The Muzoracle is a card and dice divination system and art dice set for inspiring musical compositions, developed by American songwriter and mystic Jeff S. Kingfisher, using components which are compatible and interchangeable with those used in Kingfisher's musical board game, Muzundrum.
The Muzoracle package features an 89-card deck (the Muzoracle proper), as well as thirteen dice, one of which is a black 12-sided "musician's die" showing the 12 pitches (from A to G#) featured in western musical tuning systems. The remaining 12 white dice are 12-sided solfege dice, which include the half-step pitches of the solfege, not just the diatonic scale. The set also features a spiral-bound 40 page text (a PDF version of which can be found at this address, provided by Kingfisher to view without purchase), velveteen drawstring pouches for storing the deck and dice, and a storage box for the entire set.
The "musician's die" is the same design as the Muzundrum dice.
Kingfisher's website states that every Muzoracle deck is individually packaged by Kingfisher himself after deliberately pre-shuffling the deck for the buyer, intending it to be ready for a first divinatory reading immediately upon unboxing. Kingfisher features a Muzoracle divination with every application of Swenakailo, his Reiki-based New Age music therapy practice.
The Muzoracle uses principles of western music theory and New Age mysticism to assign specific spiritual and predictive meanings to each note in a musical scale, as well as to different families of musical instruments (percussion, woodwinds, etc.) and different chord qualities. Speaking in a very relative sense about such matters of "Woo," the Muzoracle tends to be drastically less concrete and practical in its approach than tarot and most oracle decks in general. Muzoracle instead focuses more on instructing the user to take this or that psychological posture toward the events of the near future, such as to take initiative at seizing opportunities, relax and be patient, or relinquish expectations and disappointments about unwanted occurrences. Since it tends toward the overly abstract, there is usually little room to interpret its "advice" in a manner that would be obviously counterproductive: it tends to stay mild and neutral enough that one's biases - positive or negative either way - tend not to be confirmed so emphatically as to provoke rash behaviour or defeatist attitudes. The deck is printed crisply, on high quality card stock suitably sized for most users' hands, and the art is abstractly lovely, with each suit (a different instrument family from every other suit) being colour-coded for convenience. The dice are heavy enough to necessitate a rolling tray for their own maintenance, and to preserve table tops against scratching and dents.
I personally find the Muzoracle is better as a composition aid than as a divinatory tool, and it becomes better still if it is supplemented with more Muzundrum dice (though the solfege dice perform well enough). The pitches given in dice rolls or card draws can be used to select melodic sequencing and chord development. There is no reason one could not just assign the scale pitches to each face of a D12, of course, and use it in the same manner, or for that matter a D8 assigned to the diatonic scale or a similar 8-tone scale, or a D6 assigned to a pentatonic scale. There is no need for any specific tool in generating aleatory music; this tool just happens to be purpose-built for it.
Iron Noder 2023, 15/30