Mazer

This theta state you refer to is very familiar to me as well. I reach it often before I go to sleep at night and I've spoken of it in the dream thread too. Whereas you see chaotic images and hear chaotic melodies I myself find myself in a universe of pure theory. Sometime I contemplate mathematical theroms, sometimes theology and metaphysics, and sometimes I come up with iedas that yield practical results. I tend to have ideas that seem absolutely, completly coherent, but since I tend to forget myself and reality in this state I make up my own rules and upon close examination these ideas fall appart (I happen to think that the whole universe is a closed system, if all components are added together the sum will be zero, buy in my imaginary universes I sometimes forget to carry the one). When this happens I wake up and find the last memoris of the made up universe conflict with reality and I get confused, then I realize that I was dreaming, then I get frustrated that I can't remember the genius idea I just had.

But sometimes my theta dreams are rooted in reality and I can remember what they were and how they came to me. As it happens I was listening to Dido while trying to go to sleep and I realized something about the basic "geometry" of music and how it can be computerized. There is a number system that I can't remember the name for that uses binary in an interesting way. It produces a series of numbers like this: 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1, 4, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1, 5, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1, 4, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1... Say it out loud in a slow and steady pace, you can hear the rythem. Look on a standard ruler (with inches) and look at the hight of the tick marks:
It follows the same pattern (except in my illustration it begins and ends with 5 instead of 1).

What if you applied a random note to each number from to, I don't know, how about 88, they don't all have to be different notes, you can apply the same note to more than one number, you could even apply silence to some numbers to provide rests. Now play the note that corresponds to each number in the order I gave and listen to what you get. I havn't tried it myself but I bet any computer could do it with the right program. Just tell it to randomize a bunch of notes and give each a number and play each note in this order, after a few trials you might hear some very complex melodies.

This is the kind of stuff I think of before I go to sleep.
This reminded me of an other idea I had. You could concievably play the same song with the same tempo in different styles and genres by tweaking the harmonies and instrumentation. I think this could be used in shoping malls to replace that awful elevator music. As you walk from one part of the mall to the other you would hear the same song played with different instrumental arrangments, different harmonies, maybe even different lyrics and genres. The same song would sound different depending on what "zone" you're in. Perhaps instruments could be isolated and replayed through their own speakers. As you walk around the music will seem to change in style but not in rythem so that each person can have an individual musical experience, or the same person could have different experiences with the same song on different occasions. And if there's lots of space you might hear echoes from other zones that would multiply on top of each other.

You speak of th 4-dimensionality of your audio/visual dreams and their correlation with imagery. I generally think of sound as one dimensional in nature, unilinear, simply a line that changes color along it's length. An image on the other hand is a series of pararllel lines forming a plane. Video is a series of parallel planes layered on top of each other illustrating motion. Computers can handle video with ease, parsing millions of parallel multicolored lines at once. If each line had an audio output instead of a visual output, well lets just say that there's lots of room for speculation. When you speak of kaleidoscopic imagery and cacophonous chaos I imagine that this is what it must be like, hearing each "pixel" as well as seeing it. Except that the the 4-dimensionality comes from multiple video streams playing in your field of view all at once.