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.