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Sit down and listen to it 50 times without distraction so that you know all the changes, turns, asides, tensions, contractions, contradictions, and undulations.
by CWuestefeld 17y ago
Sit down and listen to it 50 times without distraction so that you know all the changes, turns, asides, tensions, contractions, contradictions, and undulations.
In college I had a minor in electronic art. We'd sit through each other's performances and then comment on all the various artistic work that went into them.
The elephant in the room was that it was all BS. I couldn't count the number of times that someone told me "I appreciated the way you used X to emphasize Y". In truth, nothing had been farther from my mind; it just worked out that way.
So I think that a huge portion of what you're interpreting in the changes, turns, etc. are just happenstance. It's just that our minds are such incredible pattern-recognizing machines, and are so malleable, that it's trivially easy to spot some pattern and rationalize a whole lot of noise (in the information processing sense) into spurious meaning.
How else to explain someone deciding that Ursa Major looks like a bear?
- seabee 17y agoIt's valid to recognise a pattern, a technique that you used. Name it if you like. The mistake is only made when they believe the pattern was made intentionally. More often than not, the only thought entering your mind as you compose is 'this is pleasing, so I will keep it'. However, even if those facets of the music you interpreted exist by chance rather than by design, they still have value and are a source of inspiration. Conversely, bad designs exist. It's the outcome that matters; that's what you learn from. Not from intentions.
- ShardPhoenix 17y agoI think that's also part of the reason why distortion can sound good - it can add a lot of fake depth to the music.