A Minimizing, Maximizing Purpose

According to United Language Group, The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis posits that “language either determines or influences one’s thought.” Ted Chiang’s short story Story of Your Life, and the inspiration for the major motion picture Arrival, takes this hypothesis to the next level. What if when humans acquired consciousness, our language determined our reality? That is to say, it became sequential. We read a sentence from beginning to end. And what if there was an extraterrestrial species that acquired consciousness, and read their sentences all at once. Thus, creating a simultaneous mode of awareness.  

A Minimizing, Maximizing Purpose is a concept musical based on this theory. Within a broken timeline, we follow Louise -- a decorated linguist asked to translate the Heptapod language -- her family, a harrowing tragedy, and the way her mind adapts to understand a simultaneous reality.

Music plays a huge part in the Heptapod language.  As a music theorist, I pondered how I could reflect this theory of language into music - often a language in itself. The Heptapods speak in live music, a cacophony of sound that is harmonically far away from the musical language of our human characters. I took directly from an iconic part of Chiang’s short story where Louise recognizes the way Heptapods add speech on top of itself to form sentences and found a theoretically exciting way to translate that, and one that holds clarity in intention as an important part of creating it.

THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE By TED CHIANG

A science fiction novella by American writer Ted Chiang, first published in Starlight 2 in 1998, and later in 2002 in Chiang's collection of short stories, Stories of Your Life and Others.