonomous, with intention and agency, much as ancient cultures once did.

Examples

1. Musicians often “feel” their way through composition, describing music as wanting to move in certain directions. This intuitive language reflects the way music is treated as autonomous. Music psychologist Ernst Kurth (Hsu 1966, p.7, 9) referred to this as “psychic force,” suggesting that music carries its own momentum and agency.

2. At high levels of performance, music-making becomes an act of “getting out of the way,” of releasing the ego and allowing deeper consciousness to guide action. Scholars such as Sylvan (2002, p.46) describe these states through interviews with DJs and musicians who report experiences of flow and transcendence comparable to possession rituals.

3. Music technologies introduce randomness and surprise, allowing machines to shape composition through sonic accidents. Modular synthesisers, drum machines, and effects units are embraced for their unpredictability, and musicians often relinquish control to allow genuine co-creation to occur. This enables new conscious agents to arise.

4. Technology-based ensembles enable one or two musicians to produce the sound of an entire group, expanding creative capacity and redefining musicianship through human–machine collaboration. We develop meta-human experience.

5. Trance states in performance create feedback loops between musicians and audiences, producing shared energetic experiences. These states are no less powerful when mediated by machines, suggesting that technology can actively participate in some of the most meaningful human experiences. We co-create new states of consciousness.

Conclusion

The experiences of contemporary musicians closely mirror those of traditional societies. In both contexts, music is treated as an autonomous force with agency and transformative power. What differs are the belief systems used to explain these experiences.

Emerging science, including the work of Donald Hoffman, challenges materialist assumptions and invites a new synthesis of ancient and modern understanding. Music has always evolved alongside its tools, retaining its capacity to move, heal, and transform. Viewing music as a form of consciousness allows us to reclaim its deeper role - not merely as entertainment, but as a means of exploring reality, facilitating healing, and supporting spiritual development.

References

Hoffman, D. D. (2008) ‘Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem’, Mind and Matter, 6(1), pp. 87-121

Hoffman, D.D. (2014) ‘The Interface Theory of Perception: Objects of Consciousness’, Mind and Matter, 12(2), pp. 207–242.

Hsu, D.M., (1966). ‘Ernst Kurth and his concept of music as motion’. Theory, 10 Journal of Music (1), pp.2-17.

Sylvan, R., (2002). ‘Traces of the Spirit: The Religious Dimensions of Popular Music’. NYU Press, NY

Wolchover, N. (2013) ‘Scientists discover a jewel at the heart of quantum physics’, Wired, 11 December. Available at: https://www.wired.com/2013/12/amplituhedron-jewel-quantum-physics/