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No Direction/Direction
The most discombobulating, yet thrilling part of composing is being without a plan of action for a session. Load an instrument, or noodle on a sound? Improvise some chords? Build a beat? Experiment with effects? Revisit an old project? This considering of options and trying out little things puts us in a space for something Continue reading
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Critical Listening
(Fernand Khnopff, Listening to Schumann [1883]) Producers who compose-record their own music spend a lot of time in critical listening mode. This is different from casual, everyday music listening, when the music washes over you and takes you into its space. Critical listening attempts to understand what’s really in play and at stake in a Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Tim Berners-Lee’s “This Is for Everyone” (2025)
“What I was beginning to see was that information was meaningless in isolation. Instead, what truly mattered was the relationship between one piece of information and the next. Context…” (59). “What you wanted, instead, was to encourage new and unexpected relationships between pieces of information to flourish. And, to do that, you had to let Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Bernt Spiegel’s “The Upper Half of the Motorcycle: on the unity of rider and machine” (2010)
“We are so well adapted to the things that we always have around us that we don’t see how they ‘actually’ are anymore, and thus we don’t even notice fundamental traits–for example, how unbelievably complicated it is to handle a motorcycle properly.” “But there’s a trick to understanding it: we can take this familiar thing, Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Richard W. Hamming’s “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn” (1997)
“How are you to recognize ‘fundamentals’? One test is they have lasted a long time. Another test is from the fundamentals all the rest of the field can be derived by using the standard methods in the field” (9). “Creativity seems, among other things, to be ‘usefully’ putting together things which were not perceived to Continue reading
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