Elaine Walker, M.A.
Elaine Walker, M.A., is an electronic musician, microtonal composer, and instrument inventor who creates music, keyboards, visual mathematics, and philosophy through ZiaSpace.com, Owner of Vertical Keyboards, and Co-owner of ZiaSpace Web Hosting. She is the author of Matter Over Mind: Cosmos, Chaos, and Curiosity and a coauthor of a series of peer-reviewed geometry papers with mathematician Bruce Olberding of New Mexico State University.
A longtime space advocate, she has been a cryopreservation member of Alcor since 2007 and describes her work as contributing to the longevity of humanity.
Elaine's music is built on tunings that lie outside the familiar twelve-note octave. Her release, MACROCHIP (A Bohlen-Pierce Scale Mini-Movie Album), issued independently in June 2026, comprises eight five-minute "Synema Songs" — instrumental science-fiction pieces in which music and film were developed together, written entirely in the Bohlen-Pierce Scale, which divides a tritave (an octave plus a fifth) into thirteen equal steps. She assembled the visuals from licensed, human-created stock footage.
Read INTERVIEW: Elaine Walker Builds an Alien Musical Universe in "MACROCHIP", Elaine Walker – 'MACROCHIP (A Bohlen-Pierce Scale Mini-Movie Album)' [Album Review], and WATCH: Elaine Walker Blends Science Fiction and Microtonal Music on New 'MACROCHIP' Mini-Movie Album. Watch the Macrochip Mini-Movie Album (Bohlen-Pierce Scale) playlist.
Earlier albums explored the same territory. No Terrestrial Road (2020) took its title from a four-dimensional surface in her mathematics work and leaned on the Bohlen-Pierce Scale, which she calls "the most alien-sounding scale of all". Four-Momentum (2018) was written in 14-, 15-, and 20-note equal temperaments and named for the hyperbolically rotated cones in her geometry papers.
Read Exploring New Dimensions: Elaine Walker Talks About Her Groundbreaking Album "No Terrestrial Road", Elaine Walker Reshapes Soundscapes On 'Four-Momentum', and her UnTwelve interview on composing in other equal temperaments. She founded the electronic space-pop band ZIA in 1991. Its album Martians (2005) includes Yuri Gagarin, her theme for Yuri's Night, the World Space Party.
To perform this music live, Elaine invents her own instruments. She built the first Vertical Keyboard in 2010 to play the Bohlen-Pierce Scale at the first Bohlen-Pierce Symposium at Berklee College of Music in Boston. The instruments are piano-style keyboards of 61, 74, or 88 keys that can be played on a stand, slung like a guitar, or held nearly vertically like a cello, with white keys that can be rearranged for any microtuning. Six further designs have followed, and she funds their engineering and manufacturing through Patreon.
Elaine's mathematics research began at age 50, with no formal math training, when she realized she had a gift for visualizing geometry. Less than two years later, her first paper, The conic geometry of rectangles inscribed in lines, coauthored with Bruce Olberding, appeared in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society in 2021.
The collaboration has continued in Paths of rectangles inscribed in lines over fields and Rectangles conformally inscribed in lines (both 2022), Bisector fields of quadrilaterals (2024), Bisector fields and pencils of conics (2024), and Geometry of lines asymptotic to a pencil of conics (2025).
Together, Olberding and Walker introduced bisector fields, a new class of geometric objects — maximal sets of paired lines whose mutual intersections share a common midpoint — and proved that every bisector field arises from a pencil of affine conics and vice versa, uniting previously unrelated geometric phenomena. Read her math papers.
Her book Matter Over Mind: Cosmos, Chaos, and Curiosity (2016), a nonfiction work of physics and philosophy funded through Kickstarter, argues that for humans to survive long enough to become a spacefaring species we must rethink how we think, viewing the world through the twin lenses of chaos theory and abstract thought in chapters that run from the cosmos and fractals to consciousness, determinism, morality, longevity, and curiosity.
Elaine has volunteered for the NewSpace community since the mid-1990s. From 2004 to 2016, she was Director of Education and Public Outreach at the Mars Institute, spending five summers in the High Arctic with the NASA Haughton-Mars Project, the field research program led by Pascal Lee that studies the Haughton impact structure on Devon Island as a Mars analog. In 2003, she was invited to Devon Island to record a music video promoting the idea of humans living on Mars.
Watch Martians by ZIA (filmed in the High Arctic for NASA HMP-2003). Read her Space.com reports NASA Haughton-Mars Project — Summertime on a "Planet" Close to Home and UP Aerospace Launch: A Giant Candle for Closure, on the first flight to reach space from Spaceport America in 2007.
From 1997 to 1999, she was President of the Boston chapter of the National Space Society, organizing a monthly lecture series at MIT and recruiting over 1,000 subscribers to the SpaceViews newsletter. From 2000 to 2003, she resurrected the dormant New York City chapter as its President, with a monthly lecture series at NYU and events cosponsored with the Hayden Planetarium, the United Nations, and the Intrepid Museum.
She served as NSS Region 8 organizer for chapters across Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, and in 2002 and 2003 sat simultaneously on the boards of directors of the National Space Society and the Space Frontier Foundation. She has performed at Return to the Moon, Mars Society, and Space Access Society conferences, and was a featured presenter at the NSS Space Settlement Summit. Read her space resume and listen to her interviews on The Space Show hosted by our David Livingston.
Professionally, Elaine was Music Editor at 4Kids Entertainment in New York from 2002 to 2009, cutting music for the Pokémon cartoon series and later GoGoRiki. She then taught electronic music for a decade, as Adjunct Instructor of Electronic Music at Scottsdale Community College in Arizona from 2007 to 2016, where she led Electronic Music I–III and Computer Based Sound Synthesis.
She served as Director of Disc Jockey and Electronic Music Production in 2016, as Instructor of Sound Design and Synthesis at Collins College from 2011 to 2013, and as an instructor at Sanford-Brown College in Henderson, Nevada, from 2013 to 2014. Since 2002, she has been Co-owner of ZiaSpace Web Hosting, a NetBSD-based hosting service.
Elaine earned her Master's Degree in Music Technology, computer music, from New York University in 2001 with the thesis Chaos Melody Theory, which uses iterated chaotic functions to generate melodies a performer "conducts" in real time.
She studied Music Technology and music synthesis production at Berklee College of Music from 1986 to 1991, where an instructor first introduced her to the Bohlen-Pierce Scale, and remained there as a lab monitor and seminar speaker until 1999. Her earlier studies included Electronic Music at New Mexico State University in 1985 and British Music and Culture at the University of London in 1986.
She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Visit her homepage, LinkedIn profile, Wikipedia profile, Medium blog, Bandcamp store, and YouTube channel. Follow her on Facebook and X.