Sounding

So much music. Nowhere to begin. Everywhere is a beginning, none end.

Ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of works out there? I do all the time, daily in fact. I tend to find new listening by discovery through association, especially through publishers and artists that cross stylistic boundaries. Sometimes I feel like I have a certain knack to picking things out, almost to the extent it feels random, but in context it really never is.

Sound sticks with me like nothing else. Some have the ability to remember words by rote and spit back movie quotes from things I haven’t seen in 20 years, others can pick out anyone they’ve met before in a crowd. I never forget a sound, you could say I have phonographic memory.

It’s almost like having perfect pitch, but I can never relate anything absolutely to a specific frequency. Those square pointy hat people in tall robes would call it having ‘relative pitch’, but I think it’s more like aural memory. Sonic textures, bits of audio, melodies, harmonies, chord progressions, vocal personalities, wind players’ tone… I have a hard time not making an association when I hear things, it’s like having a cochlear imprint.

So I am constantly searching for new things, seeking out what’s new to my ears, both when performing and listening. The amount of people out there doing the same thing astounds me… I could listen for weeks and weeks, day in and day out, and not find anything interesting until after several months at it.

And we are all being pressured to do it so fast, the releases come at us with unrelenting speed.

The noiseforiphone looks promising as the worlds first official iphone synth, with FM synthesis and gestural parameter adjustment.

The folks over at Noise Addicts have a nice blog entry including video clips and some detailed description of the four-channel FM synthesis model called “Enhanced Subspace Frequency Modulation” (ESFM).

I like that they are purposefully limiting the synth to a monophonic tool instead of a polyphonic mess; it looks like a well thought-out and highly intuitive interface, and for $7 you can’t beat it.

Comes out later in August, should be a fantastic addition to the rig. I used to have an old yamaha pseudo-FM synth, lost it in the move from Chicago to LA. It will be fantastic to have FM-type synthesis at my fingertips again.

Once aspect of creativity I haven’t quite discovered how to manage is the navigation of intuition.

It strikes me that some are better than others at accessing this elusive part of the imagination. As a visceral experience it’s unmistakable, but the pathways to obtaining that level of immersion are not so clear.

Inspiration strikes at the most incredulous opportunity; sometimes it’s like a pull, like gravitation towards a goal not seen, being drawn into a feeling that is indescribable beyond the need to create.

What about when it’s required? On-demand?

Like an actor playing the same role week after week, or a jazz musician improvising over the same progressions night after night… the good ones – the ones really in touch with the craft – know where to look for passageways, or how to prepare themselves to accept the supernatural-like ability of the unconscious brain to know exactly how things go and exactly where in the most immediate and uncalculable ways.

That doorway is really the goal itself, the ego-freeing feeling of letting go and allowing what Nature designed to take its course. In a way artists do nothing but recite what they already know by understanding themselves as part of the entirety of life outside of themselves.

One of my favorite pastimes recently is surfing through social sites like last.fm, following neighbor and friend links to different people’s pages and friends and neighbors and so on and so on… it’s a fascinating and sometimes recursive journey through the tastes of like minded individuals.

I am infused from all directions it seems, there is so much to do.

At times there seem to be so many directions that I cannot find a clear path; when I dream to be great at something, but feel I have no focus on anything.

You may have noticed a slight change in interface on the blog here, it’s because I switched from the TWiki BlogPlugin to WordPress.

The basic reason is that although BlogPlugin is a great tool on TWiki, it’s not as fully featured as I’d like, and there is the overhead of several dependencies within TWiki. The latter reason is difficult to deal with between system crashes and other kinds of data loss, and instead of banging my head against infinite loops in perl ImageMagick, I opted to install WP.

The installation was smooth, I was able to import – with original posting dates and images! – the TWiki blog (which will be shut down posthaste, although with redirects to the correct RSS points) in its entirety.

Several twiki pages are being moved into WP pages as well.