The Well-Flexed Clavicle

I grew up in the late early days of electronic music. By the time I could afford an instrument, a version of the Moog synthesizer was available at the local Radio Shack store. Even so, a friend of mine and I would breadboard our own bucket-brigade sonic seasonings while trying to emulate the masters of electronica.

Needless to say, I still look at electronic music (or "damned noise," as my father called it) as a trip into my younger age, when my understanding of the bow and arrow leading to the lyre, the hammered dulcimer, harpsichord, piano, guitar and Peter Frampton's famous talk box spiel, told me that new was old rewarded for reinvention.

Music to my ears? Hearing the conversion of a radio-control transmitter to a type of theremin, where the takeoffs, loops, and landings of a toy-scale airplane sing like nothing I've heard, joined by the lightshow that flashed from wingtip to wingtip and prop to tail, writing messages in a language that we'll only decipher in the next millenium.

Some UAVs are designed for asserting aggression (donning reflective sunglasses and stating, "Respect my aw-thaur-uh-tie"). My UAVs are designed for insight, putting thoughts and ideas into heads wired for the corpus callosum, with only a small influence on the amygdala or the reptilian brain (if there is such a thing anymore in our understanding of our species' technicolor organ).