Music always seemed an inaccessible art form to me. I never learned an instrument nor how to read music. I have always loved listening to music. I always felt a tinge of sadness or regret that it wasn’t a medium I could explore, beyond utterly primitive, jangly efforts.
We find ourselves at a time when our technological tools — our media and communication tools — evolve so rapidly that they make all forms of creativity increasingly accessible, even easy to try. The same is true for music, now. We see this trend with art generated by Artificial Intelligence — even though that art, however virtuosic, still seems to lack some vague something. Instead of a paucity of images, we now have an infinite assortment of new images at our fingertips. This glut is a new cultural reality, requiring some adjustment. (Please check out our new literary magazine, Liminal Journal, where all the art is generated by MidJourney).
I have been hovering around the idea of sharing this track for a while. I am genuinely curious to hear what people think of it (please leave a thought or comment). Through the newsletter, I find I have the opportunity to put it out into the world. I figure I might as well take the opportunity. I admit I would not have had courage to share it until I got a good deal of positive feedback from people close to me. Even my daughter (children can be your harshest critics) said she liked it.
How did this track happen? Essentially, I bought a new phone recently that had an updated version of Garageband, which was far more intuitive and easy to use. I found myself fascinated with Garageband for a week or so, discovering how you could create sequences of loops and then play the resulting loops like an instrument in themselves. All the loops used in this song were from ones available through the App. I stayed up late into the night, snorting Amazonian tobacco and getting into a semi-trance state, creating this track and a few others.
Years ago, I read Daniel J Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music, which discusses the science behind why we find music so enjoyable and what we seek from it. One thing I took from the book is that the enjoyment of music is found in the tension between repetition and novelty. Our brains constantly seek to solve for pattern. We hear the first few sentences of a story, or hear the first few notes of a song, and we are already, without conscious thought, projecting to the most likely conclusion. It is the tension between how our immediate expectations are thwarted and eventually resolved that leads to the pleasure of time-based art.
One of the questions that interests me is whether creativity is a general capacity that we can, with some practice, apply in different fields. For instance, in this case, does my relative level of skill in writing and thinking transfer to music, once the technical barrier to entry is eliminated? In some abstract sense, it seems if someone has a particular approach to thinking or writing, which involves finding and resolving certain tensions or pursuing certain ideas, those same tendencies might be valuable in musical expression. I don’t know — but I hope you enjoy the song.
Please let me know what you think of it in the comments, and if you would like me to share more in this vein, from time to time.
“The most critical aspect of the work, both artists said, was not the objects themselves, but the space between objects. In Miles’s case, he described the most important part of his solos as the empty space between notes, the “air” that he placed between one note and the next. Knowing precisely when to hit the next note, and allowing the listener time to anticipate it, is a hallmark of Davis’s genius. This is particularly apparent in his album Kind of Blue.” - Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music
My first song!