In 1937, Leonard Huizinga, describing Javanese gamelan music, noted: "This music does not create a song for our ears. It is a 'state', such as moonlight poured over the fields." We believe this idea can usefully be attached to the aesthetic of the Æolian Interface Project. The noises created from the chance interaction of wind and sensors is akin to those which are generated by traditional wind chimes (though the AIP is infinitely more configurable). The aesthetic of the wind chime, then, is our aesthetic. It is a state, a part of the environment. Something which simply is.

Lacking discernible sequence or pattern (the hallmark of our current definition of music) wind chime tones are atemporal tone clusters which have little narrative value but which are clearly of ambient value. Brian Eno has said of ambient music that it "must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular: it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." Indeed, like weather itself, the tones created with the AIP are both interesting and boring, foregrounded and backgrounded.

It is, of course, ironic that our machine interface between the natural (or meteorological world) and the sonic world merely converts one set of ripples in the air (wind) into a related set (sound). Perhaps wind does have a recognizable aesthetic. The ancient concept of the music of the spheres posited an ever-chiming but never-heard harmony between concentric celestial globes. The AIP attempts to manifest an aesthetic of nature (using wind as it's representative) via applied techné. Whether wind data can be translated into music is a matter of taste and nomenclature. What is certain is that the timbre of the tones and even the structure of their organization is not an intrinsic feature of the natural aesthetic. For that we must look elsewhere.