Dream Diary
Prelude for Piano
Prelude for Piano
Duration
3:00
Premiere
March 28th, 2026
Xiao Bai Lun
Movements
Single
Yume Nikki is a highly experimental Psychological Horror game released in 2004 by the anonymous developer “Kikiyama”. It's a peculiar project in that it lacks any sorts of objectives, dialogue, no or progression; players are simply given an avatar–– "Madotsuki"––and a surreal dream world to wander around in, serving less as a game and more as a massive interactive art piece built within the confines of a PC game.
It may seem pointless— why play a game with nothing to do in it? But like an art gallery, the true allure comes from interpretation. This piano prelude serves to interpret not just the world of Madotsuki’s dreams, but to interpret the very nature and behavior of dreams themselves. Thoughts will begin, intensify, and quickly lose themselves in the haze. Memories of melodies past will repeat themselves in fashions never truly complete or concrete. Individual notes will sound pure before quickly drowning in the sea of liquid consciousness, a state where the brain perceives dreams as reality while still acknowledging the nagging feeling that one isn’t truly present. Much of it may be familiar, but none of it is truly real.
The "Lydian Super-Scale"
Popularized by Jacob Collier as the "Super Ultra Hyper Mega Meta Lydian Scale", the Lydian Super-Scale (it's less of a mouthful) is an infinite scale formed by repeating the first four notes of the lydian scale clockwise around the circle of fifths indefinitely.
Beginning at C0 on the piano, the super-scale is treated modally in this piece, with zero exceptions. The result in theory is a marriage of modalism and pantonality, democratizing pitch classes globally while still retaining flavors of modality locally; the result in practice is constant and indefinite polymodal harmony across the full range of of the piano, serving a haunting brightness that proliferates the whole piece.