Archive for the 'Creation' Category

Art, Concerts, and Shared Experience

Published at June 22, 2007 in Creation, Mind and Noise. 0 Comments

I call this blog “Shared Headspace” because that’s something important to me - trying to occupy space in each other’s minds, sharing each other’s context. I think that’s one of the best effects of art - not just the “wow” or “that’s beautiful” moment, but the newfound insight into the mind and world of the artist.

Art goes beyond this one-on-one interaction between artist and observer, though, and I think this is one of the things that might be easy to miss out on. Obviously no two people will experience an individual piece of art in the same way - but when watching a crowd of people at a concert, it’s obvious they’re sharing something. That group of people becomes linked not only to the performers, but through the performance they become linked to each other. For the length of the concert, they’ll all be focused on the same thing, and to varying degrees (depending on the insight of the listener and the talent of the musicians, I would imagine) experience the same internal landscape. The individual bits of reflection they might have will be different, but everyone listening will walk out of the concert a slightly different individual than they were upon entry - and they’ll all be a tiny bit closer together.

I think that some kinds of music encourage this sort of interlinking, certain mental states, and certain conclusions more than others, but I think all good art can do this for us. Even seeing things differently, we’re still seeing aspects of some single truth - the very essence of what the artist created, something almost impossible to define.

Writing is an art as well, and as such can also bring our minds into similar places. Unsurprisingly, one of my goals for this blog is to help us establish one of these shared headspaces. I’m out of practice, but as I grow and stretch, I hope our common context does as well.

Quest for a musical scratchpad, love of the Casio SK-5

Published at June 20, 2007 in Music. 3 Comments

Something I’ve wanted for a long time is a sort of ’scratchpad’ for music. As a writer, it’s easy to jot down ideas in a notebook, or on a laptop. As a musician, I find this to be a lot tougher. (This is, of course, for ‘normal’ music - the noise thing is completely different, and very little of this post will apply).

I’ve always loved the Casio SK-5 for its insane immediacy - it’s very portable, runs on batteries, and of course has that lovely sampling feature with the built-in mic. I’ve used my SK-5 on a number of songs, true, but it’s gotten far more use as something I can bounce ideas off, practically anywhere. Tonight I put together a 15 second bit of music, a few notes, a chord progression - and realized the major shortcoming of the SK-5.

After I’d been playing for a few minutes, I decided my idea was worth keeping. Unfortunately, I’m hopelessly poor at remembering bits of music that I come up with. So, I did what made the most sense - I grabbed my laptop, opened it up, fired up Audacity (not my favorite, but it was there), and recorded using the built-in mic. Sounds like crap, of course, but it was just a scratchpad.

There has to be a better way than this! Laptops are great, and so are little Casio keyboards, but this SK-5 was built in the 80s. With the technology available now, someone could replicate each feature of this SK-5,  have enough room left over for audio and midi recording, and still be able to make a profit selling them around $200 USD.  Of course, in the grand tradition of ‘lots of stuff packed into a small space’ there’s the serious likelihood of Bad User Interface - and that would render the whole thing pointless.

Am I hoping for something crazy, here? Part of the charm of the SK-5 is how little it does- and how easy it is to get access to that limited feature set. The more features you add to something, the more difficult it is to use- just look at someone struggling with their PocketPC phone some time to get an idea of what I’m talking about. Things need not go so poorly, of course, and some smart minds like Alan Cooper have said more, more eloquently on this subject than I could ever hope to.

I still want a better way to ‘think’ music into a form that I can replay and edit later, though.