perception
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Music’s Negative Space
M.C. Escher, Sky and Water I (1938) Pause the music that soundtracks you.Notice silence, music’s other half. Listen to its space, your thoughts, the wind.Tune in to a soundscape without spacing out. To hear what music is saying, experience what it replaces. Continue reading
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Music’s Subtle Changes Over Time
Music is most magical when it creates perceptual sleights of ear and sounds more than the sum of its parts. Something is happening, but you can’t quite figure out how. Subtle changes over time, once noticed, are the meaningful details and clues to organizing principles: beats interlocking into polyrhythm,pitches coalescing into chords,melting timbre-textures,background moving to Continue reading
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Perception Lessons
(Photo: Mathilda Khoo) “You see, if you live by perception, as all artists must, then you sometimes have to wait for a long time for your mind to tell you the next step to take.” Agnes Martin “Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do.” Alva Noe Continue reading
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Notes On Practice As Repetition Without Repetition
In the 1920s, Nikolai Bernstein, a mostly self-taught neurophysiologist and pioneer in the field of motor control, studied the movements of blacksmiths at Moscow’s Central Institute of Labor. Bernstein used cyclographic photography techniques to track the motions used to cut metal with a chisel and hammer. (See photo above.) His research showed how repeating movements Continue reading
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Trompe-L’Oreille: Notes On An Enchanting Mix
Hieronymus Bosch, The Conjurer (c. 1496 and 1525). An enchanting mix is a sleight of the producer’s hand–a kind of conjuring trick–insofar that it creates the impression that you’re hearing more than you’re hearing, or that somehow the music extends beyond what you’re able to hear—as if it’s fooling your ears. But by what means Continue reading
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Micro-Information As Subliminal Feeling: Learning About Musical Phrasing
When I studied music in university, my percussion lessons frequently touched on the topic of phrasing. My teacher would listen to me play through a piece and then suggest ways to improve its rendition. Most of the time, this involved considering alternate ways to play a passage, which I needed because I was so concerned Continue reading
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Flip
Whether you’re a performer or a listener, when you’re involved in music you’re flipping your attention all the time, orienting it from one place to another, focusing on something near or far, just past or maybe about to happen, from the sounds to your emotions and then back to the sounds, in a repeating feedback Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Agnes Martin On Living By Perception
Agnes Martin, Friendship (1963) “You see, if you live by perception, as all artists must, then you sometimes have to wait for a long time for your mind to tell you the next step to take.” (“‘What We Make, Is What We Feel’: Agnes Martin on Her Meditative Practice, in 1976” available at artnews) Continue reading
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Traces
trace – a mark, object, or other indication of the existence or passing of something Music is a space-generator, and one of the unexpected gifts of being a musician is that making music generates a space in which to think about it. When I play I’m usually thinking about several things at once, including moment-to-moment Continue reading
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