Wrong (2002)

* "That is not music."

"What is music?"  Such an utterance has as much meaning as "This
sentence is false." or "Disobey every order!"  What then does a
musician do?  I propose that we not call ourselves "musicians".  Let's
not even call what we do "art".

"Art", like most other words, was invented by somebody else a long
time ago.  Who knows what it means in you when I say it?  Strangled
with connotation, saying "art" says nothing.  Let us kill "art" as we
would a lame horse: while it still has some dignity.

"Music" poses a similarly knotty problem.  The present society around
me values "music" at the precise dollar value the market will pay for
media holding the music.  This includes "tickets", which hold access
to "single-play" "live-action audio-visual" instances of the music.
"Producers of music" perfume, powder, wig, and corset "musicians",
betting that they will be cheaper to publicize, maintain, and replace
than simple prostitutes.  "Producers of music" invest almost all their
"capital" into brainwashing "the market" into believing the
"musicians" are sex objects.  "The market", in a primate urge to
conform (at least publicly) with the sex rules of the tribe, coughs up
vast fortunes in exchange for the media on which the "music" lives.
Not surprisingly, the programming of "the market" has little to do
with the contents of the media being sold, and much more with the
sexual objectification of the "musician".  The acutal contents of the
media certainly have less importance than the profits of the "Producer
of music", the brainwashing of the "market" resulting in the ongoing
health of those profits, and the sexual objectification of the
"musician" that ensures the proper "market" behavior.

Yet there are still those who can compose a piece of "music" that
neatly transports me past the limitations of my regular waking
consciousness.

In the name of clear, simple, explicit prose, let us no longer use
these words.  We are not making "art", we are communicating.  We are
not making "music," we are making sounds.  We are not "artists," we
are communicators.  We are not "musicians", we are sound designers.
We are then at least honest.

* "That is just noise."

Let us now dodge another completely impossible question; "What is
noise?"  Certainly, we have mathematical characterizations of signals
called "noise" (and we use colors to name them, of all things!).  The
results of my work are demonstrably not noise in this mathematical
sense.

If instead by "noise" we mean "incomprehensible" then we must ask
"incomprehensible how?"  Our minds are composites of sub-minds.  Each
sub-mind, a composite of sub-sub-minds, and so on.  That I can write
"and so on" and have you understand what I say is evidently a miracle.
That I can even write about what I am writing at times appears to be
more than I should be allowed.  All that aside, it also seems that
these sub-minds are connected; that they communicate with one another.
Dreaming is our own multitude all talking at the same time.  My
principle action of sound design is to tune in parts of myself that
are otherwise mute, and then broadcast that to physically distinct
minds.  That these parts sometimes speak simultaneously makes the
result seem incomprehensible, and some messages are certainly obscured
by others, but there is still evidence that communication is
happening.

To believe less is to believe that only I exist and that the rest of
you are all in my imagination.

The only thing that could not possibly be construed as noise is
silence, and silence does not exist.

* "That is just random."

Randomness may be the most valuable thing.  In the digital domain, the
only possible secret is a random number that you do not share.  In the
analog domain, I choose to share mine, as do most people.

I/we plan to construct a device for making names.  Names will be
culled from the purest randomness I/we can find.  In this way, I/we
will ask nothing other than the most infinite conglomeration of minds
into super minds to informing me/us of its perfect understanding.
Until then, I/we will name things based on our own understanding.  If
only randomness were so easy to come by.

* "That has been done before."

I find it difficult to compare my idea of music to painting,
photography, or film making.  In fact, I avoid using the word "music"
to refer to what I do.  It is simply communication, so I try to call
it that whenever it does not seem pretentious to do so.  At the same
time, painting a picture is also simply communication, and what I do
is definitely different from painting a picture.  More can be said of
what I do than "it is communication" and so to differentiate I make
comparisons with what other people do.  Yet, the statement "it is
communication" is all I am comfortable claiming.

Consider painting.  To me, the main difference between painting a
picture and what I do is that what I do involves elements of time.
Second, what I do is communicated primarily through our sense of
hearing, and what a painting does is communicated primarily through
our sense of sight.  Third, painting starts with materials that have
forms relatively far removed from what they eventually are shaped
into.  What I do is closer to what would be collage in the visual
realm.  There are more, but these are the most drastic differences.

Once painted, a painting has a certain stasis.  Everyone who sees the
painting sees the same thing.  It is basically the same painting years
from now as it was shortly after it was completed.  The communication
of the painting can be separated from time to a certain extent.

Perform the following thought experiment.  Take a song or poem you
have memorized, or pretend you have memorized one.  Now count how many
times the word "love" occurs in that song.  To perform this feat, our
minds play back the song in our heads.  It is as if we have a little
audio/video tape machine in our minds, and we must roll the tape to
access time-based memory.  It takes time to remember the words to the
song or poem.  Therefore, because what I do is primarily audible, it
can not possibly be separated from the time it occurs in.  This is the
secret of why music often has repetition, for we remember musical
communications in chains, and repetition with subtle variations is
easier for our minds to hold than constant variation.

Yet paintings do not actually exist outside of time.  Instead, they
are engineered to change as slowly as possible over time.  Paintings
hundreds of years old, for example, are now significantly different to
look at than they were just after the paint dried.  Furthermore,
everyone looks at a painting from a different angle, in different
light, in different framing surroundings, at a different time of the
day, or with a different amount of hunger or other discomfort.  Many
influences that cannot be separated from time can play upon any
observer of anything or the conditions surrounding observation.

There is not even an abstraction we can make about the painting that
exists separately from time.  Many paintings are composed in such a
way that they lead the focus of the viewer over their surface.  In
some paintings, we don't see everything until we view the painting
several times.  Most people don't jog through galleries of paintings.
Instead, they stand and contemplate each hanging painting for some
time before moving on to the next.

If we remove the restriction "must start with nothing but a painter,
brushes, paint, and otherwise blank canvas" from the aim of painting,
we arrive at collage and photography.  Everything we have said so far
about painting could be said of these as well.  What I do is closer to
these, however, since I often start with sounds I have recorded, and
certainly always with more than a musical staff upon which I can draw
notes, or a specific instrument upon which I can arrange gestures.

Then we come to video.  This exists in time like sound.  In fact,
there is a sound component to it that usually shares equal importance
with the visible component.  Yet because video takes place on multiple
sense organs simultaneously, it takes a lot of our attention and of
necessity drowns out much of everything else that may be going on
around it.  On the contrary, some of what I do could be considered
"furniture music" -- not to be given attention, but instead to become
part of the setting for other activities.  While it might be possible
with special playback devices, making synchronous audio and video that
is part of a background is difficult, if not impossible.

To compare painting, collage, photography, and video to what I do is
to say that those are all primarily concerned with what you see, and I
am primarily concerned with what you hear.  Even then, we're on thin
ice.

What do we have left?  Some questions that seem more interesting than
others, this time around.

  What set of senses takes in most of the communication?

In my case, hearing takes in most of the communication.

  How is the communication divided into pieces?  How much of this
  division is worked out by the communicator and how much by the
  recipients of the communication?

In my case, this is by the moment to moment creation of the sound.  It
could also be chunked into results of specific gestures, changes in
the loudest partial frequency, or most importantly, changes in how the
mind of the listener arbitrarily chunk the sound.

  Is the order in which those pieces are presented mostly decided upon
  by the communicator or by the recipient of the communication?

In my case, this is all decided by me.  Although, repeated listenings
of a recording may form essentially different communications.

  Is a memory of the communication linear or random?  In other words,
  at what granularity can we remember the communication?

In my case, this is linear.

  How much of the communication is simulation or reproduction of sense
  data that would normally occur otherwise?  If there is any planned
  simulation or reproduction, how purposefully distorted is it?

In my case, this is some, usually less than half, sometimes all.

  How much is the generation of the communication happening in the
  presence of the ones receiving the communication?

When I record, the generation of the sound is all abstract to the
listener.  When I perform, the generation of the sound is mostly due
to gestures done in the presence of the listener, although some chunks
of sound caused by certain gestures may be recordings.

  How much of the communication is verbal?

In my case, the listener expects to hear something.  I am
experimenting with verbal communication more at the time of this
writing than I have before.  Still, the words are cut up or symbolic
of meanings secondary to their denotation.

  What expectations are present in a recipient of the communication?

It is unclear what generalities can be made about the expectations of
the listener.  In some cases, listeners have such a narrow definition
of "music" that the expectation for "music" to occur, and subsequent
difficulty mapping what is actually happening to the narrow
preconceived idea, make the whole experience so frustrating that they
can't even receive any of the communication for all the noise of their
raging internal dialog.

  How much of the communication is meant for the conscious, wakeful
  attention of the recipient?

In my case, precious little, and that is usually the associated
written material that you read to frame the piece.

  How much framing is necessary to separate the communication from its
  environment?

I like to present the communication in conjunction with a little
written essay to explain what is going on and perhaps give a strategy
for listening.

* "Anybody can do that."

My process is designed around several focal ideas.  First, that what I
want to communicate as a result of the process does not ultimately
originate in my usual, waking, verbal consciousness.  Rather, our
minds assumed to be composed of sub-parts in communication, a
communication from a part for which grammar or images are useless.
Second, that finger training is inefficient.  Note that this does not
rule out finger training, but merely discourages its use as a support
beam for the rest of the structure.  Third, that the communication
should ideally happen in real time and in proximity to the listener.

To allow non-verbal parts of myself to communicate outside myself, I
try to get my usual consciousness to "let go".  It is a curious
arrangement, but the words are usually in command of the rest, and for
such communications as I am interested in, words must abdicate.  The
non-verbal parts have little finger training, in fact they might be
impossible to so train, so I choose relatively simple control surfaces
and let them guide our fingers without consciously judging the
results.  The trick of getting into this sort of trance is facilitated
by starting with sounds that cannot occur as part of speech.  The
control surface is attached to low-latency audio synthesis devices
designed to provide a rich vocabulary of sounds.  The bulk of the work
associated with my sound design is in the implementation of this all
important control-synthesis system.

One who would waste ten or more years of his life training his or her
fingers to do the work that an inexpensive machine could be quickly
programmed for is obviously a fool.  There is nothing particularly
wrong with being a fool, of course, and we are all fools of this sort
in one way or another.  But finger training is too often perceived as
a non-negotiable requirement for making music.  One might then ask, is
good penmanship a requirement for writing poetry?  But the process of
writing poetry and performing music are so different, the comparison
isn't meaningful.  Nevertheless, I reject any absolute requirement for
finger training.

The process of programming is moving ideas from one paradigm into
another.  In this sense, we are all programmers.  The highest order of
programming is our self construction.  The penultimate order is our
communication with others.  We are all communicators.  We are
ultimately familiar only with our sense organs, such as they are.  Let
us all be the best programmers we can.

Let the audience take back the stage.  That separation between the
performer and the audience is an illusion.  Do not believe it.  It is
a short term fix for the closed minded and the constipated so that
they can work their sick and atrophied imagination.  The play takes
place in your mind.  If it did not, the performers would appear to you
as raving mongoloid children.

Anybody can do it.

* "I don't like it."

01) This meta-model has meaning, but not completion.  "The map is not
    the territory."

02) We, or rather, our minds, can be organized into sub-minds.

03) These sub-minds can then be organized into sub-sub-minds, and so
    on.  Call them all "parts".

04) Each part may communicate with some other part.  This does not
    force the receiving part to communicate back.

05) The organization need not follow a strict hierarchy, nor even a
    heterarchy.  The organization more accurately matches a directed
    graph where communication (verbal or otherwise) occurs along
    edges.

06) Several parts working in concert can restructure this part-wise
    organization.

07) The mechanism of communication between parts is not necessarily
    verbal, grammatical, or even sensual.

08) We may extend our model outside of ourselves.  Our communication
    with other people, animals, plants, and even inanimate objects can
    be taken as parts communicating.

09) Any part may send communications to any other part.

10) One part may send or receive communications in different ways.

11) A part can not predict the interpretation of a communication it
    sends.

12) Different parts may react differently to the same communication.

13) When we say "I", we really mean "we".

14) Not all parts of ourselves receive a message in response to a
    external communication.

15) Of those parts that recieve a message from an external
    communication, not all receive the same message.

16) It is only possible to say "some parts of myself do not sympathize
    with it."

17) Whether or not "you liked it" is only relevant to "you".  Birds
    sing whether or not "you like it" too, yet you do not resent the
    birds (or do you?).