Clarinet
Consciousness

Clarinet Consciousness is a work of non-fiction structured as four symphonic movements. It follows one man's journey from a child of the Apollo era — learning about music, electronics, and medical life-support control rooms — through a career designing state-of-the-art digital satellite communication equipment and the entrepreneurial gamble of creating the world's first commercial deep space communications station, to the ultimate realisation that consciousness is a function of the timing circuits of the brain and body. The story plays out as the symphony is performed, revealing remarkable parallels between the arc of the narrative, the symphony itself, signal processing, the act of playing music, and the processes of the mind. The author's discovery of his own aphantasia — the lack of a mind's eye — provides the structure that reveals the links between these seemingly unrelated threads. In much the same way that Sibelius composes a masterful symphony from fractal parts, and Douglas Adams hides a theory of philosophy in plain sight within the absurdity of his narrative.

Ian Jones founded Goonhilly Earth Station on the Lizard Peninsula, transforming a decommissioned BT satellite facility into the world's first commercial deep space communications ground station. He is a digital signal processing engineer, an amateur clarinettist who performs at orchestral level, and the owner of a mind that cannot produce a single mental image. It is the collision of these three lives — engineering, music, and a profoundly different kind of cognition — that makes this book possible. No one else stands at this particular intersection.

For readers of Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain on Music, Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, and John Powell's How Music Works — yet no existing title combines all four of this book's domains. Written for a general audience, it will be loved by the world's fifteen million clarinettists and the wider community of orchestral musicians, by devotees of Sibelius, by anyone who has ever wondered how their mind works, by the neurodivergent who suspect their difference is an advantage, by engineers who know that the best explanations are elegant, and by Douglas Adams fans who always suspected the answer wasn't forty-two. The manuscript, at 56,000 words, is complete. A full proposal and sample chapters are available on request.