Emergence of developing good listening skills and making sense of our world and perception involves the studies of how that acoustic environment gives us a sense of place. It has become not only political, but substantial for any business and cultural context to coexist.

After living for several years in Berlin I found that most of the people I’m getting to work with are from industries directly or indirectly related to sound studies. The performing arts and the sound direction are composed to navigate the course in every creative production, marketing campaign or a film direction.

As a lead software engineer who developed skills in professional dance aside from my career, I’m highly interested in starting a business within a framework that would establish new and innovative ways of working and build up better investment strategies in the process of creation.

In my research I’m looking from the perspective of social studies, communication systems and networks that would lead to resourcing the right techniques for marketplace establishment. I’m exploring different channels in order to find better alternatives for the tools available for the creators and startups in early stages of their business development.

I’m fascinated by David Byrne’s book “How Music Works” and his view and personal story in sound making career. In this article you will find some of my takeaways and impressions.

Adapting the cultural context

The process of writing music doesn’t follow a strict path. For some composers, music is created via notation, the written system of markings that some percentage of musicians share as a common language. More recently, music began to be created mechanically or digitally, by accretion and layering of sounds, samples, notes, and bits dragged and thrown together either physically or in the virtual world of a computer.

The same music played in a different context can not only change the way a listener perceives that music, but it can also cause the music itself to take on an entirely new meaning. 

In a sense, we work backward, either consciously or unconsciously, creating work that fits the venue available to us. After a while the form of the work that predominates in these spaces is taken for granted. To what extent sound artists are writing music specifically, and maybe unconsciously, to fit these places?

Percussive music carries well outdoors, where people might be both dancing and milling about. The music perfectly fits the place where it is heard, sonically and structurally. It is absolutely ideally suited as a living thing.

It’s been pointed out by Scott Joplin and others that the origin of jazz solos and improvisations was a pragmatic way of solving a problem that had emerged: the “written” melody would run out while the musicians were playing, and in order to keep a popular section continuing longer for the dancers who wanted to keep moving, the players would jam over those chord changes while maintaining the same groove. The musicians learned to stretch out and extend whatever section of the tune was deemed popular. These improvisations and elongations evolved out of necessity, and a new kind of music came into being.

Until amplification and microphones came into common use, the instruments written for and played were adapted to fit the situation. The makeup of the bands, as well as the parts the composers wrote, evolved to be heard. The instruments were carefully fashioned, selected, tailored, and played to best suit the physical, acoustic, and social situation.

Where are the new music venues?

I started extensively listening to the radio when I got my first car. The car interior was a perfect sound studio, where I would plan hour-long trips just to get a chance of occupying the space with my vocals to fill in the vacuum. I would visualize dance choreographies while driving to the dance theater, music festivals and local cultural event venues.

Private listening really took off in 1979, with the popularity of the Walkman portable cassette player. Listening to the music on a Walkman is a variation of the “sitting very still in a concert hall” experience (there are no acoustic distractions), combined with the virtual space (achieved by adding reverb and echo to the vocals and instruments) that studio recording allows.

One would expect music that is essentially a soothing flood of ambient moods as a way to relax and decompress, or maybe dense and complex compositions that reward repeated playing and attentive listening, maybe intimate and rudely erotic vocals that would be inappropriate to blast in public but that you could enjoy privately. If any of this is happening, I am unaware of it.

Recorded music

With the advent of recorded music in 1878, the nature of the places in which music was heard changed. Music now had to serve two different needs simultaneously. The phonograph boc in the parlor became a new venue; for many people, it replaced the concert hall or the club.

By the thirties, most people were listening to music either on radio or on home phonographs. People probably heard a greater quantity of music, and a greater variety, on these devices than they would ever hear in person in their lifetimes.

The performing musician was now expected to write and create for two very different spaces: the live venue, and the device that could play a recording or receive a transmission. Socially and acoustically, these spaces were worlds apart. But the compositions were expected to be the same! An audience who heard and loved a song on radio naturally wanted to hear the same song at the club or the concert hall.

Performers adapted to this new technology. The microphones that recorded singers changed the way they sang and the way their instruments were played. Singers no longer had to have great lungs to be successful. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby were pioneers when it came to singing “to the microphone”. They adjusted their vocal dynamics in ways that would have been unheard of earlier. It might not seem that radical now, but crooning was a new kind of singing back then. It wouldn’t have worked without a microphone.

Chet Baker even sang in a whisper, as did Joao Gilberto, and millions followed. To a listener, these guys are whispering like a lover, right into your ear, getting completely inside your head. Music had never been experienced that way before. Needless to say, without microphones this intimacy wouldn’t have been heard at all.

Music written for contemporary discos, in my opinion, usually only works in those social and physical spaces- it really works best on the incredible sound systems that are often installed in those rooms. It’s for dancing, as was early hip-hop, which emerged out of dance clubs in the same way jazz did- by extending sections of the music so the dancers could show off and improvise. Once again the dancers were changing the context, urging the music in new directions.

The gathered masses in sports arenas and stadiums demanded that the music perform a different function- not only sonically but socially- from what it had been asked to do on a record or in a club. The music those bands ended up writing in response- arena rock- is written with that in mind: rousing, stately anthems. To my ears it’s a soundtrack for a gathering, and listening to it in other contexts re-creates the memory or anticipation of that gathering- a stadium in your head.

Musical adaptation

The adaptive aspect of creativity isn’t limited to musicians and composers or artists in any other media. It extends into the natural world as well.

Musical evolution and adaptation is an interspecies phenomenon. And presumably, as some claim, birds enjoy singing, even though they, like us, change their tunes over time.

David Attenborough and others have claimed that birdcalls have evolved to fit the environment. In dense jungle foliage, a constant, repetitive and brief signal within a narrow frequency works best- the repetition is like an error-correcting device. If the intended recipient didn’t get the first transmission, an identical one will follow.

Birds that live on the forest floor evolved lower-pitched calls so they don’t bounce or become distorted by the ground as higher-pitched sounds might. Water birds have calls that, unsurprisingly, cut through the ambient sounds of water, and birds that live in the plains and grasslands, like the Savannah Sparrow, have buzzing calls that can traverse long distances.

It’s not just birds, either. In the waters around New Zealand, whale calls have adapted to the increase in shipping noise over the last few decades- the hum of engines and thrash of propellers. Whales need to signal over huge distances to survive, and one hopes that they continue to adapt to this audio pollution.

This view of creation is somewhat reversed because of the practical adaptations. It seems that creativity, whether birdsong, painting, or songwriting, is as adaptive as anything else. The emergence of a remarkable and memorable work seems to appear when it is perfectly suited to its context and emotionally resonant.

The biggest room of all

Bernie Krause, a pioneering electronic musician who now focuses mostly on bio-acoustics, has made recordings all over the world in many natural environments, and reveals how the calls of insects, birds, and mammals evolved to fit unique spots in the audio spectrum.

Krause refers to this spectrum of calls as an orchestra- where each animal/instrument plays a part in its own range, and together they make a composition which changes depending on the time of day and season in its place. Sadly, Krause’s recordings revealed another truth: even if a landscape looks identical to the way it did a decade ago, acoustic analysis often reveals that a critter that once filled a specific part of the audio spectrum has been erased from the landscape. Most of the time it is due to the intrusion or intervention from noise pollution- traffic, farms, houses, global warming. What’s interesting is that it’s the acoustic analysis and missing sound, not some visual evidence that makes this change clear.

Architecture as an instrument

Scientists have proposed that pre-Columbian sites have acoustic properties. Archeologist Francesca Zalaquett explained how Mayanpublic squares in the ancient city of Palenque were designed so that someone speaking or singing from a particular spot could be heard way across the square.

In Peru, at a sacred site named Chavin de Huantar that was established as 1200 BCE, there is an underground maze, the acoustics of which were designed to disorient the visitor as much as the winding passages do.

Archeologist John Rick of Stanford University thinks the various kinds of rock used in these tunnels, along with the multiple acoustic reflections from the bending passageways, can make one’s voice sound as if it’s coming from “every direction at once.” He believes that this labyrinth was used for spiritual rituals, and, like a stage in contemporary theater, the acoustics would have helped set the scene.

It seems the effect of architecture on music and sound can be reciprocal. Just as acoustics in a space determine the evolution of music- acoustic properties- particularly those that affect human voice- can guide the structure and form of buildings.

“On a break from the tour, I went south to Bali. I rented a small motorcycle and headed up into the hills, away from the beach resorts. I soon discovered that if one saw offerings of flowers and fruit being brought to a village temple compound in the afternoon, it would be pretty certain that some sort of ritual performance would follow there at night.

Sure enough, night after night I would catch dances accompanied by gamelan orchestras and shadow-puppet excerpts from the Hindu Ramayana- epic and sometimes ritual performances that blended religious and theatrical elements. (A gamelan is a small orchestra made up mainly of tuned metallic gongs and xylophone-like instruments- the interplay between the parts is beautiful and intricate.) It wasn’t all thrashing chaos, as a Westerner might expect, but a deeper kind of dance.

I was struck by other seemingly peripheral aspects of these  performances. The audiences, mostly local villagers of all ages, weren’t paying attention half of the time. People would wander in and out, go get a snack from a cart or leave to smoke a bidi cigarette, and then return to watch some more. This was more like the behavior of audiences in music clubs than in Western theaters, where they were expected to sit quietly and only leave or converse once the show was over.

These Balinese “shows” were completely integrated into people’s daily lives, or so it seemed to me. There was no attempt to formally separate the ritual and the show from the audience. The food, the music, and the dance were all just another part of daily activity. I remembered a story about John Cage, who, when in Japan, asked someone what their religion was. The reply was that they didn’t have a strict religion- they danced. Japanese do, of course, have Buddhist and Shinto rituals for weddings, funerals, and marriages, but a weekly thing like going to the church or temple doesn’t exist. The “religion” is so integrated into the culture that it appears in daily gestures and routines, unsegregated from ordinary life. I was beginning to see that theatricality wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It was part of life in much of the world, and not necessarily phony either.

I guess I was primed to receive this new way of looking at performance, but I quickly absorbed that it was all right to make a show that didn’t pretend to be “natural”. The Western emphasis on pseudo-naturalism and the cult of spontaneity as a kind of authenticity was only one way of doing things onstage.”

Auditioning

“At the beginning of the dance audition there were fifty dancers in the room. We had two days to whittle them down to three. Cruel, but, well, fun too. We decided that the dancers would be asked to do three types of things: exercises in which they made up their own movement, short routines that they would be asked to memorize, and bits where they would receive notes and suggestions for how to improve what they’d just done. Noemie began with an exercise I’ve never forgotten. It consisted of four simple rules:

1. Improvise moving to the music and come up with an eight-count phrase. (In dance, a phrase is a short series of moves that can be repeated.)

2. When you find a phrase you like, loop (repeat) it.

3. When you see someone else with a stronger phrase, copy it.

4. When everyone is doing the same phrase the exercise is over.

It was like watching evolution on fast-forward, or an emergent life form coming into being. At first the room was chaos, writhing bodies everywhere. Then one could see that folks had chosen their phrases, and almost immediately one could see a pocket of dancers who had all adopted the same phrase. The copying had begun already, albeit just in one area. This pocket of copying began to expand, to go viral, while yet another one now emerged on the other side of the room. One clump grew faster than the other, and within four minutes the whole room was filled with dancers moving in perfect unison. Unbelievable! It only took four minutes for this evolutionary process to kick in, and for the “strongest” to dominate. It was one of the most amazing dance performances I’ve ever seen. Too bad it was over so quickly, and that one did have to know the rules that had been laid out to appreciate how much a simple algorithm could generate unity out of chaos.

After this vigorous athletic experiment, the dancers rested while we compared notes. I noticed a weird and quite loud windlike sound, rushing and pulsing. I didn’t know what it was; it seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. It was like no sound I’d ever heard before. I realized it was the sound of fifty people catching their breath in and out, in an enclosed room. It then gradually faded away. For me it was part of the piece, too.”

Excerpts from David Byrne’s book, “How Music Works”.

There are lots of unacknowledged theater forms going on all around. Our lives are filled with performances that have been so woven into our daily routine that the artificial and performative aspect has slipped into invisibility. PowerPoint presentations are a kind of a theater, a kind of augmented stand-up. Failing to acknowledge that these are performances is to assume that anyone could and should be able to do it. In political speeches- and I don’t think there’ll be any argument that they are in fact performances- the hair, the clothes, and the gestures are all carefully thought out.

There’s something special about the collective nature of an audience at a live performance, the shared experience with other bodies in a room going through the same at the time, that isn’t analogous to sound heard through headphones. Often the assembly of fans defines an experience- it’s a social event, an affirmation of a community and belonging to a larger tribe. All these live experiences are ephemeral- nothing lingered, nothing remained except for your memory of what you heard and felt.

Listening modes

Sociologist H. Stith Bennett suggests that over time we developed what he calls “recording consciousness,” which means we internalize how the world sounds based on how recordings sound. He claims that the part of our brain that deals with hearing acts as a filter and, based on having heard lots of recorded sound, we simply don’t hear things that don’t fit that sonic template. This development might have led us to listen to music more closely.

So the mind’s eye (and ear) is a truly variable thing. What one person hears and sees is not necessarily what others perceive. Our brains can and often do narrow the scope of what we perceive to the extent that things that happen right before our eyes sometimes don’t register. Our own sensory organs, and thus even our interpretations of data and our readings of measurements on instruments, are wildly subjective.

Read more about Audio-Vision: Sound on screen methodology in this article: https://syntia.org/en/projects/audio-vision-sound-on-screen/. 

Recording technology

Vibrato as a technique, whether employed in a vocal performance or with a violin, helps mask pitch  discrepancies, which might explain why it was considered “cheating.” As recordings became more commonplace in the early part of the twentieth century, it was found that using a bit more vibrato, not only could increase the volume of the instrument, especially when there was only one mic to capture an orchestra or ensemble), but the pitch now could be smudged by adding the wobble.

The mind of the listener “wants” to hear the correct pitch, so the brain “hears” the right pitch among the myriad vaguesesses of pitch created by players using vibrato. The mind fills in the blanks, as it does with the visual gaps between video frames in a movie, in which a series of stills creates the impression of seamless movement.

The sound in live venues is also never as good as it is on a record, but we mentally fix the acoustic faults- maybe with the help of those visual cues- and often we find that a live experience is more moving than a recording.

Recordings freeze music and allow it to be studied, but in a live situation, the ear can psychoacoustically zoom in on a sound or isolate a section of players and pick out a phrase or melody- the way we can pick out a conversation at a noisy dinner table if we can see the person talking.

Acoustic associations

A region of the brain seems to be devoted primarily to sonic memory, and that includes not just ringtones, dog goals, and ambulance sirens, but also snippets of songs, mainly recordings, that we’ve heard as well. These sonic fragments function as nodes in a network of related memories, specific places and moments, that stretch beyond their acoustic triggers.

A slew of musical associations bounce around in our heads, linking to recurring memories and feelings that, after a while, facilitate the creation and reinforcement of specific neural pathways. These pathways help us make sense of those experiences.

The New World

Recordings bring distant musical cultures in touch with one another, they also have the effect of disseminating the work and performances of sound producers, singers, orchestras, and performers and creatives within a culture. As it happens to all of us at some point, hearing a new piece of music for the first time often opens a door that you didn’t even know was there. It communicates to us about how we feel and perceive our bodies- in a way that other art forms can’t. It’s sometimes in the words, but just as often the content comes from the combination of sounds, rhythms, and vocal textures that speaks to our emotions.

Music embodies the way people think and feel: we enter into new worlds and though our perception of those worlds might not be 100 percent accurate, encountering them can be completely transformative.

David Byrne’s style and energy are as apparent on the page as on the stage – Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine

Paris, an African city

“Over the years I’d been to a number of Paris clubs to hear music with the late Jean-Francois Bizot, who had a magazine called Actuel that I admired. We’d see Cuban or African bands or singers, and we’d eat at African restaurants. The African diaspora was turning Paris into a hub that featured some of the best African music in the world- many of the best musicians had moved there, or spent much of their time. I proposed that we record in Paris to take advantage of what seemed to me like a special moment and to work with some of those musicians. Not to pretend to be an African band, but to see if something new - a third thing- could emerge. It helped that we already had basic parts and structures to play- a minimal foundation, but one that could be built on.

We worked at Studio Davout, a former movie theater out on the Peripherique. The room was immense, unlike most New York studios. As an ensemble, we were all playing at the same time, and there was enough distance between us that we could hear and see each other but still have some acoustic separation.

New York, the Secret Latin City

I decided in 1988 that I would try to make a pan-Latin record, to dive into that world using a batch of songs I’d written as a foundation. I’d gotten into the habit of visiting Latin clubs and continued to immerse myself in the old records- it was all part of the history of my city, New York, so why not partake of it? I knew I wanted to include grooves drawn from a wide swath of South America- a cumbia rhythm from Colombia and samba from Brazil, as well as the classic son montuno and cha-cha grooves that formed the Afro-Cuban base of New York salsa. Latin musicians generally tend to specialize in one or another of these styles; salseros don’t usually play sambas, just like the blues-rock guitarists don’t often play speed metal. But we recruited players from all around the New York metropolitan area, where pretty much every kind of musician from the New World could be found, and in this way we began the advance work.

Playing well with others

Many of my songs were written without songwriting partners. Are they less good than the ones where the job was split, or where a partner modified, added to, or rejected my ideas, or I theirs? I can’t answer that, but certainly musical partnerships have often led me to places I might not otherwise have gone.

In this system, one person’s response to another’s contribution could shift the whole place in a radically different direction- harmonically, texturally, or rhythmically. Pleasantly unexpected surprises would occur, but just as often they could seem like rude and arrogant impositions that misused the significance and integrity of the preexisting material. Is this disruption a risk worth taking? Did the piece just get ruined, or did it really need to get radically rethought in order to go somewhere new and exciting? You can’t be too precious in this process. For us, this method resulted in music in which the authorship was to some extent shared among a whole group of people. The musical bed was, in these instances, very much collaborative.

Excerpts from David Byrne’s book, “How Music Works”.

Notation and communication

When musicians play together and record, they come up with terms- real and invented- to try to communicate musical nuance. Funkier, more legato, more holes and spaces, less pretty, spiker, simpler, pushed hard, more laid-back- I’ve said all of those things when trying to describe a musical direction or the feel I was looking for. Some composers resort to metaphors and analogies. You could use food, sex, texture, or visual metaphors; I’ve heard that Joni Mitchell described the kind of playing she wanted by naming colors. So, interpreting a written score, reading music notation, is itself a form of collaboration. The performer is remaking and in some ways rewriting the piece every time he plays it.

To encourage this kind of collaboration, to make the interpretive aspect more overt, some composers have written their pieces as graphic scores. This is a way of granting a generous degree of freedom in the interpretation of their work, while simultaneously suggesting and delimiting the organization, shape and texture of their pieces across time. Below is the graphic score by the composer Iannis Xenakis.

Source: https://drawingcenter.org/exhibitions/iannis-xenakis-composer-architect-visionary

This approach isn’t as crazy as it might seem. While these scores don’t specify which notes to play, they do suggest higher or lower pitches as the lines wander up and down, and they visually express how the players are to relate to one another. This type of score views music as set of organizing principles rather than a strict hierarchy- the latter viewpoint usually ends up with melody at the top of the pile. It’s an alternative to the privileged position melody is usually given- it’s about texture, patterns, and interrelationships.

Robert Farris Thompson, a professor of art at Yale, pointed out that once you let yourself see things this way, lots of things become “musical scores” - although they might never have been intended to be played. He argued that in a lot of African weaving, one can sense a rhythm. The repetition in these fabrics doesn’t consist of a simple looping of mirror images and patterns; rather, modular parts recombine, shift position, and interact over and over with one another, aligning in different ways over time, recombinant. They are scores for a funky minimalist symphony. This musical metaphor implies a kind of collaboration as well.

Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2008/african-textiles/photo-gallery

These are musical breaks, fugues and stanzas, inversions and recapitulations here. It’s not that crazy to believe that some part of vast African musical sensibility was carried across the oceans and reconstructed using visual means- that these fabrics functioned as a structural mnemonic aid.

If music can be regarded as an organizing principle- and in this case one that places equal weight on melody, rhythm, texture, and harmony- then we start to see metaphors everywhere we look. Musicians playing together find a kind of a symbiotic relationship between one another and an interplay between, so that the interlocking and interweaving create a sonic fabric.

Emergent storytelling

Sometimes music and visuals work together so seamlessly that it’s hard to imagine a theatrical work or a film without its score, and vice versa. Some film and stage music evokes the whole story, the characters, and the visuals every time we hear them. But where does it emerge from?

Sometimes sitting at a desk trying to force the lyrical context doesn’t work. At those times I ask myself if my conscious mind might be thinking too much- and it is exactly at this point that I most want and need surprises and weirdness from the depths.

Some techniques help in that regard. For instance, I’ll carry a microrecorder and go jogging, recording phrases that match the song’s meter as they occur to me. When I’m driving a car, I can do the same thing. Sometimes just a verse, or even a phrase or two, will resonate and be sufficient, and that’s enough to unlock the idea. From there on, it becomes more like fill-in-the-blank, conventional puzzle solving.

You are the music, while the music lasts

The way we imagine what our senses do is affected by our cultural biases as well as by the way our language limits our perception. What we refer to simply as the sense of touch actually includes separate sensors for temperature, vibration, texture and movement- each of which could have qualified as a separate sense. The experience includes intuition, emotion, smell, touch and hearing. 

The UCLA study proposed that our appreciation and feeling for music is deeply dependent on mirror neurons. When you watch, or even just hear, someone play an instrument, the neurons associated with the muscles required to play that instrument fire. Dr. Edward W. Large at Florida Atlantic University scanned the brains of people with and without music experience as they listened to Chopin. As you might guess, the mirror neuron system lit up in the musicians and non-musicians who were tested. The UCLA group contends that all of our means of communication- auditory, musician, linguistic, visual- have motor and muscular activities at their root. By reading and intuiting the intentions behind those motor activities, we connect with the underlying emotions- our physical and emotional state are inseparable.

Mirror neurons are also predictive. We might sense the emotionally resonant rise and fall of a melody, a repetition, a musical build, and we have expectations, based on experience, about where those actions are leading- expectations that will be confirmed or slightly redirected depending on the composer or performer. When we observe an action, posture, gesture, or a facial expression, we have a good idea, based on our past experience, what is coming next.

Distribution

Here’s the traditional breakdown of what record companies used to do:

• Fund recording sessions

• Manufacture product

• Distribute product

• Market product

• Advance money for expenses (concert tours, videos, promotional events, hair and makeup)

• Advise and guide artists on their careers and recordings (managers are supposed to do this, but record companies do as well)

• Handle the accounting of all of the above and eventually funnel some of the leftover cash

But now an album can be made on the same laptop you use to check email. Digital distribution is pretty close to being free in terms of costs in manufacturing- with LPs and CDs there were base manufacturing costs, printing costs, shipping, warehousing of stock and so on. It was essential to sell in volume, because that’s how those costs got amortized. This meant that marginal music tended to remain marginal because of economics and technology, rather than the quality of the music. Due to the large percentage of each record sale kept, the record companies often broke even way before the artists began to see their own shares trickle in.

Performing is now viewed as a source of income. Where there used to be one model, now there are six, ranging from the artists who put themselves entirely in the hands of the label to the artists who do nearly everything themselves. At one end of the spectrum is the 360°, or equity, deal, where every aspect of an artist’s career is handled by producers, promoters, marketing people, lawyers, accountants, and managers. The idea behind this model is that the artist can achieve wide saturation and sales because they are being boosted by a system working from every aspect of an artist’s career.

At the other end of the scale is the self-distribution model, where the music is self written, played, produced and marketed. Within the limits of what can be afforded, the artists have complete and absolute creative control- not just their music, but how it is sold.

Meanwhile, Spotify has given “advances” to US record labels in the area of $90 million- which encourages the labels to allow Spotify to have access to their catalogues. In fact, Spotify is partly owned by some of these record labels, so they’re giving advances to themselves and are not sharing them with the artists.

For emerging artists, self-distribution allows freedom but without much in the way of resources or knowledge in distribution and market. Another source of income for recording artists is licensing. The more a writer or band holds on to their publishing- or even, when  possible, their master recording rights- the more they will benefit from income sources. One licensing deal can provide more income than a whole tour, and certainly more than royalties from sales through a label.

In response to the decline of income for musicians is to source investments that can have corporate support, live concerts, funding and licensing their work to commercials. Not all of the alternatives are free or designed to fund or support development of an ongoing career in music.

With all self respect performing artists must know their value, consider their basic needs and career with regard to the others, and do not support the institutions and companies with their work that promotes free labor and exploitation.

The act of making music, clothes, art, or even food has a very different and possibly more beneficial effect on us than simply consuming it. And yet for a very long time, the attitude of the state toward teaching and funding the arts has been in direct opposition to fostering creativity among the general population. The way we are taught about music, and the way it’s socially and economically positioned, affect whether it’s integrated (or not) into our lives, and even what kind of music might come into existence in the future. Our innovations and creations, after all, are what keep many seemingly unrelated industries alive.

The future

Education advisor Sir Ken Robinson points out that every educational system on the planet was designed to meet the needs of nineteenth-century industrialization. The idea, that Tom Ze implied, was to “manufacture” good workers. This is largely because the current systems of public education were never designed to develop everyone’s talents. They were intended to promote certain types of ability in the interests of the industrial economies they served.

Canadian composer and music teacher R. Murray Schafer originated the concept of the soundscape, that can be thought of as our sonic surroundings and involves the study of how that acoustic environment gives us a sense of place. A soundscape that is out of whack, he says, makes us feel impotent. A soundscape of a bureaucratic office building’s lobby tends to make you feel small and insignificant. Schafer’s pedagogy begins with trying to create awareness, to help students hear their sonic environment:

• What was the last sound you heard before I clapped my hands?

• What was the highest sound you heard in the past ten minutes? What was the loudest?

• How many airplanes have you heard today?

• What was the most interesting sound you heard this morning?

• Make a collection of disappearing or lost sounds, sounds that formed part of the sonic environment but can no longer be heard today.

Schafer writes, “For a child of five, art is life and life is art. Experience is a kaleidoscopic and synesthetic experience, but once the child is in school they get separated- art becomes art and life becomes life.” ”In their place,” he suggests, “we substitute subjects that encourage sensitivity and expression.” He says that the focus should shift to a general awareness of the world around us.

The habit of creative problem solving translates to any activity we find ourselves engaged in, nurturing our skills and talent. The culture is a large part of what it means to be human and we have adaptations that encourage us from an early age to absorb or extract certain things from the culture around us. The kind of built-in ability to perceive music in a similar way to innate ability to clock relationships. The song from a loving mother to her child is more than just the sound of a soft voice and soothing harmonic intervals- then speech might be enough to calm a baby- but somehow the song seems to have come into being, too.