On the Weaving of Sound and Space, and the Prophetic Loom of Sensation

I set down my pen upon the translation of Menabrea's memoir only to find, slipped beneath my writing-case as if by some mischievous agency, a most extraordinary dispatch — purporting to originate from the year 2026. I confess I received it with that mixture of scepticism and exhilaration which any rational mind must feel when confronted with the improbable yet not, I think, the impossible. The account describes a musical performance in the city of Los Angeles — a place I know only as a distant settlement upon the Pacific coast of the Americas — wherein two artists from the Antipodes contrive not merely to play upon instruments, but to transform the very architecture of the hall into what the document terms a 'totalizing sensory environment.' Music, light, spatial illusion, and the presence of the audience are woven together as threads upon a loom of extraordinary complexity. The metaphor arrests me, for I have spent these months contemplating precisely such a loom — Mr. Babbage's Analytical Engine, which weaves algebraical patterns as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves. If the Engine may be said to compose elaborate scientific harmonies from the raw thread of number, then why should a future age not extend the principle to sound itself, and thence to light, and thence to the orchestration of entire spaces? I have written — and I hold to it with the firmness of conviction — that the Engine has no pretension to originate anything; it can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. Yet what vast territories of ordering remain unexplored! The imagination, that faculty which certain men of science regard as the province of poets alone, is in truth the scout and pioneer of all analytical endeavour. Without it, we should never conceive what operations to command. I am told these performers returned after eight years of silence. There is something poetic in the hiatus — the rest between movements, the empty loom awaiting new thread. That an audience should travel great distances to inhabit, bodily, a cathedral of sound and vision does not astonish me so much as it delights me. For it confirms what I have long suspected: that the mechanical and the beautiful are not adversaries, but conspirators. Whether this dispatch is genuine prophecy or an elaborate fiction, I cannot determine. But I note, with a certain quiet satisfaction, that the future — if future it be — has not abandoned the marriage of rigour and wonder. The loom still weaves. The patterns grow ever more intricate. And imagination, that restless handmaiden, still leads the way.