Lying back in his chair, Victor mentally reviewed his last practical testing scores, his musician brain automatically sorting through the technical parameters of each scale.
The first was the Scale of the Perimeter (2D Boundary Control).
This foundational tier relied on the kinetic mechanics of Shear to establish sharp, cutting lines in the air and Convergence to tightly lock the endpoints together.
For high school students, the baseline target was to project a flat, flawless 2D geometric outline—such as a perfect square, a star, or a circle—directly into the open air using their voice or instruments.
To pass the official mastery test, a student had to keep the projected outline completely motionless for sixty seconds.
Any minor wavering in their mental concentration or acoustic pitch would cause the geometric lines to bow, warp, or snap out of existence entirely.
The second was the Scale of the Field (Static Surface & Color).
Building directly upon boundary control, this level utilized the kinetic mechanic of Bloom to spread acoustic energy outward until it was locked securely within a closed perimeter.
The high school curriculum required students to fill a static boundary with a completely solid, uniform color hue and texture, mimicking real-world materials like a flat sheet of matte blue plastic, polished metallic brass, or smooth white porcelain.
The mastery test dictated that this color fill remain perfectly homogeneous across the entire surface, showing absolutely no dark spots, flickering, or bleeding edges.
The third and most challenging high school tier was the Scale of the Silhouette (Composite 2D Imagery).
This advanced phase combined the mechanics of both the Perimeter and the Field, introducing a subtle Pulse to control layer opacity.
High schoolers practiced this by constructing a flat, highly detailed silhouette or emblem that resembled a sharp 2D sign or a pane of a stained-glass window.
As their ultimate High School Graduation Exam, every eighteen-year-old was required to perform their school’s Standard Graduation Emblem Scale to earn their diploma.
To graduate, they had to successfully construct a complex, multi-colored flat seal in under thirty seconds and hold it perfectly motionless in midair.
To anyone uneducated in the Federation’s physics, terms like Bloom, Shear, Convergence, and Pulse sounded like abstract concepts.
In reality, they were four of the five core musical “notes” dictated by this world’s advanced acoustic theory.
Notes are in parentheses because musical notes in this world weren’t the same thing as Earth’s musical notes; actually, they had completely different concepts.
But we won’t delve into that now.
Victor narrowed his eyes as he heard that; he couldn’t escape these scales, as they were the basis of any university graduation course, whether an artistic or a non-artistic one.
So, even if Victor had decided not to delve into music again, with a society so integrated with music, there were some things that he couldn’t escape.
Fortunately, Victor had a clear exit strategy.
These foundational scales were merely the simplified prerequisites required before higher education. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
If he simply chose a technical route centered on the exact sciences, he wouldn’t have to delve deeply into advanced music theory or composition.
Yet, as he looked down at his desk, his mind automatically began comparing these three scales to the traditional sheet music of his past life.
“Damn…” The whisper slipped out before he could catch it.
Victor quickly snapped his head up toward Mrs.
Tracy.
She was already deep into reviewing her lesson plans, completely oblivious to his minor slip.
He heaved a quiet, cautious sigh of relief.
Though he was determined to keep his distance from the music industry, analyzing the underlying mechanics made one thing clear: he wouldn’t be like those generic web novel protagonists who could copy a random Earth pop song and instantly achieve global stardom.
The core physics of the two worlds were completely incompatible.
On Earth, music theory was absolute and static.
A C-natural was always a C-natural, a 4/4 time signature kept a predictable pulse, and dynamic markings simply instructed a musician to hit their instrument harder or softer.
Sound was an acoustic product, played on pre-tuned keys or frets.
In the Federation, music theory was dynamic, relational, and deeply physical.
Sound was treated as a kinetic fluid—much like water or atmospheric pressure—and performing a scale meant actively steering a live wave through a changing environment in real time.
When a high school student practiced the First Foundation Scale, they weren’t memorizing fixed notes on a keyboard; they were learning to manage relational pitch.
On Earth, a chord consisted of three musicians playing three pre-tuned, stationary keys.
Here, a scale was defined by continuous mathematical ratios relative to a lead musician.
If the lead singer’s voice drifted by a fraction of a cent due to breath control or something else, every other student in the ensemble had to instantly glide their own pitch by that exact micro-fraction.
Missing the ratio by a millimeter caused the sound waves to physically collide out of sync, turning a warm, smooth scale into a harsh, fluttering throb that destabilized the room.
The Second Foundation Scale took this a step further, teaching students how to manage physical tension.
On Earth, a composer created drama by writing harsh or dissonant notes on a page.
In the Federation, tension was a tangible buildup of acoustic friction along the boundaries of the sound wave, created by intentionally playing slightly off-ratio for a split second.
As this acoustic friction accumulated, the air in the room grew physically denser and more turbulent, violently vibrating the instruments in the students’ hands.
A musician had to hold their vocal cords or fingers perfectly steady against that physical resistance, ride the friction right to its absolute limit, and then execute a split-second pitch glide to snap the wave back into harmony, instantly discharging the room’s atmospheric pressure.
Playing rapid notes pumped acoustic energy into a space faster than the ambient air could clear, physically compressing the atmosphere in the hall.
To prevent fast tempos from stumbling against this thick, resistant air, a student had to precede every note attack with a micro-burst of unpitched string friction or breath—a tiny cushion that dropped local air resistance so the musical note could glide through cleanly.
When the performance ended, simply stopping wasn’t enough; the entire ensemble had to damp their instruments in perfect synchronization.
This caused the compressed sound field in the room to collapse instantly, causing the air pressure in the hall to snap back so fast the audience felt a sudden, breathless drop in their stomachs.
Ultimately, while an Earth scale merely tested whether a musician could memorize finger placements on a fretboard, even the most basic high school scales in this world required a performer to act as a real-time fluid dynamicist.
And this was only the bare-minimum baseline.
According to his childhood education, university courses taught students how to completely discard these rigid foundational patterns, allowing them to play entirely free of geometric constraints.
For a split second, a dangerous surge of longing and raw excitement flared up against Victor’s frozen heart.
The sheer brilliance of this world’s music theory was breathtaking.
They weren’t confined by the artificial, twelve-note prison that limited musicians on Earth.
This meant that if he wanted to bring music pieces from Earth to here, he would have to study in depth this world’s music theory to ‘translate’ the piece to this world.
But this also meant that the musical possibilities of this world were infinite!
Each music piece could have as many variations as the grains of sand on a beach.
It was only at that moment that he genuinely admired this world’s musicians for creating such a beautiful system.
But he also knew that they were only able to produce and use this complicated theory because each human of this world had a supernatural musical ear.
They could identify the slightest wave undulations.
Earth musicians couldn’t implement this as they weren’t as connected with the sound as this world’s humans were, at least most of them weren’t.
Victor couldn’t help but wonder how he could translate classic pieces from musical legends like Chopin, Vivaldi, Beethoven, and others.
He was dying to know if this world’s music theory could elevate these pieces….
‘No.
Forget it,’ Victor thought aggressively, mentally slamming the box shut on his emotions.
He forced a deep breath into his lungs, gripped his pen tightly, and stared directly at Mrs.
Tracy’s biology slides, using the mundane details of cell replication to drown out the dangerous, melodic thoughts tempting his mind.