Pareidolia

Commissioned by the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra

Year composed: 2022

Duration: 10’

We all have the ability to perceive familiarity in nebulous atmospheres. We can identify shapes in cloud formations and find patterns in lottery numbers or multiple dice rolls. Our response to inkblot tests conveys this all. This tendency is called pareidolia, and it can be applied to what we hear as well.

I sought out Pareidolia’s name after experiencing it while listening to a common hip hop composition process known as sampling. In hip hop’s case, sampling is the process of taking pre-recorded sounds—usually songs—and cutting them up to be played over again. During the process, one has to experiment with sampled sounds for extended lengths of time. These sounds would be interpreted the same as the sounds we hear when stepping on to a city street—just noise. But when recorded and repeated in a pattern, noise will be heard in a rhythm, creating music. 

Sections in Pareidolia are composed intentionally to sound random. There are immediate rests, entrances, and abnormal phrasings. The same material, though, is put into patterns with the intent of shifting the listener’s cognitive response from hearing noise to hearing music. This is all to convey the highest extent of pareidolia—finding purpose. The events of seeing the face of Jesus in a piece of toast, the Man in the Moon, the formation of the constellations giving way to the zodiac, our first meeting with those we come to love, and experiencing happiness and suffering are all unintelligible until we provide meaning.