Psychedelia

Psychedelia is a name given to the subculture of people who often use psychedelic drugs, and/or a style of psychedelic artwork and psychedelic music derived from the experience of altered consciousness that uses highly distorted and surreal visuals, sound effects and reverberation, and bright colors and full spectrums and animation (including cartoons) to evoke and convey to a viewer or listener the artist's experience while using such drugs. The term "psychedelic" is derived from the Ancient Greek words psychē (ψυχή, "mind") and dēloun (δηλοῦν, "to make visible, to reveal"), translating to "mind-revealing".

A psychedelic experience is characterized by the striking perception of aspects of one's mind previously unknown, or by the creative exuberance of the mind liberated from its ostensibly ordinary fetters. Psychedelic states are an array of experiences including changes of perception such as hallucinations, synesthesia, altered states of awareness or focused consciousness, variation in thought patterns, trance or hypnotic states, mystical states, and other mind alterations. These processes can lead some people to experience changes in mental operation defining their self-identity (whether in momentary acuity or chronic development) different enough from their previous normal state that it can excite feelings of newly formed understanding such as revelation, enlightenment, confusion, and psychosis.

Psychedelic music

Psychedelic music (sometimes psychedelia) covers a range of popular music styles and genres influenced by psychedelic culture that attempted to replicate or enhance the psychedelic experiences of psychedelic drugs. It emerged during the mid-1960s among folk rock and blues rock bands in the United States and Britain.

Psychedelic bands often used new recording techniques and effects, drawing on non-Western sources such as the ragas and drones of Indian music. Psychedelic influences spread into folk, rock, and soul, creating the subgenres of psychedelic folk, psychedelic rock, psychedelic pop and psychedelic soul in the late 1960s before declining in the early 1970s. Psychedelic music bands expanded their musical horizons, and went on to create and influence many new musical genres including progressive rock, kosmische musik, electronic rock, jazz rock, heavy metal, glam rock, funk, electro and bubblegum pop. Psychedelic music was revived in a variety of forms of neopsychedelia from the 1980s, in psychedelic hip hop and re-emerged in electronic music in genres including acid house, trance music and new rave.

Psychedelia (light synthesizer)

Psychedelia is an early light synthesizer developed by Jeff Minter and published by Llamasoft in 1984. It was converted to the MSX and ZX Spectrum by Simon Freeman.

Usage

Psychedelia allowed a user to generate a light show on the screen grid, using the joystick to send pulses or bursts of coloured squares. There are various preset settings, or the user can manually set the variables controlling the pulses. Patterns can be recorded to memory or tape for later playback.

Unlike Minter's later synthesizers such as Neon, Psychedelia does not use audio as a factor, only using a joystick's input. It is, however, intended to be played in accompaniment to music.

History

Minter had been considering "dynamic interactive pattern generators" but hadn't coded any previously. An idea for an algorithm came to him, in which patterns would be seeded along a path, which would then expand and change shape and colour over time. He coded it in 6502 assembler language, fitting into about 1 kilobyte. Running the code for the first time had a profound effect on Minter: "It just felt wonderfully new, and somehow primal... it was like the patterns and mandalas that have fascinated humans for millennia, but come to life, under your control..."