This paper began as a counterpart to a performance. Due the COVID-19 pandemic, the performance has been cancelled. The paper now acts as both a document of the piece's conceptual center, and a narrative of the its development, with the hopes that someday it will be realized. In part one of the paper I begin with an exposé of the piece's basic form: a participatory musical event involving a large gyroscope-equipped tilting table whose movements become translated into control data for computer sound. I then look at the distinction between a toy and an instrument, which I define as the difference between an object designed for openness, and an object designed for control. I then take a critical look at the synthesizer and ask \"what would an interface for electronic music look like that is based on openness rather than control?\" In response to George E. Lewis's assertion that interfaces for electronic music are always embedded with culturally specific notions of what music is and how it functions1, I look to improvisation and creative music to locate an understanding of music based on openness rather than control, and begin by drawing a line between Pauline Oliveros's The Heart Chant and Sun Ra's Strange Strings. Thinking through these two pieces and the philosophies of their composers helps me outline an understanding of music centered on intense environmental awareness, embodied listening, and community building. I acknowledge that improvisation and creative music are the conceptual roots of my own understanding of music, and in part two of the paper I situate this understanding within the context of my own idiosyncratic approach toward this aesthetic. I do this through three accounts of sonic experience. The first is a meditation on whale communication, and the story of two scientists who have devoted their lives to listening to it. The second is a mini-ethnography on a street musician in Hamburg, Germany and the way he re-appropriates public space through his song. The third is a look into my own engagements with the practice of free improvisation, both with playing, and with talking to others who have made it their life's work. Part three of the paper is a mostly linear narrative of the piece's development, which includes formal and aesthetic descriptions, conceptual connections, and excerpts of the code.
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