WHAT MUSIC IS

A show for orchestra and animations (2025)

A book co-written by a composer, neuroscientist, and astronomer (2026)

A website, podcast, and arts in education campaign (2027)

What Music Is reveals music’s profound role in our collective well-being. It explains why every human culture makes music, what its true purpose is in human life, and how we can enhance its incredible psychological powers for individual and civic wellness.

The centerpiece to this global campaign is the 80-minute performance with full orchestra, speaker, and exquisitely timed projections. Audiences are taken on a multisensory journey through the mysterious ubiquity of harmonic phenomena. The incredible preponderance of harmonics reveal that the universe is seeking consonance with itself over time via the principle of least effort. Its penchant for consonance can be seen directly in today’s structure of our solar system, and as far back as the early stages after the Big Bang. The universe’s tendency for ‘resonance capture’ along the nodes of the harmonic series places human music in context with all of nature.

The final missing link involves how the human brain processes music. We finally understand that our experience of the world is the sum of all our mental priors: what we expect to happen based on previous experiences. Exposure to culture develops our expectations, leading to ‘preferences.’ We mistake our familiar recognition of experiences for preference, when in fact the pleasure we derive from familiarity is simply our brains doing less work. Incredibly, the recognition of familiarity is also an example of the principle of least effort. It is easier for us to like our favorite music, just as it is easier for the moons of Jupiter to lock into harmonic relationships with each other. This can now be cross-referenced and proven by the burgeoning study of orbital resonance in astronomy. Resonance shows that it is simply easier to get along.

Our project also addresses commonly misunderstood similarities in scale diversity around the world. The rules that govern musical harmony in all major cultures are derived from the natural laws of physics. The Harmonic Law appears as a mathematical series – somewhat like the Fibonacci sequence – across a shocking variety of fields: astronomy, linguistics, biology, string theory, and more. These fields have never been cross-referenced for the public, and the implications are astounding. Our singular multidisciplinary experience reveals the Harmonic Law coursing through our entire reality, creating surprising consonances that reveal a little-understood feature of our universe: entrainment – the intelligent ‘synching up’ of adjacent oscillations.

 We explain this in a way that everyone – absolutely everyone – can understand. We inspire awe and wonder in our audience, and catalyze further reading and research that support the critical role that the arts play in our social infrastructure.

Through our deep look at musical phenomena, we see how surprising states of equilibrium are possible in a chaotic universe. Some are obvious while others await future research to establish just why an entropic world finds way stations of simplicity. However this resembles the relationship of consonance and dissonance, these emergent phenomena are not music.  But human music, with its roots in the harmonic nodes that stabilize the universe, is the sound of the universe seeking stability with itself.

The show is written and performed by Bill Barclay with animations by Shawn Feeney

The book is co-written by Barclay, neuroscientist Dr. Lukas Volz (Cologne, German), and astrophysicist Dr. Matteo Cantiello (Princeton)