As you may have noticed from a distinct lack of activity from me this year, music has not really been at the forefront of my life. Maybe that's fatigue from the listening excesses of previous years or perhaps it's because this year I've taken more of an interest in the visual arts. So while my yearly summary blog is going to be somewhat light-weight (I actually think I'll struggle to name 10 truly exceptional albums for this year) I'm determined to rectify this next year.
One of the ways I think I'll get better engaged with music is by returning to actually trying to make some of my own. In fact, I have become quite obsessed with the idea of spending my time producing things. Maybe I want to see us, as a culture, move away from mass consumption (perhaps best epitomized by the phrase binge-watch entering the Oxford English dictionary) toward a culture of home production (which in typical 21st-century-have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too fashion is also a growth industry). Or perhaps my motives are a purely solipsistic attempt to justify and extend my existence... Or maybe I'm just a bit bored. Anyway, like it or not, I want to make more blogs, more little pieces of music, more ideas, more...stuff.
So what kind of music am I going to be making I hear you ask?
Well, I believe that is the very question that has stopped me making any music since I left university 4½ years ago. Thanks to the digital innovations of the last few decades there is a nearly endless array of possibilities for music making. Not to mention the various levels of skill, or lack thereof, required for your various modes of production. But that's an idea for a future blog... The point being I felt suffocated by choice into a position of complete inaction.
To cut my long-running dilemma short I decided that I just had to pick something and stick with it. What I settled on in the end was to create electronic music using SuperCollider a programming language built for "real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition." Yep, I, perhaps intentionally, have chosen one of the most in-depth and challenging tools for making computer music when I could almost certainly achieve the same results on my phone. So why SuperCollider? Well I'm very attracted to the complete flexibility of having total control over the entire sound synthesis process. Also, being a professional software developer, I just quite enjoy coding and it is a default state that I'm comfortable with. This means learning a new programming language (something coders generally love doing) which requires an investment of time and effort that brings us back to my initial idea that I'm interested in crafting something, albeit a digital something (nothing?). Finally, I was particularly inspired by this collection from the SuperCollider community whereby they created fully formed musical pieces in SC in the space of a Tweet (and it seems the practice continues). It's little ideas and constraints like that that I find particularly inspiring and don't be surprised if you see a few Tweet-sized compositions from me in the near future.
So there you have it. I've laid out my intentions. Hopefully I can stick to them. Posting them here on my blog should keep me honest and if you don't see updates here then feel free to yell at me.
Right, now I've fulfilled my blogging obligation I'm off for a cheeky binge-watch.
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