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.