Creative Systems Architect

Architecture → Music → Cultural Technology

I design constraint systems that preserve human complexity in the age of AI. My work resists the flattening of cultural specificity into statistical averages — building infrastructure where friction, silence, and untranslatability are features, not bugs.

Background: Co-founded Mashrou' Leila (2008–2022), scaling Arabic electro-pop to 500M+ streams across 40+ countries while navigating censorship, exile, and cultural translation. Architecture research at The Bartlett (UCL). Now building the computational infrastructure that practice made necessary.

Location: NYC (ex-Beirut/London) · Walaw Studio

AI systems erase cultural specificity by design. When a language model maps Armenian exile onto generic displacement, or flattens maqam scales into "exotic modes," it performs what I call the Localization Gap — the systematic erasure of minoritized knowledge through optimization for universality.

My work builds infrastructure that operates against this tendency.

My repositories form a federated constellation — independent systems that coordinate through shared architectural principles. Each addresses a layer of the Meaning Stack, a framework for processing culture rather than just data.

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ SENSORIUM        │ Body as interface                 │ 3D-Beat-Synth
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ LATENT SPACE     │ Memory as constellation           │ STORYLINES
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ OBSERVATORY      │ Resonance cartography             │ music-engines
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ CONDUCTOR        │ Human-authored constraints         │ DERIVE
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ STAGE            │ Emergent signal propagation        │ photon+
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ VERACITY         │ Epistemic defense                  │ HAH-WAS
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Spine: choreography-of-systems (methodology + Five Axioms)

Core Principle: Systems are rehearsed, not built. Code as composition, architecture as performance.

→ Read the full methodology

The operating model that coordinates everything else. Five Axioms for designing human-scale systems across AI, sound, narrative, and culture. This is how I think, not what I built.

ChromaDB · Whisper · Pydantic · FastAPI

A negentropic memory system that preserves cultural perspective through human-authored Tuning Rules — constraints applied during retrieval, not after. Prevents AI from smoothing specificity into generic output.

Innovation: Tuning Rules as first-class citizens in RAG architecture. The human is pilot of the stochastic process, not passenger.

✅ Active development

Flask · Celery · Redis · Neo4j · Librosa

Research infrastructure for mapping musical resonance across six interdependent systems: Creative, Audience, Platform, Market, Industry, and Culture. Built from 14 years of empirical data scaling Mashrou' Leila globally.

This is not hit prediction. It's cartography — mapping the deep structure of why creative work resonates across cultural boundaries, and where that resonance breaks down.

Innovation: Treats resonance as multi-dimensional topology, not feature engineering. The Culture System measures what other tools erase.

🚧 Backend complete, API in progress

React Three Fiber · D3-Force · Gemini Embeddings · Rapier Physics

A spatial interface for personal libraries that resists search-first paradigms. Navigate knowledge through spatial memory — semantic proximity becomes physical proximity in a 3D force-directed graph. Physics-based layout creates navigable "memory palaces" from your reading.

Innovation: Navigable latency — exploring knowledge through spatial voyaging rather than hierarchical search.

✅ Live demo

React · Gemini 2.5 · Google Search API · Capacitor

Epistemic self-defense for the Localization Gap. A mobile app that teaches users to detect AI hallucinations about minoritized cultures through adversarial gameplay. Born from being gaslighted about Lebanese history by language models.

Innovation: The Reverse Turing Test — the machine tests whether the human is paying attention.

🚧 Core verification working, gamification in progress

MediaPipe · Tone.js · Three.js

Webcam hand gestures sculpt 3D forms and generate spatial audio. Zero hardware required. The body as direct interface — removing barriers between intention and sound.

✅ Live demo

Ray Tracing · Web Audio API

A physics-based optical sequencer. Light beams bounce off mirrors to trigger generative music. Signal propagation as compositional method.

Spatial computing for software architecture using color morphism instead of file trees. Early prototype · Demo

                    ┌─────────────────────┐
                    │  choreography-of-   │
                    │     systems         │
                    │   (methodology)     │
                    └────────┬────────────┘
                             │ governs all
              ┌──────────────┼──────────────┐
              ▼              ▼              ▼
     ┌────────────┐  ┌─────────────┐  ┌──────────┐
     │3D-Beat-Synth│  │ STORYLINES  │  │music-    │
     │(gesture →   │  │(knowledge → │  │engines   │
     │ sound)      │  │ space)      │  │(resonance│
     └──────┬─────┘  └──────┬──────┘  │analysis) │
            │               │         └────┬─────┘
            │               │              │
            ▼               ▼              ▼
         ┌──────────────────────────────────┐
         │           DERIVE                 │
         │  (Tuning Rules constrain all     │
         │   generation across systems)     │
         └──────────────┬───────────────────┘
                        │
              ┌─────────┼─────────┐
              ▼                   ▼
       ┌───────────┐       ┌───────────┐
       │  photon+  │       │  HAH-WAS  │
       │  (output  │       │ (verifies │
       │   stage)  │       │  output)  │
       └───────────┘       └───────────┘

DERIVE sits at the center: analysis from music-engines and memory from STORYLINES flow in; Tuning Rules constrain what flows out to photon+ (creative output) and HAH-WAS (epistemic verification).

Languages: TypeScript, Python AI/ML: Gemini, ChromaDB, LangChain, OpenAI Whisper Audio: Tone.js, Web Audio API, Librosa 3D & Spatial: React Three Fiber, D3-Force, Three.js, Rapier Physics Backend: Flask, Celery, Redis, Neo4j, FastAPI Infrastructure: pnpm monorepos, Docker, Capacitor

I spent 14 years as a founding member of Mashrou' Leila, an Arabic electro-pop band that became a voice for queer Arab communities. We played to hundreds of thousands, got banned in multiple countries, and learned — empirically, under pressure — what it means to scale culturally specific work globally without flattening it.

I studied architecture at the American University of Beirut and The Bartlett (UCL), specializing in spatial systems and architectural research. That training in how spaces organize human behavior now informs how I design computational systems.

The question connecting all of this: How do you build systems that preserve difference rather than erase it? Where friction is generative, not inefficient. Where untranslatability is a feature.

Currently: MEKENA NYC resident artist. Founder of Walaw Studio.

Localization Gap — When AI maps specific cultural knowledge onto generic categories, erasing what makes it meaningful.

Tuning Rules — Human-authored constraints applied to AI outputs to preserve cultural friction. The pilot governs the stochastic, not the deterministic.

Navigable Latency — Exploring knowledge through spatial voyaging rather than keyword search.

Negentropic Generation — AI output that increases specificity and order rather than trending toward homogeneity.

Resonance Cartography — Mapping the multi-dimensional topology of why creative work resonates across cultural boundaries.

Email: haig.papazian@gmail.com Studio: Walaw Studio Location: NYC

"Rupture is truth. False coherence erases."