Music

On returning from an expedition in the 1990s, Michael was approached by a Native American elder, while crossing the Strait of Georgia by ship (British Columbia, Canada). The elder reached into a leather satchel slung over his shoulder, pulled out a beautiful Native American flute made of red cedar, and gestured as he offered it to Michael.

From that day, Michael has used the poetic sounds of the Native American flute as a celebration of gratitude on a journey of sound that connects people to one another. One lesson he’s learned from this 30-year journey is that the sounds seem to carry the intentions of the player out into the world. So, there is gift that comes with its playing when it is offered in a spirit of reverence.

Michael’s form of World Music is about our journey through the unknown, where we encounter more of our true selves with each faithful step. His music is about reverence and transformation. It is about the common breath we share with all living things.

Beyond his journey with the Native flute, Michael is also a lead vocalist of The Galactics, a band comprised of NASA flight surgeons, test pilots, space medicine specialists, astronauts, and folks who spend their careers trying to send humans to the Moon and Mars. He has had the opportunity to record with professional musicians and perform live, including events in Chicago, New Orleans, Reno, Denver, and others. Michael has also had the chance to play in an eclectic range of venues, from the soaring Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence, Italy, to Indigenous Peoples celebrations in North America, to the jungles of Costa Rica and Panama. Some of his most engaging encounters with the Native flute have come while playing amidst pods of orcas, humpback whales, and dolphins in the wild.

In the sound engineering field, Michael is part of the leadership team at the frontier of spatial acoustic engineering that developed a novel immersive technology based on their proprietary artificial narrow intelligence method called Segmented Radial Topology (SRT) and the complementary novel technology termed Low Energy Acoustic Waveform Assembly (LEAWA). The applications range from energy conservation and optimization, to medicine, to sports, to film, to music. As one application of this technology, Michael and his team have developed an immersive spatialized acoustic biophilic space architecture platform (SiBASE) for application to human space analogs on Earth, low Earth orbit, and Lunar/Mars settlements.