Fear_of_Distraction (FoD) is the result of overthree years of active composition; a reflection on
ongoing brain therapies, AI musical agent
trainings, Complex Tonality (cTonal music) andexperiments into intra-hemispheral (binaural)
entrainment techniques in musical composition.
by Kent Clelland, aka LapCore

Fear_of_D[isTraction] represents a cancerous
reality in which the human organism is actively
battling the forces of destruction and withadvancing velocity inventing new means to battle
these cancers. A fever dream during a brainscan,reality becomes dystopian when one can no longer
trust the information arriving at the brain.

Technique
A forty-five minute composition in 7 treatments,
FoD builds upon the following techniques:• polymetrics• cTonality• binaural entrainment• feedback enhanced AI phrase improvisation
polymetricism blurs the human ability to measuretime to a degree of confidence, allowing forindividuals to experience the same event withdisparate understandings of what they heard. This
contributes to the breakdown of the humanorganisms’ ability to act as whole. A reality inwhich one is no longer able to measure (understand)the world around them: distraction.
cTonality undermines the very tradition of music as
we have come to know it. Only a century ago the‘modern’ composers began exploring harmonies
considered inconsonant or un-pretty and called this“aTonality.” The fact is that both tonal andatonal musics (as we think of them today) are built
from sound generation concepts which have notchanged in thousands of years. The plucked (orbowed) string, vibrating reed, blown pipe, thestruck slab, these original tone generators arewhat I call the Urgestalt Tone Generators (UTG’s).
In computer music, UTGs include sine wave (pipemodels), saw waves (phasor model), and pulse waves(vibrating reed) PLUS all of the modulations andmutations thereof (Frequency and Amplitude
Modulation, Width Modulation, Delay Line
Modulation, saturation, distortion etc etc). cTonalmusic rejects the idea of composing directly with
UTG’s and introduces new synthesis techniques wheretraditional waveforms can be heard as a byproductor side-effect. The sounds of the industrial
revolution [and thus capitalism!] are all sounds ofphysical moving things: wires/strings, metal slabs,
rolling wheels, in short: UTG’s. The sounds of thesilicon revolution [and thus information age!] aremagnetic resonance, computer control signals,
electron waterfalls through transistor matrices.
These sounds contain tonality, but in a complex
manner and often as a byproduct, thus cTonal.
Binaural entrainment can happen when a stereo
signal is presented to the human ears discretely:with the left ear receiving different sounds than
the right ear, the result is that both hemispheresof the brain are required to collaborate in orderto make sense of the two discrete signals. This
collaboration forms a kind of synchronization
between the two brain hemispheres, encouraging anotherwise absent free flow of information (stimuli)
which encourages imagination, auditory, andillusory hallucinations, or in some cases seizures.
Composing with binaural synthesis opens thepossibility to ‘prepare’ the listeners’ brain for
impregnating raw ideas.
Artificial Intelligence musical agents are nothing
new, in fact becoming more and more generally
accepted by the music industry en masse. Training
an agent as an improvisation partner for human/machine collaboration has been a project I havebeen working on since my California phase whendeveloping with the Hierarchical MusicSpecification Language (HMSL). My latest
development is an ensemble of 9 musical agents all
linked via a common clock and feedback source.
FoD is architected around 7 independent
improvisations, each one a training session for amusical agent. All training sessions occurred at112 BPM, so there can be a (blurred) sense ofcontinuous clock time throughout the 45 minutecomposition.

Search for the Higher Dimension of Music
Underlying the techniques outlined above is thepervasive hope of Emergence Theory. The
parallelism of the various metrics, tonalities, andphrase agents represent a quasi-crystalline
projection of higher dimensional music which we areunable to perceive under the human condition.

About the name… Fear_of_Distraction
When people are informed of my condition (grade 3brain cancer) they often ask if I am afraid. Or
comment on how brave I am. Naturally I inquire what

they would be afraid of: generally it’s the ‘D’word. Upon intense meditation, the ‘D’ word I am
most afraid of is: DISTRACTION. Most humanindividuals do not actively (daily) think of their
expiration date and the inevitable (immeasurable)countdown. When one must confront the countdown,prioritize and qualify the time between now and theexpiration: the largest inconvenience is being
distracted from what matters (and surviving thedystopia until then).
What matters to me is to experience the higher
dimensional lattice of music and project it into
the human dimensions. With Fear_of_Distraction I
attempt to do just that.
__track listing__
01 Stuck Like a Magnet in Switzerland
02 Codependance
03 Microdose04 ExelonFTW
05 Amerecium
06 AxpoTattoo
07 3T[ 7:00][ 5:58][ 7:48][ 7:23][ 4:24][ 7:50][ 7:50]

total minutes:[48:08]©2020 Kenneth (Kent) Clelland, GEMA

Fear_of_Distraction is composed and performed using software
engineered by Kent Clelland and the W3rkH0f Verein for media

arts. N-Gon wave and Shuffle Noise algorithms are used courtesyof Dominik Chapman.
Fear_of[D]istraction highly leverages the sound design of Mike
Daliot’s work on the CARBON2 Reaktor Ensemble (NativeInstuments).Thank you,Mike for your expressively playable,andsound design of timbral depth, inspiring sequential research
into AI pattern development. FoD would not have been composed
without your sound design contributions to NI Reaktor