Omar, Week 1

Ooops, a little late. Forgot about doing this. Here goes:

So my project is centered around learning about and creating electronic music. I told Mark that I wanted to learn more about the nuances of the creative process of making music, and that I want to figure out why I enjoy it so much and what the best elements of the music I already make exactly are. So, with that in mind...

What I've been doing so far is, first, a lot of music listening. I've been listening to a lot of abstract and avant garde artists from as far back as Edgard Varese's poeme electronique to as modern as Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac, and discussing "what makes these songs tick," as my mentor, Mark, would say. We have been choosing songs to listen to--one from each of us--and then discussing them at night. For example, the one I chose to analyze for last night was Autechre's Fold4Wrap5 (I highly recommend it. It is crazy cool if you ask me).

But the really cool part about all of this is that Mark isn't satisfied with any of the observations I make, which made me realize that I've been focusing so much on the technical aspects of music--like rhythm, tonality, and structure--rather than the affective aspects of it, like how it makes me feel and what the moods and vibes of the songs actually are in definitive terms. It's opening my mind to think of pieces like Fold4Wrap5 as Mobius strips or Mandelbrot sets in an audio form, instead of just "that song that keeps on slowing down and speeding up and repeating."

I have several projects that he's assigned for me to do this week as an exercise in creativity. First, I need to construct a piece from a short, ~3 second melodic tune that he made up off the top of his head in like 10 seconds into a full, ~2minute long piece to explore what I can do with that. Second, I will try to construct a piece entirely from a single synthesizer sound or grain that sounds interesting ("crunchy" in Mark's terms). And finally, I've ordered a program called Record to work in concert with the music program I use, called Reason. My current program alone is pretty much entirely based on synthesizers and virtual samplers, but Record will allow me to record things of my own and manipulate them natively in the program instead of having to draw off of samples that other people have already made (who knows, maybe I'll sing a funky jam). I have a condenser microphone lying around, so what I need to do is find some interesting sound in the next few days that I can record and then build things off of that.

After these preliminary exercises, I'll hopefully have a greater understanding of what constitutes music, and how sound operates to produce an interesting musical experience. Yes, I could dive in and make techno jams immediately. But I am spending this time not to continue what I already can do, but to develop my style into something unique, so I think my experience so far has been really eye-opening. Sweet! :)