When I started this blog (a long time ago now), my intention was to explore music and improvisation in as scientific a way as possible. The blog served a purpose in allowing me to express myself (even if very awkwardly and sometimes not very musically), but also then it provided me with the confidence to write more about the music, and my process of making it. The blog also arose at quite a difficult emotional time for me, so the musical expression was therapeutic. At that time, I wanted to write about music in a way that connected it to everything else - to education, technology, philosophy, cybernetics. Over the years, I've made a bit of progress - there are a few papers... although of course, they're completely ignored...
What do I think now? Well, I think I was right in my original hunch that everything is musical. I also think that that the connection between music, improvisation, learning and systems is fundamentally about symmetry and geometry. What I mean is that music is clearly a "multi-dimensional" thing. That means that there are different orders of phenomena which partake in the process of making music. These phenomena are not on the same level: we cannot talk about pitch and rhythm as if they are different "attributes" of music. But we can talk about noise and pitch, and repetition (redundancy) and expectation as different orders of phenomena with different dimensionalities.
Only recently have I appreciated this dimensional connection, and understood that pitch is like a vector - a signal from a to b, while noise is a scalar - something that has no direction, and that music requires both noise and signals. And of course, with noise, come both a necessity for repetition and a stochastic process which ensures that random events can happen. So things keep growing.
This is to say that what music really is is an unfolding selection mechanism which selects its ongoing unfolding until such a point that it selects silence and stops. I think music is driven to reach a point of stopping for fundamental reasons probably related to deep physics, physiology and the relationship to the universe.
A few years ago I experimented with the Roli Seaboard musical instrument. I'm trying again to do some improvisation with this. Not entirely successful, but it does make the point about how important noise is. Also, in returning to the original purpose of this blog, is to return in some way to the kind of emotional state that produced it. Since the last few weeks has knocked me sideways, it's quite nice to revisit some older practices.
I think I've made progress over the years. But I'm not sure really. How do we ever know if we get anywhere? Most people like to progress in their careers, and they often end up in senior positions which are effectively administrative, stressful and dull. For one reason or another, I've avoided that. But I've been free to think. I think, I hope, it's worth it. It's difficult to know what to do with a life. What do you think?
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