We do not simply hear songs, speech and culture. Their repetition teaches us how to hear what comes next, while every new encounter quietly changes the pattern that taught us.
Tag: music
This post is not about technique, tone, or teaching. It is about a physical risk associated with long, uninterrupted guitar practice that many players may not have considered at all. I have played guitar for decades. Like many serious players, I practised for extended periods, often four to five hours at a time. I play […]
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Creativity Matters
Expressing ideas with, without, through, or as technological mediation isn’t the issue. The trouble begins with what we expect that mediation to deliver. The moment we try to instrumentalise the whole field—writing, sharing, signalling, transmitting—we quietly become the instrument. We become the relay. The medium. A carrier for systems and incentives that were never ours […]
The music produced here is eminently forgettable, perhaps highlighting a bias of the attention economy towards confectionery-like superficiality. We’re being overwhelmed by a tide of short sharp bursts of information content that lack substantive value or meaning. As a kind of procedural “hollowing out” of ourselves and our diverse histories, this surely poses a risk to the preservation and sustainment […]
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Shadowplay Culture: Musical Mothers
Not so much listening to as hearing a neighbour’s car stereo droning out a persistent rhythmic baseline this afternoon provides room for reflection. It occurs to me how such assertions of public identity, of enthusiastically announcing a place in whichever cultural coordinate space we might choose or otherwise find ourselves inhabiting, there is a certain […]
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Can a robot write a symphony?
Detective Del Spooner : Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a… canvas into a beautiful masterpiece? Sonny : Can you? Movie: I, Robot, 2004. (After Asimov). A robot can write a symphony, it just can […]
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Some days…
Some days it all just gets away from me. I try to value and appreciate the words and worlds of those around me but they ring so hollow and haunted that I just seem to end up clutching my own similarly fictional, if ever so slightly better-informed, reality to my chest as a treasured possession […]
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Nietzsche as Teacher
More important, I feel, than any particular aphorism or penetrating psychological and historical insight from Nietzsche is that he teaches us how to think. Much the same might be said of Bach; the patterns and complex symmetries of logical abstraction he defined and refined do not (only) instruct us in the use of any particular […]
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Swimming Against The Stream
Swimming against the stream and powerful tides of conventional thought and behavioural orthodoxy is the only way to ever do anything of enduring value or significance in life. It is also the hardest life to live. Authenticity and sincerity or conscientious adherence to your own values will cost you more in suffering and hardship than […]
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Broken Symmetry
In our endless fascination with symmetry we mistake its instances for a generalised property of value and in attributing significance this way we tend to totally miss the point. More important than this or that symmetry group or identifiable pattern of encoded mathematical relationship and patterned ratio was always the mischievously-binding fact (and counter-intuitively asymmetrical […]
Zeitgeist.
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There are no “Creative Types”
We are all, each and every one of us, “creative types”.
