Melody
The melodic language draws from Chinese tuning, giving the piece a tonal center that feels rooted but not conventionally Western.
Creative Technology / Original Composition / Center for Latter-day Saint Arts
Farraginous
An experimental composition and video about mixed identity, shaped by hybrid tuning systems and biometric signals.
“A song built from biometric signals about mixed identity, coexistence, and belonging.”
Raw Pure Data patch
Final video still
The released artifact, with the EEG headset still visible in frame.
Year
2021
Context
Center for Latter-day Saint Arts
Medium
Composition + Video
Themes
Identity, Tuning, Biometrics
Overview
Farraginous is one of my most personal creative works: an experimental composition and video that translates the feeling of living in-between into sound.
Created for the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, the piece brings together a melody rooted in Chinese tuning, harmony shaped by Western Just Intonation, and biometric-driven experimentation to explore mixed identity, alienation, and the strange beauty of not fitting neatly into a single category.
It is also a statement about coexistence. The tuning systems are not forced into the same frame. They remain distinct, yet they can still live together and create something harmonically rich without one tradition needing to flatten the other.
Why I made it
I grew up half Taiwanese and half white in the United States, often feeling close to both worlds without being fully claimed by either. Farraginous came from that tension.
I did not want to make a piece that only explained the idea intellectually. I wanted the music itself to carry that feeling. The tuning systems do not fully resolve into a single frame. The sound world stays beautiful, but unstable.
I also wanted the piece to resist a more typical Western move, where another culture's musical language gets absorbed and normalized into a dominant system. Here, the different tuning systems are allowed to stay themselves. The result is a piece about identity, misreading, coexistence, and the middle space.
Watch the piece
The released video artifact for Farraginous.
How it works
The system stayed intentionally legible: tuning and biometrics shaped behavior, but the piece remained grounded in musical feeling rather than technical display.
Harmony
The harmonic world is shaped through Western Just Intonation, creating a different kind of stability and tension around the melodic material.
Biometrics
The piece also incorporates EEG-related and facial-expression-linked input. In particular, blinking influenced the melody, turning small physical gestures into musical events.
System adaptation
The original concept for Farraginous was to incorporate EEG-derived emotional readings, especially frustration, into the musical behavior. I was working with an Emotiv EPOC+, but by that stage the hardware was beginning to fail, and its emotional-state readings were no longer precise enough to use confidently. I also intended to incorporate live heartbeat, but I was not able to patch live Fitbit data into Pure Data reliably, so the BPM of the final piece oscillates between the highest and lowest heart rates I measured while working on it. Rather than overstate what the system could do, I adapted the piece around the signals that remained dependable, particularly blink-related and expression-linked input.
Instead of treating biometric data as a novelty effect, I used it as compositional material. The result is a piece where identity is expressed not only through story and tuning, but through the behavior of the body itself. It is also an argument that different cultural systems can coexist without one needing to erase the other.
Process / System Artifacts
This material shows the project as documented creative R&D: the device, the patch, the live setup tests, and the way the system was actually handled during development.
Process artifact
Development portrait
Using the Emotiv EPOC+ during development.
Process artifact
Signal patch
Patch environment used to map biometric behavior into sound.
Process artifact
Device kit
The EEG device used in the project.
Process video
Home demo
Home demo showing blink detection and patch behavior in real time.
Exhibition / Presented Publicly
Farraginous was presented as part of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts exhibition environment, where the work was shown alongside other artists in a public event setting.
Installation
Installation view
Installation view with Farraginous on display.
Credit
Program listing
Program listing with composers credit.
Exhibition
Exhibition context
Exhibition context.
Seeing the piece presented publicly changed my understanding of what it had become. I got to watch people encounter it alongside paintings, installation work, and other artists connected to the exhibition, which made the piece feel less like a private system experiment and more like a shared act of interpretation.
One gentleman told me it helped him empathize more deeply with his mixed-race child. That stayed with me. It suggested the work was doing what I hoped: making in-betweenness felt rather than merely explained.
“The work showed me how two cultural systems could remain distinct, still live together, and sound beautiful without one forcing the other into its frame.”
Artist Interview / Exhibition Context
I was also featured in the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts' I AM: Creation interview, which provides additional context for the exhibition and the ideas surrounding Farraginous.
This is supporting context rather than the main artifact, but it helps place the piece within the larger exhibition conversation.
Watch the interview on YouTubeWhy it belongs in this portfolio
This project belongs here not just as a piece of music, but as an example of how I think. Farraginous reflects the same instincts that shape my product work: translating ambiguous inputs into meaningful systems, designing around human signals, and using structure to turn complexity into something people can feel.
It is a creative work, but it reveals the same systems thinking, experimentation, and narrative intent that drive the rest of my portfolio.