the marble tea webthing

Midnight saltines with
Peanut butter on top
My grandfather’s breath

As a songwriter that always used a portable cassette recorder (and sometimes a micro-cassette recorder) along with pen & paper for writing down lyric and chord ideas, I found that trying to organize all these snippets into some coherent system for later use and reference was laborious and incomplete. Even today there are song ideas that I know I captured somewhere at some point, but I don’t know where they are, and my mind is of course too feeble to remember how the songs went after an often surprisingly brief passage of time.

The iPhone has streamlined this process for me, in both the capturing of ideas and in their organization. It’s great to have one handheld device that’s always with me and that can serve an increasingly useful purpose. Below I outline my basic process in hopes that it might give you some idea of the capabilities, and perhaps inspire you to begin streamlining your own creative process. (more…)

…the [musical] score, the requiring that many parts be played in a particular togetherness, is not an accurate representation of how things are. These [composers] now compose parts but not scores, and the parts may be combined in any unthought ways. This means that each performance of such a piece of music is unique….The parallel in art is the sculpture with moving parts, the mobile. ~ John Cage

There’s an experiment I’ve been wanting to try for some time, but have only just now found a means for presenting. It may not be the most original idea in the book, but it was fun creating and then playing with.

The basic idea is to have several small pieces of audio, of varying lengths and sounds, play randomly and loop indefinitely to see what types of atmospheres evolve as the pieces interact with each other over time, producing not only something unintended and spontaneous, but hopefully something interesting and engaging as well. The listener becomes active in the musical arrangement by their choice of sounds to include (hopefully all of them), and when they choose to start them…and if they choose to turn some of them off (though here again, the interesting things happen as all the sounds evolve and writhe together over time). (more…)

Mine was called The Yellow Bird. Tom Hachtman‘s was The Goshdarnwich. Yum.