Hey! I Invented a New Musical Art Form

by Dan Shaw

What is a Vortex? I wanted to give people the experience of being in a Vortex, not just talk about it, as I have at VortexMaps.com. It's easy to demonstrate the geometric reinforcement of patterns of energy vortexes, using musical instruments. With these simple instructions you can try it yourself, and be among the very first to develop this new art form.

So I took eight chimes, and did the simplest thing I could think of. I gave seven volunteers a chime and mallet and we stood at the center of the room, back-to back. The "audience" stood in a circle around us.

I began by slowly walking and chiming from the center to the edge of the room, outside the ring of the audience. Then I walked back to the center, still chiming.

I then tapped the person across from me, and we each walked to the edge of the room and back chiming. This gave the audience the sense of their relationship to a "line" of sound-energy.
Next, three chimers walked out and back, forming a triangle of sound. We progressed in this way, adding a chime at each repetition, until there were eight chimes, forming an expanding and contracting octagon of sound.

The entire process took just a few minutes. The audience had an experience they had never had before, their relationship to geometric patterns of sound. The audience and volunteers all enjoyed it. Had we taken more time, we could easily have come up with an infinite number of variations, such as counter-rotating circles of chimes.

The volunteers were unrehearsed, so we used a random assemblage of an octave of chimes. A quite different effect could be achieved with continuous instruments, such as violins, instead of chimes, which are more percussive and intermittent. The audience, on the dance floor, may move among the instruments, become participants in creating a unique soundscape, instead of sitting in an audience, removed from the instruments, hearing more or less exactly what the rest of the audience hears.
The musical piece may be composed in complete synergy with a choreography of the physical movement of the instruments and musicians. One sound-healer called the new art form, "equivalent to the discovery of perspective in painting."

I invite you to contact me to let me know what you're doing and how we can work together.

Filmmaker -- Writer -- Speaker -- Business Support Services
Dan Shaw dot com