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On Overhearing: Audible Portable Music
Is this a thing? Here and there in the city I’ve been noticing people walking and biking around with bluetooth speakers or their smartphones hidden in their backpacks, tucked in their pockets, or dangling from their belts, playing music. It’s like a mobile party of one. Yesterday, on an otherwise quiet street, I did… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: On Dominic Pettman’s “Sonic Intimacy”
“An interesting pedagogic exercise in sonic economics: identify and attend to the most prominent voices of capital. At the time of this writing, candidates might be Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, Christine Lagarde, Kanye West, Taylor Swift, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and so on. Toward the other end of the spectrum: a humming child laborer in… Continue reading
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Notes On Creativity As Blind Variation And Selective Retention
In a chapter on the sources of creativity in his book The Wandering Mind (2015), Michael C. Corballis draws on a 1960 article by D.T. Campbell (“Blind variation and selective retention in creative thought as in other knowledge processes.” Psychological Review 67, 380-400) about the constitutive elements of creative thought. Campbell distills the process into two… Continue reading
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Interface: On The Ergonomics Of Musical Instruments
“Most of the works are not about something–they are not trying to tell something–but they are more made like interfaces for the viewer.” – Cevdet Erek Recently I came across the music of the Turkish artist and musician Cevdet Erek, who creates sound art installation works that deal with sounds, space, and rhythm. Here is some… Continue reading
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Notes On Vybarr Cregan-Reid’s “Footsteps: How Running Makes Us Human”
“When running, thinking plays sixth fiddle to sensing–for hearing, seeing and feeling how places present themselves to our consciousness takes precedence over careful consideration.” – Vybarr Cregan-Reid, Footsteps, p. 56 Vybarr Cregan-Reid’s Footsteps: How Running Makes Us Human is a lucid and literary exploration of running. Cregan-Reid is an academic (professor of English) who has turned… Continue reading
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Notes On Editing Music
Editing is taking things out, getting rid of pointless part doublings and overlaps. This creates space which allows what is already there to fill it. Editing is nudging a part earlier or later to sync (or not sync) better with the others. Editing is dropping a part into a lower register, moving a pitch up or… Continue reading
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Ventrilo-Dialogue: A Poet Meets A Composer
Poet: I take an idea and unravel it into its component parts so that they lie in front of me— a set of word tools used to both assemble and constitute a prose structure based upon the potentials inherent in the idea but in an abstracted musical form. Composer: I take an idea and develop it using… Continue reading
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