8 Billion Souls is an epic musical experience that is the culmination of my PhD at NYU. It started with EM recordings of the Earth that were dropped by NASA, in which I heard a Cosmic Choir singing in a moment of apophenia. I manipulated the samples until the choir came out strong and then had a group of singers follow a visual score and their own apophenia to turn that into a vocal composition.

The next stage of the project was to have Earl Scioneaux re-arrange that piece for the Hypercube Quartet. We had the quartet play the score as re-arranged by Earl and also as a responsive piece to the EM recording which I myself was manipulating live. Next I re-arranged those resulting recordings to create 8 Billion Souls, which is a balance of the originally manipulated EM recordings, the choral piece, and the recording of the quartet. Finally I created a video piece with novel AI techniques with a lose narrative arc depicting leaving the Earth, weather in spirit or physically.