Before answering this question, I ask you to set aside for a moment everything you know or think you know about music, about yourself, and about the reality around you.
Suspend judgment for a moment and make space to welcome something completely new and mysterious.
Done? Good, let’s begin.
NoFM – Non-Functional Music is a project about music and sound research, experimentation, and workshops, both online and live.
The aim is to experiment and explore an alternative and non-ordinary way of composing, listening to and experiencing music and sound, focused on the exploration of perception, attention, states of consciousness, the manifest and unmanifest reality, the dream, and the Self.
The project is intended for musicians, composers, music enthusiasts, occasional listeners, and especially anyone interested in sharing this journey of exploration, research and self-discovery of ourselves and the reality around us, through a non-ordinary experience of music and sound creation and listening.
Why Non-Functional Music?
The term was born as a provocation against the ordinary way we usually create and listen to music.
Music is everywhere. It is often used as background, to entertain us or keep us company, to help us relax, distract ourselves, feel emotions, improve our mood, encourage us to buy something, energize us during a workout, meditate, study, create atmosphere, dance, and so on. Or we listen to it simply because we like it and it makes us feel good.
We find it on TV, on the radio, in shops and venues, at the gym, at parties. Sometimes we have no choice — music is there, maybe we don’t like it and wouldn’t choose it, but we have to listen to it or at least hear it.
Although every artist has their own way of composing music and their own reasons for doing so, music creation is often influenced by the way music is consumed and by the type of audience that will listen to it.
NoFM promotes the research and experimentation of different, non-ordinary, active, and conscious ways of creating, listening to, and perceiving sound and music — even the kind we don’t like.
Non-ordinary approaches for extraordinary results.
The goal of NoFM is exploration, discovery, encounter, and sharing.
Musical research has existed since the dawn of humanity. Much has been done, and much remains to be discovered, experimented with, recovered, and deepened.
Perhaps never before has music been so trivialized and reduced to mere entertainment, background noise, distraction, or mental conditioning (for example, in advertising or supermarkets, to guide our purchases).
And yet this is also the time when we have more musicians, more listeners, and greater access to music from all over the world, thanks to the Internet.
The purpose of NoFM is to bring together all those interested in pursuing this kind of research into creation, listening, and the exploration of non-ordinary states of consciousness, perception, and awareness through sound and music.
Want to be part of our project? Click here to join us on Reddit!