PSYCHOLOGICAL STATES: FOUR BOOKS OF THE INNER LIFE
Psychological States is an exploration of the human interior. Across four books and thirty-six compositions, the project explores different regions of the inner life. Rather than simply illustrating emotions, each piece asks what the mind actually does while inhabiting a state—anticipating, remembering, resisting, fixating, wandering, doubting, accepting—and allows that psychological behavior to shape the music itself.
THE PROCESS
Each work began with the psychological state itself rather than with a genre, instrument, or conventional musical form. The state’s underlying mechanism was translated into musical behavior—so frustration encounters resistance, obsession progressively narrows the field, recognition reorganizes what has already been heard, and acceptance allows unresolved material to remain without continuing to fight it.
The music was created through a human-directed AI process in which psychological truth and musical integrity took priority over accessibility when necessary. Each state was allowed to develop its own sonic identity, which is why the 36 works can differ radically in instrumentation, structure, density, tuning, production, and the use of wordless voice while still belonging to the same larger cycle.
BOOK I — THE OPENING WITHIN
The first book begins with the mind leaning toward what has not yet happened and moves through curiosity, contradiction, play, resistance, reverie, recognition, loneliness, and equanimity. It is an opening of the interior world: the discovery that consciousness contains far more variety, tension, and possibility than first appears.
BOOK II — THE GRAVITY OF DESIRE
This book explores the forces that draw attention toward something—wonder, fascination, suspicion, memory, obsession, relief, awe, self-consciousness, and resolve. Desire here is broader than wanting; it is the psychological gravity created whenever something captures us, pulls us backward, enlarges us, or asks us to choose a direction.
BOOK III — THE UNSTABLE REAL
Here the reliability of perception, memory, attention, and time begins to shift. Déjà vu, hope, confusion, flow, cognitive overload, solitude, dread, dreaming, and yearning create a world in which reality is not necessarily broken, but no longer behaves quite as expected.
BOOK IV — THE WEIGHT OF BEING
The final book enters some of the cycle’s most difficult terrain: disorientation, boredom, uncertainty, trance, hypervigilance, helplessness, rumination, alienation, and finally acceptance. It does not conclude by defeating difficulty; it ends by asking what happens when reality may remain imperfect, but our relationship to it changes.