Impermanence, Creativity, Impression

Consider the sounds of the wilderness, and those of civilization.

The river, the plains, the highway, the supermarket: each has associated expectations of sounds and their combinations, just as there are associated expectations with "music".

Set aside expectations.  Create and sustain sound environments reflecting heightened awareness, gleaned from any and all sources of aesthetically pleasing auditory imagery.

Textures

Initial experience is perceptual impression.

Sounds associated with sensation evoke feeling first, then emotional and intellectual connections. Some connections are entirely personal; others may be more objective or abstract, as the directly sensual yields to symbol.

The composer of atmospheric works finds opportunities for juxtapositions of auditory images that can link the delicate and bold, the dense with the ethereal, the urgent with the serene, or any combination that enlivens experience.

I count myself among those whose interests in the art of sound are focused upon expressions of the reflective, the contemplative, and the imaginative.

Opposing Forces

The medium is sound.  Vibrations generated in every possible way create panoramas, of the mind as well as of the environment.  Composer and listener move within these atmospheres, together and separately.

Timeless and universal themes and motifs carry the seeds of future expressions, and these often arrive in contrast to expectations, unfettered by either tradition or rebellion.  The extraordinary takes its own course of possibilities, clashing with the commonplace, beyond the view of entertainment media, the microscope of the cultural status quo.

Aural Radiance

Postulate a musical form in which equilibrium of composition emerges in a gradual unfolding of tones. 

The combination of sounds evolves like a kind of luminosity that expands throughout the atmosphere, altering colors and hues, brightening hidden places and casting ever-changing shadows.

Imagery and Symbol

The observer of art apprehends meaning in visible expression and movement; the listener senses significance conveyed by tone, pattern, and auditory imagery.

In each case meaning is a part of larger connections, both cultural and personal, that arise from the past and are carried forward into the future, enlivened by human perception.

Long Moment

Lose track of beginning and ending.

Compose works that create a palpable sense of timelessness, utilizing sonic structures that contribute to sustaining that feeling.

Facility

Indiscriminate impressions reveal nothing and lead to no conclusive ideas.

Yet any impression may prove revelatory to creative imagination and judgement.  

The Real

Free the perceptions and attention to experience follows.

Consider distinctions between arts that distract and arts that enhance experience.  Musical compositions that turn the attention toward clarity of awareness will do the latter.

The Long View II

A composer may begin anywhere and go anywhere, particularly if guided by vision and principle and willing to put forth the effort required to develop and progress over the long run.

In the world of the arts it makes no difference if inspiration strikes suddenly, as it sometimes does, or if, as in my experience, the work evolves over the course of many decades to become what it is.

There is no alternative to devotion, and no substitute for following the way of the artist.

Intention and Impression

Art may be a barrier as well as a bridge.  As propaganda, it manipulates; as academic pretension, it obfuscates, often as a gambit to deny the self-evident for less than honorable purposes.

Intelligent listeners and observers owe no allegiance to such things, confident in their perceptual acuity and personal knowledge of cultural history.  Human nature will be as it is, while art, music, literature and other works of merit communicate directly, with integrity, to all who are capable of setting aside prejudice to give rational consideration to aesthetic experience.

Reflection and Reflex

In any media, the superficial is initially of paramount importance.  It is the instantaneous impression, the sudden sense of an image and the expression of reality it offers that communicates with force.

At this first critical moment, the percipient does more than observe, and projects emotional interests or needs and a fund of personal information upon the art form as an object of interest.  This may be seen as something of a poetic, or romantic, moment of interaction.

Then, given the receptive viewer or listener,  it is the content of the artistic work that sustains such involvement.  Thus much depends upon whether it is the audience, the personal ego, or the art to which the artist is devoted.

Aesthetic Expression

That which is good is self-evidently so, in need of apologies and explanations only in the course of shedding light upon its virtues.

In music, as in most arts, the simple, direct, and timeless find many forms, and ultimately these serve as auguries of near and distant visions.

Sound Composition

I contemplate settings until I hear their meaning.

I combine elements using the fund of sounds available to me until that meaning is brought into being.

Surface and Depth, Glamour and Clarity

Unconscious memory reproduces music imprinted in the brain with extremely fine accuracy.

But this is a form of involuntary musical imagery, akin to hallucination; it is obviously not the same as remembering a tune or listening to real music, and it has likely become more prevalent in the course of the century or so since the advent of recorded sound.  The condition of constantly perceiving musical events that do not depend upon actual sound vibrations would have been highly unusual as little as two hundred years ago, and certainly it would not have been as widespread in human consciousness as it it now.

It is possible that it may be more debilitating to the individual intellect than it appears, and may require an effort of will on the part of the percipient to end the phenomenon and to clear the mind; otherwise perception is diminished, rational thought is obscured, and attention is distracted.

It is also apparent that sound designs may be conceived and recorded that have the peculiar secondary effect of eliminating the narrowing of awareness produced by these "earworms" and renewing clarity of consciousness.

The interested observer may conclude, as I have, that certain musical compositions in the ambient style (though by no means the majority of these) that create both atmospheres and conditions in which active listening and passive hearing may take place-- the type of recordings Brian Eno famously described as being "as interesting as they are ignorable" --offer insights into the methods and technologies by which musical forms can be created that lend themselves to different auditory perceptions, particularly those conducive to elevated, as opposed to distracted, mental and emotional states.

Tone Language II

Musical communication is generally conveyed through rhythm, percussion, melody and harmony, tempo and instrumentation.  For the most part, the intent of the composer or musician is to communicate emotion.

If the essential emphasis in a composition, recording, or performance is placed upon tone and its atmospheric qualities, however, the focus of the work is on the sense of perception itself, and beyond that, to create a setting in which the listener's imaginative faculties may be engaged and stimulated.

In terms of sound, these are two separate and distinct paradigms.

Position, Movement, Perception

Movement through a setting alters the perception of sound.

In the environment of perceptive consciousness, while listening and hearing with the inner ear, movement takes place within the imagination, altering states of mind and creative vision.

Function

Value and meaning are given sounds for their beauty and for their effects as well.

The listener will appreciate the emotional connotations of natural sounds, human speech, and favorite musical works, as well as the clarity of a well-crafted recording, the aesthetic integrity of a finely rendered performance, and other such things of a more objective nature.

As broadly understood, the influences of sound and music upon temperament, attitude, and the spiritual or contemplative aspects of the psyche are of equal importance to their emotional and artistic qualities.

Clearly, beyond art and entertainment, music and sound designs may be created and experienced as enhancements to consciousness, and to a life well-lived.

Change. Transition.

Forms in time do not remain static.

They emerge, develop, disperse, and return to emerge again.  This, too, is the reality of sounds.

Music and the Uncanny

Sounds may be designed to evoke the simultaneously familiar and the unknown.

These atypical arrangements of sounds, with their elements of emergence, clustering, dispersal and re-forming, may challenge reason, and so provoke uncertainty, or a sense of strangeness, even given their simple, everyday nature as tones and musical patterns.

They may, at first, be easily rejected, rather than given intellectual consideration and analysis with the aim of aesthetic appreciation, but the curious listener will follow the threads of the familiar until absorbed by a new-- or different-- perception of music.

Absorption

Impressions of events over time are made upon every element of reality.

This is true of sounds.  This is true of ideas.

Resonance

Communications convey imagery and tone through every medium.

Such communications take both gross and subtle forms, as do the ways in which they are perceived.

Again, in the context of  "music" and its variations as "sound design", the composer imparts meaning by direct self-expression through numerous controlled actions, or by producing works via methods that are more or less detached yet retain a degree of aesthetic involvement.

Both present aspects of artistic vision, given their separate methods, and each is accessible to a wide variety of  listeners.

Aural Flux

In nature there are rhythmic movements and myriad beautiful sounds, yet they are not driven by rhythm and percussion, nor are they enhanced by melody and harmony.

Sound designs may be composed to reflect the perceptual effect of such environments and atmospheres, with their diversity of tones and dynamics. 

Moving Sounds

Consider the sonic journey that begins and ends in conjunction with the perception of time.

A linear awareness of time is manifest in musical forms of all types.

Postulate music or sound designs composed and expressed according to the idea of time as a continuum.

Percipient as Observer

Neither listening nor hearing is effortless.

Much depends upon the creative imagination of the listener.  Some seek nothing more than to fill a sense of emptiness, while others strive to expand awareness.

The artist's duty is not to make shared visions easy, but to make them possible.

Sound Poetics

Staccato bird calls, distant rains, creaking of tall oaks in the summer sun, voices over the hills.

Pursue these sounds, convert them from words into impressions, combine them in kaleidoscopic movements.

Bring forth the perception of atmospheres.

View, Focus, Redefine

The creative nature of the artist lends itself to a view of reality through the lens of aesthetic perception.

The creative act draws upon resources and experience in representing a perspective of the real, regardless of the medium employed or the context of the activity.  It is communication that informs concepts, which in turn evoke perception, or vision, if you will.

Painting, literature, sounds and music, teaching, learning, politics, athletics, sculpture and invention-- these may indeed be arts, given imagination, and all the better if tempered by moral reason and clarified by the force of virtue, these being timeless and universal.

Therein lies meaning, and most particularly that of what it means to be human. 

Scope, Outlook, Foresight

Development of artistic vision tethered to narrow forms may produce predictability of outcomes, as standard formulas particular to the musical genres demonstrate.

Instead, cultivate beauty as the inner ear of the perceptive, forward thinking listener anticipates it, in the wild.

Reason and Expression

Observe how excessive diversion and distraction blunts the edge of perception.

Consider the extent to which dullness of the intellect and of individual awareness renders emotion unreliable, even treacherous.

The artist must reach beyond the failures of moral reasoning engendered by cultural conditioning, or surrender to them.

Pop and the Fine

Similarities between the music of popular culture and that associated with refined or cultivated tastes are many, as illustrated throughout these various notes on creative perspectives and the arts.

Even so, these similarities are rarely acknowledged, as if the latter, even given its sophistication and rarefied intellectual attributes, is diminished by the understanding that the nature of both forms reflects the same focus on rhythm, melody, harmony, and other traditional aspects of music, particularly Western music.

Both have similar origins, both order sounds to similar effect, and each generates expectations in its listeners as to what constitutes music in terms of the elements mentioned. Yet neither prepares the listener for forms that are brought into being by artists who compose outside the strictures of the common and traditional.

Nevertheless, it is through the act of  listening itself that it becomes possible to hear with the contemplative or inner ear, and thereby interact with sounds designed beyond the "given", to ultimately expand the personal and cultural aesthetic in musical experience.

Pause, Perceive

Extend the immediate.

Take in the awareness of those things that go unnoticed.

Imaginative Variables

Environments contain unexpected elements that contribute to the atmosphere in unexpected ways.

In composition and experimentation, there are innumerable choices.  Each alters the total effect of the finished work irrevocably.  The extent to which the artist's sensibilities are manifest is also a choice, and my personal perspective is that the least interference results in the most compelling aesthetic result.

Each transformation ambient piece should be, more than a personal expression, an evocation for the listener's most desirable states of consciousness.

Mimesis, Abstraction

The art of transformation ambient composition echoes awareness.

As field recordings reproduce auditory events, sound designs may be composed in ways that reproduce diverse aspects of auditory perception.  The ultimate end of this process is a fullness of experience involving both active listening and passive hearing in the course of interacting with the musical expression.

The nature of such compositions, being suggestive rather than specific, lends an impression of being somewhat detached from linear time, and, with repeated listening, an impression of never sounding exactly the same.

Conjunctions

Transformation ambient music reflects the choices and the hand of the composer.

Neither solely generated by programming nor arranged according to traditional theories, the music of Black Mountain School is designed to bring separate sonic events into play simultaneously, with as little interference as possible and without particular regard for form, whereby their varied interactions combine to enhance environments and states of mind.

Fluidity

Movement over time is perceived in music as a flux or flow of sounds ordered to propulsive beats and rhythms, tightly synchronized and controlled.

Consider, in contrast, a continuity of sounds more deeply reflective of the manner of fluid dynamics, with internal currents, variations in pressure and depth, velocity, temperature, and other associated phenomena.

Rather than flowing according to the framework of an arrangement, as in a channel or canal, such a concept opens, alters, and expands the settings and scenarios in which musical movements occur, producing multifaceted forms-- tone clusters and lines, for example-- and directions, as does water in rivers, lakes, and oceans.

Stylization

The sounds of nature and human environments are not random, but part of a larger connectivity.

Sounds and visions and perspectives may be reproduced, and consciousness directed; they may also be suggested, and consciousness extended, elevated, and, above and beyond mundane expectations, liberated.

Clarity and Magic

Observe the multitudes of distractions and diversions, the ideological issues and the expectations associated with cultural and social norms.

In contrast, clarity of vision may appear to be of supernatural origin.

The Obvious and the Subtle

Emotional impression and critical interest are conveyed by words and music.

The sublime is conveyed by tone, mood, and atmosphere.

Shading

Shift focus from the obvious.

The critical sounds are masked by beat and rhythm.

Avenue, Trail, Broadcast

Sounds in the wild-- whether in distant fields or urban areas-- are unpredictable and asymmetrical.

A listener does not commit these soundscapes to memory, as may be done with a popular song or favorite musical work.  For the most part, music is created with the intent of imprinting memory, appealing to mnemonic devices both auditory and verbal in ways that are essentially artificial, with improvisational forms presenting the most variations within a musical arrangement.

While artificial, transformation ambient music is designed to create sonic atmospheres in ways similar to those that occur in the wild, or in conformity with sounds as they simply happen while moving through various environments.  Not meant to be committed to memory, yet appealing to the inner ear, they remain fresh and retain interest over time, enhancing settings and states of mind as well.

Perceptions in Obscurity

Accepting the "given" in regard to music, all the elements of understanding fall into place.

The listener then enjoys certain types of music, dislikes others, or is neutral in point of view regarding them. There is nothing to think about; either it provides subjective pleasure or it does not, whether it is a masterwork filled with passion and spiritual intensity or it merely has a good beat and you can dance to it.

The detached observer takes a different perspective, recognizes the various aspects of music for the effects they produce, considers their myriad forms and patterns, and notes the variables and extremes in dynamics, sophistication, technique, presentation and instrumentation that define the genres and appeal to both the popular and refined tastes and sensibilities.

Set aside the given of  "musical appreciation" along with the fashions, the attendant subcultures, the platitudes of "show business", and it becomes certain there is much more to the art of sound than adherence to cultural norms and well-worn styles.  Freed from form and formula, sounds and tones, in pattern and combination, can enhance consciousness and elevate experience in ways far beyond those to which listeners are accustomed.

To listen and to hear is prescience.

Sensation and Thought

Within and without consciousness, perceptual imagery takes objective and subjective forms.

See and hear, remember and imagine, and as artist, sculptor, dancer, writer, composer, communicator, express by giving form and being to experience.

Not Hearing, Not Listening, Not Music

Fragments of music pass through consciousness throughout the waking hours.

Sometimes these fragments linger after encountering a piece of music, and other times they simply arise spontaneously out of memory.

Consider whether this is a positive or negative effect, whether it is a pleasant diversion or a distraction, a disturbance of concentration, focus, and consciousness generally.  Certainly it is a common effect, and not abnormal in its commonality, but neither is it necessarily desirable.

An interesting secondary effect of the peculiar transformation ambient compositions discussed here is that the listener does not experience these "ear-worm" auditory perceptions while listening to them. They apparently disappear immediately, as if unhooked or detached from the listener's awareness, and the compositions do not take this form later, after listening.

It is a different way of encountering musical sounds altogether, reflecting prolonged efforts in the way of experimentation, contemplative discipline and aesthetic observation.

Currents

Genre music develops according to parameters of composition and style.

Currents of air and water move according to volume, density, gravity, the diverse shapes of topography and other influences like temperature or human intervention.

Release sounds from common form and formula to develop and aurally transform in similar ways.

Artifice Corresponding to the Natural

Generative music is the result of programming alone, whereas transformation sound design is manipulated by the composer for aesthetic purposes.

Creative work that is a product of inquiry, speculation, observation and exploration ultimately reflects, in its development, the sensibility of the artist.

As to the Black Mountain School project there is a conscious effort to shape and produce tone-poem environments that emerge and evolve as sounds do in the wild, as it were, or as tonal forms evoking movements and settings regarded in terms of peculiar, non-musical perceptions.

Examples would include such things as wind in trees, traffic noises, birds and insects, as well as patterns describing any type of natural or social activity. Other events-- like changes in the quality of light, architectural structures and textures, meteorological effects and states of mind-- are treated as aural possibilities as well.

Fundamentally, it is a search for different ways of listening and hearing that emerges in these compositions.

One Moment

Observe, and consider the real.

Respond, and give account.

Reaction, Response

The design of sound environments takes into account reasoning as well as emotion.

Both attitudes, the feeling and the thinking, reflect the consciousness of the listener, and both passive and conscious listening engagement take place in such environments.

The intention of the composition is to accommodate the full spectrum of auditory attention throughout, emphasizing interest with sound elements like tone and contrast while minimizing those such as rhythm and melody that tend to dominate concentration and focus.

Distinctions

Distinctive compositions bear the impress of the author or composer's vision.

The musician focuses on displays of technique and style; the composer, on self-expression and emotional relevance; the speculative artist or theorist, upon ideas and concepts related to sound, its effects and its revelations in regard to reason and the human experience.

Each perspective reflects a kind of quest.  The first is for acclaim or glory, the second for personal and aesthetic satisfaction, and the third seeks mystery, whether out of intellectual curiosity, a metaphysical turn of mind, a desire for expanding and understanding consciousness, or something else altogether, but beyond the mundane and emotionally subjective.

Flux and Passage

Change over time is gradual.

In contrast to sudden, dramatic events, the course of things appears static, but this is an illusion.

Sweeping changes come to pass in ways that seem undetectable except to the perceptive observer; in sound design, such effects contribute to an aesthetically pleasing listening experience and, often, to a more relaxed and alert state of mind in the listener.

Encounter, Response

Impression, followed by processes of envisioning, resulting in representations reflecting reality and the imagination.  Such is one concept of art among many.

So cycles of creativity continue, constantly revised, completed, restored, and renewed.  One artist gains perspective in regarding the work of another, and another painting, poem, or musical piece follows.

Ultimately, fully evolved and internalized, the artistic vision moves beyond the traditional into the personal, shaping and shaped by experience itself.

Variations in Pattern

Throughout the human and natural environments find designs, repetitions, change and development.

The myriad choices of tones, lines, spaces and clusters of notes and patterns combined in sketch music and transformation ambient music are reflective of such designs as those observed in sediment deposits and erosion, roads and trails, cloud formations and the movements of crowds or flocks of birds, to suggest a few obvious examples.

Sounds arranged and produced in this manner have very little to do with popular music-- but everything to do with sensory impressions of the good and the beautiful.