We love the music we have today.
And yet, we still long for music that moves us in ways we've never experienced before.
Perhaps we don't yet fully understand what music can do to the human heart.

Ronnatune is a place where people who believe there is still more to discover in music come together to explore new kinds of musical experiences and new ways of feeling. For example, a piece might unfold differently depending on the listener. The listener's actions can shape the piece itself and change how it sounds. Or we might reflect deeply on "that feeling" a piece evokes in us, put it into words, and share it with others. We create experiences like these and see where they lead, exploring how people feel and respond.

We explore new possibilities for musical experience. From the many different ways people respond to these experiences, we seek to understand the underlying structures and principles that connect music with the way we feel. We then turn that understanding into new musical experiences. This cycle is at the heart of Ronnatune.

Here are some of the ideas currently being explored.

• Multiverse Music

  Choose how the music unfolds as you listen. Or let your reactions shape where it goes next without you even realizing it. The same piece of music may lead different listeners to completely different endings.

• Living Music

  Return today to the music you listened to yesterday. The melody is the same, but the backing is slightly different. The next time you listen, the instrumentation may have changed. Never fixed in a single final form, the music feels fresh each time you listen.

• Playable Music

  Listening becomes more than simply pressing play. Shape the sound, play sounds in time with the music, or tap a button to send applause and cheers to support your favorite artist. You become part of the performance.

• Landscape

  After the music ends, you might wonder, "Was I the only one who got chills at that moment?" Looking at how others felt, you find that some listeners were deeply moved at the very same moment, while others were drawn to the quiet opening. Across a single piece of music, these different responses layer together to form a landscape.

These are just examples, not the final form of Ronnatune. As we experiment with these ideas, we may discover that some are less compelling in practice than they seemed at first. Or people may use them in ways we never expected, revealing new possibilities. We explore these possibilities together with the people who join us, trying things out, bringing in new ideas, and sometimes reshaping existing ones entirely. Ronnatune is not about replacing the music we already have with something new. Both the experience of simply listening to a finished piece from beginning to end and the new experiences that may emerge in the future are part of what music can be.

At the heart of Ronnatune is another purpose, deeply connected to the exploration of new musical experiences. It is to explore the very nature of how we feel through music. When we listen to music, there are moments when we suddenly get chills or feel a kind of nostalgia that is hard to put into words. And how we feel is not necessarily determined by the sound alone. Even when the sound is exactly the same, how we feel can change depending on where in the piece we started listening, what we heard before, or what we have experienced in our lives.

I do not begin by reducing these experiences to existing labels such as "serene," "nostalgic," or "bittersweet." More fundamentally, I do not even assume that the ways we feel can be neatly organized into categories or represented along dimensions, or that how we feel at a given moment can be treated as a single "state." There may be ways of feeling that humanity has not yet named. Different ways of feeling may also be related: some may be "similar," others "completely different," and some may be "easy to transition between." Even if we seem to arrive at a similar way of feeling, what we experience next may depend on what we went through to get there.

What do people choose? What are they drawn to? At what moment do they feel that "something changed"? And how do they express it? Rather than drawing conclusions about how a person feels from a single response, we look across many different responses and the relationships between them, tracing the patterns, differences, and changes that emerge. From there, we explore a "map of how we feel" that has long been difficult to capture.

And Ronnatune does not treat music merely as a research tool. We bring what we learn through research back into music. So listeners can see, from a new perspective, what kinds of music move them. So creators can understand what kinds of listeners their work resonates with most deeply. And ultimately, so we can open the way to musical experiences that have never existed before.