Material

Nature yields to impermanence.

To reflect upon the totality of available recorded music is to be aware of inevitable change.

Sound, System, Synthesis

Ultimately, the concept of music is undefined.

What is understood is the art of sound as it relates to individual and group sensibilities in subjective ways, while the objective outlines, analyses, and critical observations of technique, style, and expression carry equal weight in specialized cultural contexts.

I explore, ranging far afield.

Fire of Spirit

Of the arts, music is burdened most by social constructs vis-à-vis conformity in terms of sound, fashionability, political stances, and other things of this nature.

In addition to the dull and mediocre, works that are absurdly outré are conferred the status of acceptability if they conform to the collective sensibilities of a mass audience or are granted recognition by academic institutions or media conglomerates. 

For the imaginative composer and the discriminating listener as well, it is fortunate that the aforementioned scenarios need no longer be formidable obstacles to creative expression.

Saturation

Listeners experience the perception of musical forms as they experience culture.

Certain impressions are individual and relate to personal experience; others suggest social environments and relationships as well as collective frames of reference.

Between composer and listener is a point of contact, a merging of tone, idea, and feeling.

Myth and Legend

Predictability yields excess as well as ennui.

As genre loses individually, it is re-framed in bombast, as no amount of subtlety can disguise the banal. Evidence of this failure of imagination is everywhere plentiful, and opposition to it, in terms of the art of sound, is the responsibility of both composer and listener.

Promoveo, promovi, promotum.

Increase

Expansion of experience enlarges the capacity for perceptual awareness.

As engagement with the art of sound grows, it becomes possible to move beyond personal bias into wider appreciation of diversity, discernment of fullness of expression in addition to proficiency of technique, and respect for the conceptual and philosophical as well as the affective and energetic.

The opening of the mind's eye and inner ear of imagination heralds the arrival of what is yet to be.

Sound and Reasoning

The art of listening recognizes beauty in a combination of elements, including thought and feeling as well as environmental acoustical processes and properties.

Moving through the public square the listener encounters myriad sonic atmospheres, some static and confined to particular areas, others relatively unfettered, and all perceived within the dynamic of the listener's activities. Within the personal environment, the listener may exercise greater influence over the listening experience, yet various aspects of the quality of sound, as well as movement within the more intimate setting, similarly engage the mind and emotions.

If the composer's aims are finely delineated and artistic sound works, it is absolutely essential to give consideration to the perceptivity, desirable state of mind, and consciousness of the potential listener with the same attention given to that of the fabrication of the creative auditory environment.

Continuance

Within the atmosphere, the listener moves and participates.

Giving attention to sound means fully experiencing its effects, which may evoke emotions, ideas, reflection, and reverie.  The challenge for the composer is to bring about and sustain these effects in ways that enhance, rather than dominate consciousness, providing listeners a mood of equanimity as well as heightened sensory awareness.

Movement, Inward and Outward

Sound events link perception to memory.

Every element of experience contributes to intellectual and emotional response, and every individual completes a unique perspective within the listening experience.

Like the musician, the composer may choose to project and interpret feeling and attitude; even so, it is possible, on the other hand, to encompass, through reason, art, and act, a worldview to engage and contemplate.

Shadings II

Perception ignites idea.

Idea and action converge.

The idea is to capture the atmosphere of an event, real or imaginary, and give it form through sound that represents the content of that aural setting, the diversity of its sonic elements, and the dynamic manner in which it enters the listener's awareness. In terms of action, aesthetic choices applied to design, structure, and manipulation of sound technology and production are brought to bear in the creation of the total effect of the work.

Ambiguity

Perceptions are identified in the context of knowledge and experience.

It is the sound of the uncanny that mystifies; it seizes imagination and alters perspectives in ways the familiar, that is to say the musically generic and exceedingly common, can not.

Sustain

Respect for consciousness and being demands the transcendence of mundane attachments.

The arts do not exist to serve vanity or populist politics.  With vision, observe widely, feel deeply, express fully; with any media, elevate virtue and exalt vitality in gesture. With sound, particularly, convey perceptivity and clarity through tone, and give voice to the inexpressible.

Manner and the Thing Done

Observe, in the course of events, those things that are constant and those that are impermanent.

Custom and culture inform the arts, but the artist determines the extent to which their pressures influence the work of a lifetime.

Conditions for Perceptivity

Understanding, intuition, reason, perception, action.

Seeking virtue, observe the vitality of the virtuous, constantly enduring.  These are the arts that expand, fill, and elevate consciousness with idea, feeling, spirit, and ideal.

Thin Air

All that will be arises from all that came before.

It is foresight that envisions and creates the leading edge of theory and practice, called, in the arts, the avant-garde.  Yet regardless of perspective, it does not exist without foundation.  Eliot's poetry evokes by allusion as well as by juxtaposition; William Burroughs' fragmentary prose delineates classic themes of human conflict through the imagery of surrealistic film noir.  Andy Warhol's visual art frames a modern world view while encompassing artistic expressions of time past.  The unique experimental and ambient recordings of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno owe as much or more to the unexpected and under-appreciated minimalist response to atonality in classical music as to the history of pop and rock music.

Progress cannot allow itself to be bound and gagged by subjection to immediacy, or mere novelty, any more than by false sentimentality or nostalgia.

Horizon Lines

In the wake of dynamic changes in cultural perspective, obsolete ideas are abandoned.

At the forefront of such changes, understanding depends upon foresight; risks are taken, predictive analysis and experimentation are implemented, and clarity of reason yields possibilities.

Like any artist, the composer must weigh the known against the unknown, and act accordingly.  To do less is to act foolishly in a realm fraught with unintended consequences and, ultimately, failure. 

Nonetheless, to choose wisely is to illuminate, through vision as well as sound.

Design and Intent

The arts inform as well as entertain, and diverse media lend themselves to various purposes.

While there is nothing unusual about music as an enhancement to contemplative or introspective experience, its value and function as such is not as clearly evident as its roles in popular listening diversion, dance, or even in the contexts of religion and spirituality.  

As one may become lost in thought, so it is possible for sound to displace the ego and direct the attention towards a consciousness of things greater than oneself; and thus listener and composer aspire and strive together.

Luminosity of Sound

Consider the imaginative moment, when the creative idea takes form and begins its progress to expression.

Inspiration and intuition take hold, the burden of the temporal and impermanent is cast off; thought unites with action to bring a perspective into being that may be shared with anyone.

The peculiar art of sound is a contemplative one, and unlike music that only serves, for the most part, as cultural entertainment, it exists to elevate and expand the consciousness of both composer and listener through insight and the aesthetic experience.

Setting and Story

All forms of imagery travel with the imagination.

Where the mind reaches, so does narrative and sound.  Every event brings forth music shaped by the surroundings and their myriad elements, whether dramatic or subtle, while the merest moment holds an overabundance of sonic meaning.

Sense, Mind, Knowing

Life as it is experienced is beyond its representations.

The best of its representations make that clearly understood.

Tone and Temperament

Reach the deep.

When extending perception outwardly or contemplating consciousness inwardly, follow the sounds of life wherever they lead. 

Moon Rising, Approaching Shadows

The art of metaphor speaks through aural imagery as it does through verbal imagery.

Fix moments to sounds within them:  Pacific sunset, canyon rim, pine woods in autumn rain, eclipse over Maryland, subway in Budapest, dim and foggy night through a window. These are the sounds of blood, bone, nerve and consciousness, discovered through instrument and studio, experience and the inner ear. Brought into being, they emerge, converge, and are scattered, their meanings to be formed again in every listening setting.

Regarding the Experimental

Identify the diverse sounds encountered in the routine order of the day; observe tone, duration, and patterns over extended periods.

Consider what music would be like if, rather than existing as an expression of idea and emotion, its origins were in the re-creations of atmospheres through a conscious stylization of perceived auditory phenomena.

Unstopping

Superficially, art is omnipresent.

But art that inspires vision, and sounds that evoke the unheard, will be nonetheless, and will be unexpected.

Detachment

Approach to creative action, whether inspired or contrived, concerns expression and representation.

Decisions regarding means and methods can be considered in terms of  "creating a reality", and by doing so, exploring what reality is and what it means. 

Ears to Hear

In the popular imagination, entertainment and diversion laden with visuals increasingly obscures direct personal experience.

The "pop mind" is necessarily one that is formed and focused through collective ideas, imagery, and subjection to immediacy, an authoritarian mass conformity of attention. Clearly, such a burden upon consciousness degrades contemplative reflection and gives rise to a host of social issues caused by mental and emotional impediments to existential freedom.

Neither engagement nor disengagement is the way of the artist. It is the integrity of the creative work that is the essential element.

Transmission VIII

All communications take place in the context of environment.

Culture, society, circumstance, and time cannot be set aside in order to convey meaning, regardless of the extent of its significance.  This is a fact of life that is no less true in the arts.

Even so, there remain expressions that cannot be brought into being under the burden of intellectual compromise, if artistic principles are are to have any value at all.  

Immensity

The greatest of rhythms are, in their depth, range, and temporal scope, beyond sensory experience.

Reality on this scale is comprehensible only in the abstract, yet it may be suggested through expressive art.

Pursuit

To know with the senses is to participate in the human experience.

Commitment to vision is commitment to audience.

Emergence, Convergence, and Dispersal

Historically, music sounds nothing like auditory phenomena in the world at large.

Rather than seeking to express the personal, I compose and create by listening to the surroundings, considering the various aural impressions within, then finding and combining sounds that re-imagine, reflect, and represent the experience.

Plainness and Intricacy

Find nature, find being.  This is simplicity.

But this presupposes "nature" to be outside awareness. It is not. Such an idea is, like many, only a delusion of subjectivity. Birds and wildlife enter and cross the grounds; outside the pull of the Earth's gravity, one is weightless. The extent to which analysis has meaning is valuable, and beyond that, it is a pointless exercise, an obstacle to discernment.  To lose consciousness of one's true nature is a failure of rationality.

Eliminate the excessive; broaden the focus, extend the senses, and understanding follows.

The composer would do well to begin creative endeavors with this thought in mind: out of the simple evolves the complex, yet complexity expands into simplicity.  

Background, Being

Sounds, unceasing, go unheard.

Attention is fixed elsewhere in the scheme of the mundane, of work and play.

It is possible to know and hear the moment now in the surroundings, to sense with the inner ear the totality of experience, and to realize more aural beauty, in the imagination, than the sounds of music alone evoke.

Formless Change

What will be, is not now.

Putting aside the common ideas of music, think of sounds composed like a pool of water, clear and beautiful, but indistinct; still, yet contained in a flow impossible to fully grasp, measure, or capture.

Sonic Fields

Begin with the idea of creating something other than music using aesthetically complementary sounds.

Reproduce sounds as they occur spontaneously in human environments as well as in natural ones. Treat the studio as an instrument in developing and manipulating sound elements and aural effects.

Set aside musical ideas in favor of gesture, collage, layering, and striking placement of tones and lines. Consider any and all possibilities in growing the composition.  Contemplate and evaluate the total effect until, with alterations, additions, eliminations of fault and failure, and realization of integrity of expression, the work is finished.

Energies

All things are in constant motion.

Out of stillness comes action, and each produces effects on the other.  This is a fundamental dynamic of sound, however subtle or wide-ranging, whether spontaneous and natural or contrived.

Centering Surroundings

Sounds are perceived, identified, located, and separated in the perceptual process.

Listening actively makes these distinctions clear, yet they take place just the same in the course of passive hearing.  One will note the unusual, ignoring the rest, and still be conscious of the quality of the atmosphere.

In approaching ambient sound design, I am interested in composing with these perceptual processes in mind as well as in the juxtaposition of complementary tones, lines, and so forth, giving attention to the sensations produced by sounds as well as their musicality.  While atypical of the ambient style in general, such methods contribute to originality of total effect in Black Mountain School works, making them distinctively different in sound and nature from those of other stylists.

Immersion

Aesthetically appealing sounds are considered musical as distinguished from noise and other sounds that impact negatively upon the sensibilities.

Thus there is virtue in moderation and balance in developing sound works that emphasize sustained effects. When subtlety of sound and expression is abundant, perception is enhanced and the listener becomes more thoroughly involved in the experience.

Certainly these are desirable outcomes, and particularly so with works of an experimental or avant-garde nature that aim to communicate in ways that are out of the ordinary.

Widening

Huxley concluded that the brain is a filter, one that spares consciousness the shock of perceiving all things simultaneously.

Thus the creative object of the composer is to assemble the elements most attractive to the listener's receptive awareness in such a way as to extend both active listening and passive hearing. As this is the way one perceives sound outside the framework of music, so it may be a different way to bring a composition to fullness in the listener's inner ear.

Shifting

Sounds are perceived, in their continuous manifestations, according to the nature of the listener.

But sounds may alter perceptions, mood, and consciousness. Blazes become glowing coals, winds rise and die down, to stir again, and arrival moves gradually toward departure.

So it is with the composition of sounds and tones that are not shaped into music, but into forms that reflect perceptions of the surrounding world.

Aesthetic, Function, Meaning

Art acts upon the senses, emotions, and mind.

Inspired by music, the dancer moves, while mood and thought follow.  Yet as art inspires, so the composer and listener explore and discover.

Territories of Imagination

Memory, association, feeling and thought are stirred by musical tones and structures.

The composer produces the atmosphere; the listener envisions and moves through the landscape.

Impression and Force

The arts always stand firm in the face of banality.  The contrast between the two is clear and real.

Distraction does not elevate; diversion does not last.  Meaning and beauty always endure, regardless of time, place, and medium.

Circumference, Expanse

Awareness of limits contributes to the efficacy of processes, including those involved in musical composition.

To oppose, overcome, deconstruct, or disregard limits is not the same as conceptualizing different limits altogether, and acting accordingly.

Contexts and Contents

Convert impressions of environmental sound elements into elements of composition.

Every setting is different and produces unique effects.  The sonic events produced in diverse settings, and those produced in the same settings on different occasions, offer practically infinite impressions that may contribute to any number of atmospheric compositions.

Deep Distances

Composition with sound can often be an exploration carried forward by forces of memory.

To "paint" with tones, lines, and placement of sounds evokes impressions that can be traced to their origins and projected toward unknown outcomes, neither to necessarily fail nor thrive, but to collapse or expand, supported not by rhythm, melody, harmony or meter, but by the impetus of vibrations and combinations that extend and diversify as they develop.

Spaces and Sources

Self-expression is many times of secondary importance in the arts.

Fundamentally, it is the communication of reality that, for some, demands representation. There is no room for the personal, or the spirit of the times, or critical debate.

The ideas and emotional perspective of the artist must be subsumed into the totality of the work.

Spectrum of Echoes

Events leave impressions.

These images of imagination, experiences, and sounds form the composer's palette.

Total Effect

Experience time present in the sounds of the surroundings.

While the sounds of such atmospheric events are not typically considered musical, they may be given form in artistic and aesthetically pleasing ways that anyone may enjoy.

The goals of these compositions are to enhance contemplative thought, lucid mental images, concentration, and composed reflections upon feelings.

Axis, Whorl, Atmosphere

The listener is at the center.

The spectacle is staged:  lights and visuals of every kind intensify the sound performance.  Like video, it exists for the eyes, not the ears, yet it completes the circuit of attention, as do sound designs for films that augment action and emotional scenarios with fitting music and effects.

Outside the spectacle, the listener is free to do other things and to move about, engaging in both passive hearing as well as active listening: auditory perceptions are altered accordingly by these movements.  Musical ambience may be composed and recorded for such contexts, to be enjoyed and engaged in such a manner.

Fullness of experience is far greater than anything mere spectacle can provide.

Close, Distant, Indeterminate

Musical variety exists within a frame of reference generally defined by cultural and personal taste.

Move past those boundaries and beyond their time and place altogether.  Listen for the beautiful, determine what makes it so, and create ways to bring it into being.