Why do you write music ?

Wasn't sure where to put this & didn't want to start a new thread

I was thinking about the difference between visual art & audio art, & why one might be drawn to making one or the other or both. As with most thinks, it can be boiled down to psychedelic hippie crap. Specifically, the two minds.

The first of course being the "lower" human mind, the personality or ego or whatever you want to call it. The one that functions on conventional emotions. I link visual art to this mind. Texture, colour, shape, etc all have a very real & visceral feel to them. You can look at an abstract series of red blotches & still get that it represents anger, or touch a surface & have an instant sensual reaction (by sensual I don't mean "you'll get a boner" btw). And of course more often than not visual art resembles or directly utilizes objects from our physical world.

Audio, lacking a corporeal form, is by nature more ethereal. Particularly electronic music, which with machinery has been abstracted away from simple cause/effect relationships like "dude plucks string, hears twangy vibration". In some cases sounds may be generated, arranged, recorded, & performed entirely from within a computer, only stepping out into the real world at the end of the line (maybe).

For me, listening to this sort of music does not conjure up obvious emotions but instead stranger feelings that are hard to express in words. Remembering a place you've never seen, or the sense that the laws of reality could very well rewrite themselves at any moment & in fact are in a way you're only aware of on the deepest level. That's what I think of as high brain (GET IT?) multiverse conciousness thoughts.

Of course, there is a ton of music that does express an obvious emotion, but most of it is lyrical stuff that literally says "this is how I feel" & ties it back to the human experience (maybe that's why so many people prefer music with words in it). Play a piece of instrumental music for 10 people & you might get 10 different opinions on what it's expressing, & all of them will be to some degree compromised by centuries of cultural symbolism that has been forced upon these reflections of unexpressable feelings. Maybe that's why so much pop music sounds the same - it's all one very specific pattern of music used to express safe ideas like dancin' & sexin'. It's easy to listen to without having your mind drift off into strange, inhuman waters.

that's muh bit

Because I can.

  On 12/15/2011 at 4:10 PM, Cryptowen said:

Wasn't sure where to put this & didn't want to start a new thread

 

I was thinking about the difference between visual art & audio art, & why one might be drawn to making one or the other or both. As with most thinks, it can be boiled down to psychedelic hippie crap. Specifically, the two minds.

 

The first of course being the "lower" human mind, the personality or ego or whatever you want to call it. The one that functions on conventional emotions. I link visual art to this mind. Texture, colour, shape, etc all have a very real & visceral feel to them. You can look at an abstract series of red blotches & still get that it represents anger, or touch a surface & have an instant sensual reaction (by sensual I don't mean "you'll get a boner" btw). And of course more often than not visual art resembles or directly utilizes objects from our physical world.

 

Audio, lacking a corporeal form, is by nature more ethereal. Particularly electronic music, which with machinery has been abstracted away from simple cause/effect relationships like "dude plucks string, hears twangy vibration". In some cases sounds may be generated, arranged, recorded, & performed entirely from within a computer, only stepping out into the real world at the end of the line (maybe).

 

For me, listening to this sort of music does not conjure up obvious emotions but instead stranger feelings that are hard to express in words. Remembering a place you've never seen, or the sense that the laws of reality could very well rewrite themselves at any moment & in fact are in a way you're only aware of on the deepest level. That's what I think of as high brain (GET IT?) multiverse conciousness thoughts.

 

Of course, there is a ton of music that does express an obvious emotion, but most of it is lyrical stuff that literally says "this is how I feel" & ties it back to the human experience (maybe that's why so many people prefer music with words in it). Play a piece of instrumental music for 10 people & you might get 10 different opinions on what it's expressing, & all of them will be to some degree compromised by centuries of cultural symbolism that has been forced upon these reflections of unexpressable feelings. Maybe that's why so much pop music sounds the same - it's all one very specific pattern of music used to express safe ideas like dancin' & sexin'. It's easy to listen to without having your mind drift off into strange, inhuman waters.

 

that's muh bit

I like this.

make music for the things already mentioned in this thread, plus some sort of sense of escape I guess

I'm more curious about what motives grandma's nationwide to keep knitting doilies,

  On 12/15/2011 at 4:10 PM, Cryptowen said:

Wasn't sure where to put this & didn't want to start a new thread

 

I was thinking about the difference between visual art & audio art, & why one might be drawn to making one or the other or both. As with most thinks, it can be boiled down to psychedelic hippie crap. Specifically, the two minds.

 

The first of course being the "lower" human mind, the personality or ego or whatever you want to call it. The one that functions on conventional emotions. I link visual art to this mind. Texture, colour, shape, etc all have a very real & visceral feel to them. You can look at an abstract series of red blotches & still get that it represents anger, or touch a surface & have an instant sensual reaction (by sensual I don't mean "you'll get a boner" btw). And of course more often than not visual art resembles or directly utilizes objects from our physical world.

 

Audio, lacking a corporeal form, is by nature more ethereal. Particularly electronic music, which with machinery has been abstracted away from simple cause/effect relationships like "dude plucks string, hears twangy vibration". In some cases sounds may be generated, arranged, recorded, & performed entirely from within a computer, only stepping out into the real world at the end of the line (maybe).

 

For me, listening to this sort of music does not conjure up obvious emotions but instead stranger feelings that are hard to express in words. Remembering a place you've never seen, or the sense that the laws of reality could very well rewrite themselves at any moment & in fact are in a way you're only aware of on the deepest level. That's what I think of as high brain (GET IT?) multiverse conciousness thoughts.

 

Of course, there is a ton of music that does express an obvious emotion, but most of it is lyrical stuff that literally says "this is how I feel" & ties it back to the human experience (maybe that's why so many people prefer music with words in it). Play a piece of instrumental music for 10 people & you might get 10 different opinions on what it's expressing, & all of them will be to some degree compromised by centuries of cultural symbolism that has been forced upon these reflections of unexpressable feelings. Maybe that's why so much pop music sounds the same - it's all one very specific pattern of music used to express safe ideas like dancin' & sexin'. It's easy to listen to without having your mind drift off into strange, inhuman waters.

 

that's muh bit

So what youre basically saying is: smoke weed, get a boner, do safe dancin and sexin, good clean fun, I get it mate !

man, music is soooo subjective.

Anyway I make music because:

1. My head is always full of music. It has to come out somehow.

2. Only I can make the music I really want to hear. Not that I'm not inspired by other musicians, or make any claims regarding my skillz, but I've my own particular ideas I'm working on.

3. It adds substantially to my quality of life, and means I've always new things to learn.

4. It's like having a secret alter ego.

5. It's fun.

I like making electronic music specifically, because:

1. It's like painting and sculpting and having all the materials you need available to you on the fly, except with sound.

2. It's the closest I will ever get to having the music I hear in my head available outside of my head. In some ways, I think electronic music has the potential to be profoundly intimate that way.

  On 12/16/2011 at 1:30 AM, TwiddleBot said:

2. Only I can make the music I really want to hear. Not that I'm not inspired by other musicians, or make any claims regarding my skillz, but I've my own particular ideas I'm working on.

Thing is, for me working on music is way more fun than listening to music. So even working on a mediocre song is more enjoyable than listening to a really good song (well, maybe not a really really good song, but only for the first time).

  On 12/16/2011 at 1:30 AM, TwiddleBot said:

I like making electronic music specifically, because:

 

2. It's the closest I will ever get to having the music I hear in my head available outside of my head. In some ways, I think electronic music has the potential to be profoundly intimate that way.

very good point ! (or at least a point we share).

the tools of electronic music allows you to get out of your head the sounds you have in it better than any other tools. + I think that electronic music culture has a wider mind-opening towards the other music cultures (rock, classical, traditional music, and so on) than these cultures have the other way.

If you consider it that way, then you can consider to put any instruments or more generally any sounds in your tracks and then your sound-palette has no limit (except the very narrow limits of your mind obviously ^^). I think I'm wandering from what you said.

Just that imo the wider is your open-mindedness towards music, the more sounds you can use, the more intimacy you can reach. If what you want to reach is intimacy of course.

I make music because music drives me. It makes me feel like I have a place in this world. I'm able to remove me from myself and tap into my "true" self - far outside of any daily troubles or material needs. It's like, my thoughts can actually be expressed. I know this is a very introverted way of looking at it but I think music is really the one form of communication that links all humans together - it's the universal language.

to get chicks and to have a reason to burn more herb