Industrial Society and Its Future for percussion quartet and electronics

Abstract

Industrial Society and Its Future is an electroacoustic composition for percussion quartet and electronics. The piece centers around the worldview and actions of Theodore Kaczynski, an American man who mailed dozens of hand-made bombs, killing three and injuring 23 others. These bombings were an act of revenge against “the industrial-technological system”, as well as a means to gain leverage towards the publication of his manifesto, from which my composition gets its name. The work has an acoustic component and several electronic components. The acoustic component is a percussion quartet to be performed live. The primarily electronic component is percussion samples I recorded myself. Other electronic components used are voice-over of quotes from the titular text rendered using AI, recordings of my own voice, and randomly generated MIDI sounds. These sounds are processed to varying degrees, most to the point of unrecognizability. After mixing and balancing my sounds, I rendered my results as waveform files to be triggered at specific times in performance using a Max/MSP patch. These components combine to create a dystopian, oppressive soundscape, exploring the ways Kaczynski’s ideas, worldview, and actions can be expressed through music. The work is not a critique, but rather an exploration of Kaczynski’s ideas in the wake of modern developments of technology, such as the reorganization of society prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the advancement of artificial intelligence. Said technological developments have contributed to a resurgence of interest in Kaczynski’s beliefs, and this piece contributes to the ongoing conversation about the tenuousness of the global technological order.