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Musical Materials
Pieter Gerritsz. van Roestraten, Still Life with Musical Instruments (c. 1650) A question pops up when I make music: What are my materials? It often feels like I’m lacking the sonic stuff that others surely have. Questions about materials multiply: What sounds am I using? Where are these sounds from? Are these the right sounds?… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: John Berger’s “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos” (2026)
“The problem of time is like the darkness of the sky. Every event is inscribed in its own time. Events may cluster and their times overlap, but the time in common between events does not extend as law beyond the clustering” (13). “Most workers in the world carry the same physical stigma: a sign of… Continue reading
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Database: A.G. Cook On Total Opposite Sounds
“Any producer who claims to have whatever sound is five seconds away from opening up something that will create the total opposite. So if anything, my sound is really trying to bring that to the forefront.” A.G. Cook database (a cache of perceptions) (slower walks) Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: W.G. Sebald’s “The Rings of Saturn” (1995)
“I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert,… Continue reading
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Music Production Quandaries (And Solutions)
Music production involves a computer trackpad and screen. Figure out how to transcend them. The music’s goal state is a recording that isn’t a performance, but an evocation of one, a simulation of music-making that never transpired in real time. But are there other ways the music can perform? New instruments are developed at a… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Dave Eggers’ “Contrapposto: A Novel” (2026)
“Rembrandt lived three hundred years ago and knew far more than we do now. How is that? Why is that? Why have we gotten less skilled, less competent, less knowledgeable, less adept and versatile? How can that be?” (168). “You have been mistaught! You have been fed the lie that intent is achievement. It is… Continue reading
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Keywords: Sympathetic Resonance
Sarangi with its sympathetic strings Touch one string and the others around it begin vibrating, each in its own way. The surrounding strings are sympathetic to what the main string is saying, humming along with it, adding their overtones into the mix, as if saying I hear you. Sympathetic resonance happens when a passive vibratory… Continue reading
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