Post Wave Ep. 3: Music

welcome to postwave this is eric this is trevor trevor what is music [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so i would say that music is what our brain creates when we when our ears uh perceive pressure waves in the air and it's also kind of the pressure waves in the air but i think it's mostly what our brain is doing with that and the experience that's creating okay cool so it's uh deeply connected to the perception of it yeah because like uh even if the sound waves are are you know that's all that's creating music right um there's this whole kind of experiential realm that they can't really explain um you know entirely um even though we can kind of tie that back to you know preference for certain harmonic ratios and and that kind of thing um it's uh our experience of it at some level it's kind of hard to connect um completely to the physical yes and impossible to separate uh the perceiver from the experience yeah and i just i mean i have to imagine that it's so idiosyncratic to the art the way our brain evolved that you know uh kind of in the way that you know like a psychedelic drug will kind of like tweak certain knobs in our brain i feel like music is doing maybe something similar um cool my definition of music at the moment is sound organized by some internal logic system a language of its own where you don't need to know any outside information to understand it yeah i say that one more time or sounds organized by some internal logic system which is a language of its own where you don't need to know any outside information to understand it yeah that's interesting i mean it makes me think of uh like wasn't it perez who said music is organized organized sound yeah or was it um yeah cause because in music school we talked about this we talked about what is music and we had quite a number of different definitions floated around i've got some written down here that i would love to share but one that was potent for me was consciously organized or or disorganized sound and for me that was like oh of course that's what music is and then i went home and i started listening to an audiobook and i was like [ __ ] this is consciously ordered and disordered sound yeah it's something talking there's no way this is music at least not by my understanding of it yeah but i mean if you don't if you don't know a language and you're just listening to someone speak it and you just like kind of follow the intonations of their voice i mean it's kind of like singing it's it's it's just we're singing in a way that's that makes the it feel like there's no definite pitch but if you actually i mean like you know and some composers like steve reisch have done this you know take uh takes speech spoken speech and uh spoken with speaking yeah with words and kind of transcribed the the pitches from them and uh turned those into uh into materials for for a piece which i think is really cool and if you actually yeah if you pick if you pay close enough attention with most people speaking you can kind of hear hear the pitches that are happening yeah and that makes me think as well of west african languages um there's some languages that are deeply rooted in being musical you have your low tone medium tone and high tone and to hear these people speaking uh these traditional languages it's remarkable it is so musical yeah yeah i think there's actually like i know in um in like southeast asia where there's a bunch of languages that you know rely on pitch that there's like more uh more people who are born there develop perfect pitch yeah which is really interesting um yeah so my my current definition i see it it doesn't really hold water either because um if you think about it any language is a language where you don't need to know any outside information to understand it like no one's born with the dictionary downloaded you're born and you don't know how to speak and you hear people speaking and eventually you catch on it's really the same thing with music so i i don't know how how it's different in a fundamental level how how is it the same with music though because you can't i mean i guess you can you can learn theoretically just by you know getting your instrument and watching and listening to people play and you know but people have to teach you i feel like maybe more than you have to be taught you know like to speak i mean you have to be taught to read and like you know write but speaking i feel like that that can just be done by like immersion um are you talking about like playing music i was speaking about enjoying or appreciating music but uh it's interesting that you bring up playing music because victor wooten talks about this extensively um victor wooten if you don't know is the bassist of the flecktones trevor of course you know that yeah i know he talks extensively about how music is a language and if you have a culture uh like a nuclear culture like his family that he grew up in was a very musical family and what what they had happened was a kid before they could even play was given an instrument and give them frequent opportunity to play with very advanced professional musicians and just make that a natural part of their upbringing that that kid is going to become as good as victor wooten is on the base yeah that is that's true yeah if if you actually immerse them in like that kind of thing yeah and that the approach to how we learn music in in our western culture is kind of backwards like if if we were to do that as part of the culture as we do with language like you know with language victor talks about how you have ample opportunity to just riff with advanced people who have been doing it all their lives for decades and decades and it's not like no one makes a big deal about it that's just how it is mm-hmm yeah yeah i mean yeah especially at when you're that young your your brain is just like a sponge and it'll just you know doesn't it it's not scared of something being too hard for it to like yeah get it around the way i feel like a lot of adults myself included we'll just like look at something and be like that's impossible like how do you like there's there's no way i could you know my good ever yeah my guitar teacher when i was growing up was really great because he wouldn't let on that anything i was doing was abnormally hard you're just like okay let's play this right now and i'd see yeah i don't know if i can play that but i'd try and i'd figure out how to do it and if you told me like okay this is something hard this is a challenge we're gonna have to work at and then give it to me i i wouldn't have been able to do it yeah that's funny because i i do the opposite thing with my students i mean i don't tell them something's gonna be hard before we do i mean sometimes sometimes they do but if they're having a problem with something i'll be like oh yeah this is hard and like basically everything in music is hard when you first start to do it like if that's kind of the point it just like stays the you know gets a little bit harder but like it's it feels like kind of the same mostly the same level you know and like the things you're working on or just get you know more complicated but it's always like you know you feel like man this is just like really hard if you're doing it right you know yeah definitely and uh with decreasing returns as as you get uh more and more talented you see less and less progress for the amount of effort you put in yeah but i always with my students i try to save telling them that it's hard as like a backup if after they've already tried and failed and like are getting down on themselves then i'll say yeah okay it was hard but i won't let on until that happens yeah yeah yeah i guess that's pretty much what i end up doing so um there's some other definitions of music i found some dictionary definitions um we've got some like basic ones like vocal or instrumental sounds or both combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form harmony and expression of emotion that's interesting it's so it's it's kind of saying in like implying that there's always expression involved yeah and it's interesting um because it mentions emotion specifically and i i don't know if i can refute that yeah i mean it's an interesting question because like i think i think that's more about the listener like whether the listener is aware that music can have emotional content and that they can either like respond to it or not you know like i mean if it's if it's a song with lyrics it's harder to do to like you know hear it as just music but if it's like instrumental music um i don't know i feel like i feel like some people could you know maybe see it more objectively but everyone at a certain level like has to feel some of it yeah for sure um the other thing i thought interesting about this one is that they took the time to specify vocal or instrumental sounds or both out of all of the range of sounds and so i was thinking what what do those particular things have in common well they stem from the body from the human body and so vocal and instrumental yeah so so it it's like if you assume some amount of consciousness within a human which is debatable but uh if you assume that then kind of like what they're saying is that the the sound stems from uh from consciousness as opposed to just happening huh seems like yeah reading very deep into that definition but i see where you're coming from okay um so another one here a sound perceived as pleasingly harmonious that's uh that's total bs yeah because like [Laughter] music has to be harm well what does harmonious mean well if you consider the harmonic series and all of the relationships that are possible in an infinite series then you could consider that any sound fits somewhere within the harmonic series yeah yeah i mean uh sure but then you know why if you're gonna extend the harmonic series to include every possible pitch then i even use it you can't turn it off yeah but i see your point i actually i i don't know like i mean the harmonic series is interesting but i like to think about it like what music is in relationship to to like white noise because that that is like pure randomness right that's not not ordered in any way and doesn't have any like principle behind it besides just you know random yeah um and that like basically anything other than that you have to count as music because it's being modified in some way from the like the blank canvas yeah you know because even like pink you know pink noise is like a deviation from total it's more pleasingly harmonious to the perceiver right yeah exactly so that comes to the question though of the the agent of the creator of the sound does that have any role in whether it's music or not um i don't think so i mean i mean you could say there there's definitely like a line in uh in you know things that were conceived and created consciously by a group of people you know and then things that were you know environmental sounds that just happened randomly or not randomly but but no one was coordinating saying these are the sounds we want to make you know yeah we're gonna make them at these times um but i mean as far as the listener is concerned those two things can kind of see me seamlessly you know overlap and you can have you know things that are performed by people uh very uh very exactly and it can sound totally just you know random or like it was you know somewhat accidental but in a cool way or something um and you can also have things that were you know like crickets or birds that you know aren't meant to be synchronized really but they they it sounds like some kind of iliatoric you know uh thing with everyone kind of repeating the same patterns over and over again with like over like a background that's an interesting question though because like they are meant to be synchronized at least by the crickets for the crickets it that synchronization is not coincidental yeah that's that's true actually yeah that's uh yeah so can can a non-human entity be uh a composer a creator of music yeah i mean i i like i have to imagine with anything like that like with crickets they i don't know it's an interesting question to think about whether they would see that as separate from language because like a blue whale like when or you know any kind of whale that has whale song like i don't know whether they would think of that as music or they think of that as just talking you know yeah it makes me think about like how music must have evolved in humans and at what point was it uh like a synchronization activity like it is for crickets and at what point did it become music yeah i mean i think there's you know there's something that's like uh it feels like really this really good to be you know singing with people and in tune yeah and you know and all just you know and in time too and uh and you like feel you feel you know you feel the harmonies kind of lock in and stuff and um i think that might have been you know that might have been some of what drew people to it yeah i i had the pleasure of witnessing a really remarkable natural event not just once uh we have geese here on martha's vineyard that migrate in the fall and i'm right here on a lagoon and so the the geese are outside my window on the water and i was sitting there listening and you know there's just a random assortment of geese and they're all calling out at different pitches and different rates and as i was as i was sitting there the rates of the the geese calling started lining up with each other they be were slowly becoming more synchronized and that the pitches that they were singing they were singing four notes and it made a dominant seventh chord yeah and as they continued to sing the the all of the voices became more synchronized until they were all like at first it was kind of like and in time it got to the point where they're all doing it at the same time and once that happened basically right away they all took off and flew away together that's wild i really wonder if i've really thought about this actually whether like ai is going to crack the animal communication thing or whether whether that even has meaning you know because like it's you know it's possible we would uh kind of like happened when we you know tried to teach uh apes sign language like they can kind of talk but it's mostly not that interesting and it's mostly just like like food and like you know like primal and it's not like you know they're writing poetry or anything or like you know um expressing like you know complicated thoughts and desires and stuff um so like going back to the harmonic series i think it's really interesting to think about music's relationship to math and it just really fascinates me that it's kind of the universe's way of letting us perceive math on a very you know um like i said kind of inexplicable like you know um tangible feeling level tangible but also like intangible because like it's it's there and then it's gone you know like um [Laughter] and um yeah i i it's just it's it's it's so beautiful that we have that mechanism just because of evolution to to perceive all this beauty just effortlessly yeah wow that's definitely true i definitely feel that i have a much deeper understanding of mathematical subjects when i consider them in in relationship to sound like what kinds of things like uh the harmonics series um fourier transforms yeah kind of thing yeah even just waves yeah i always yeah and i always find like ai stuff easier to think about using musical examples because it's it's it's so rich for for like pattern uh like utilizing patterns to create just kind of endless variation and and interest i was sitting in a warehouse one time working on a project and it was pretty noisy and there was this uh sound in the background it sounded like somewhere off in the distance someone was listening to trap music all i could hear was the hi-hat and it was this really interesting pattern i was grooving out to us like yeah these people know what's going on this is some damn good music i'm hearing right now the pattern kept evolving in this really natural interesting way and then i became aware that it was just like a loose fan up in the darkness every time i have one of those moments i i just like appreciate the hell out of it because like it doesn't happen that much and like and yeah because your brain like believes so much that that's the that's the source of the sound you know before you realize that it's wrong yeah that's that's always what i love about contemporary classical music or any any kind of experimental music especially if it's live if you can't really tell how the heck something is being created or you thought it was you thought the sound was one instrument but then it like turned into something that couldn't possibly have come from that instrument yeah you know um yeah it's it's uh it's fun to let your brain play tricks on you that's for sure um so another definition vocal instrumental or mechanical sounds having rhythm melody or harmony i like the melody i like the rhythm melody or harmony yeah it's like you know it could just be one of those which is good that's although i don't know i don't really know how you have melody without rhythm yeah so that's interesting um because i remember one time when we were talking about this in the composition seminar and jim simmons uh for the those who don't know a good friend of mine and very intelligent music theorist and composer and just a remarkable person um spoke up and said that it wasn't music to him it didn't count as music unless it had sound uh it was sounds having rhythm melody and harmony all three of them bold bold move claim yeah it's like i kind of get like if you have like a piece just for drum set and it is like wholly percussive for me like it's it's interesting and i could admire the technicality and enjoy the rhythms to some extent but it's not musical in the same sense yeah um although you could say that the the melody and the harmony of something on on drum set is just like the harmonics of the tom sure when you're hitting them and then like of the symbols and like that actually is i mean that that gets to the question of like uh what is uh what is the difference between harmony and rhythm and single pitches because they're all just kind of rhythm at different speeds yeah or in different different ratios right now absolutely yeah if you have a frequency below 20 hertz it's a rhythm and if you're above 20 hertz then it's a pitch yeah and then if you have multiple rhythms going out at the same time it's it's a harmony yeah so one thing i um i wanted to ask you about is what you think about the whole question of whether music is a universal language um wow interesting um yes in some regards but universal only to the extent that you have to have a certain degree of open-mindedness in order to appreciate it because you can have music that is entirely unrelatable to people people who are looking for a particular thing but if that person is willing to accept any possibility and engage with the music be for that music being what it is as opposed to looking for it to be something else then it's it's possible to understand that music without having any any background in that particular formal language that the music is written in totally totally yeah yeah i agree people have to like at the very least like know how to open themselves up in the like uh in the way that'll result in them getting the like the intent behind the music um although like um i mean that'll i think that only goes if it's uh you know something that's so out of the normal what they would normally listen to um you know some so much different from what they normally listen to that um that it takes a lot of effort to kind of figure out what you know what the intent was behind the music or or that kind of thing yeah but maybe do you think intent is important that's a good question um i think it has some importance but uh as we've talked about already that maybe the greater importance is in the pre what the perceiver derives from it but that probably there is a correlation between intention within the composer and the amount of perceivable value yeah i mean the the idea is kind of that you know the composer knows more or less what they're they're going for in the listener and if they're a good composer then the that's exactly what the listeners is experiencing you know um is that yeah is that universal though because that's definitely true about like contemporary classical culture but is that true for like free-form jazz uh yeah i mean i guess i guess some some genres kind of open themselves up to just being you know open to interpretation um you know um and i feel like honestly i feel like contemporary classical music like there there are some you know it's kind of you know it's kind of being a good at your craft uh type thing to you know be able to to know how music affects people to actually you know uh to do that um but um i don't think it's it's uh it doesn't always have to be that way and i think just especially since like um a lot of contemporary classical music like spectralism is so con concerned with like uh perception of sound itself um i think i think a lot of people are are fascinated by kind of the subjective aspects of it like inherently [Music] [Music] us [Music] so [Music] uh excuse from [Music] [Laughter] [Music] um [Music] yes so to answer your question trevor yes i do think that music is a fundamental language because it's a language based in the simple fundamental phenomena of waves which can be used to describe all of existence yeah and if you think about it i mean the the your what your ear is doing is turning pressure waves in the air into electrical signals which you know the same kind of one-dimensional wave you were talking about where it's just a it's a value between you know zero and one or everyone yeah absolutely yeah it's like reducing information into the lowest number of dimensions that can hold it and in that way that's fundamental yeah and when you get down to you know microscopic uh quantum scales everything kind of turns into into waves and and kind of probability you know distributions and that kind of thing yeah absolutely um yeah something about that the idea of a wave seems very fundamental to to just the way the universe works yeah you can have a a single waveform to describe the position or velocity or whatever of one particle and then you can have a complex waveform that describes uh entangled particles to the point where it becomes mathematically sound and uh can be be like a relevant uh way to look at the world that any object that exists can be described as a complex wave function yeah that that whole idea just blows my mind and that they all and that they all like you know somehow overlap and create this bigger wave function that's you know because they're all entangled with each other yeah yeah so there's there's one wave function that describes the entire universe the universe is just uh some monk hitting a gong somewhere so i was curious uh if you remember any early formative musical experiences you had whether it was listening to something or seeing a concert or playing somewhere performing or a lesson or something hmm yeah well aside from when i was like six and seven and wanted to be a a rock star like bob dylan um i know that yeah and eric clapton but mostly because he had the same name as me yeah um i mean there were a number of really powerful music lessons that i had when learning an instrument but i feel like most of those had more to do with the satisfaction of being good at something yeah i don't know if i got like i mean it was it was cool to be able to yeah like cool and satisfying to be able to do things that that you know sounded interesting and cool that other people would you know be impressed with yeah exactly but i don't think i don't think i would you know i wasn't really uh fascinated with just like music for its own sake for i think probably until probably until like middle school i think i don't know um yeah it took me well until late in high school i think to come to the point where my musical practice became a sort of meditative practice uh like a centering activity that helped help me organize my thoughts and keep me sane you said that was in high school late high school maybe even going at early college yeah before i finally had that breakthrough yeah it's interesting tell me about uh your middle school experience so uh i don't know if there's anything special about middle school but i remember uh uh i've been playing trumpet for like uh i started trumpet into fourth grade so by the time i got to middle school i've been playing for a couple years and i think in seventh grade my dad gave me a copy of kind of blue by miles davis and uh i listened to that a lot and um and then i just kind of started to buy a bunch of cds and you know listen to it just started listening to a bunch of jazz and i i had my dad's old uh jazz history book it was just like laying around the house and i'd like usually just like crack it open to a random page and you know start reading and whatever and um yeah so that was the first time i kind of just got super interested in something music related and just kind of went off on my own and like you know uh kind of went in as far as far as i wanted to that's really cool i did have in high school uh a remarkable fascination with unusual musical instruments yeah i went through a lot of research uh just poking around on wikipedia and google and stuff just trying to find all the weirdest instruments and catalogs that's yeah i think i went through that too but like looking at pictures of like the largest saxophone in the world like yeah the contra contour bass yeah yeah trombone multi pavilions might be my favorite visually uh look it up go to google now type in trombone multi pavilions this is an instrument invented by adolf sacks [Laughter] it's pretty awe it's pretty awesome that's uh man think about ridiculous yeah i mean i i i don't know if it's ridiculous because i don't really know how it works like maybe it i mean it looks pretty badass honestly like i think the idea was it was it was like a trombone but you had valves instead of a slide and then you had a tube for each note oh each diatonic note interesting so that each one would be perfectly in tune i see that's but i'm sure it was heavy as [ __ ] that's exactly the problem with it too heavy to hold i think that kind of gets at one of the things i love most about music which is just kind of the endless exploration of it and that you know there's just people have been doing it for so long and so many people have been doing it for so long that like there's no way you could possibly know you know everything about it within one lifetime yeah you know um or maybe that there's even infinite variations that as we continue to create there is no point at which the well will run dry yeah yeah um although i i mean that's an interesting question i mean um because we i mean sure is there a plank length well no i mean like minimum length no i mean there is you know uh i mean uh you know you can always do the thing where uh it's infinite because you can always add a note to the end of the other you know the previous piece right but like but like in terms of actually like unique sonic experiences within a certain time time frame that actually is a limited uh set of things i think it would be really i mean it's gigantic but it's it's uh it's still i think it would still be limited i don't know i don't know about that i feel like it might be infinite uh i don't know about time scale i don't know about on a limited time scale but i i think that maybe maybe just that on an unlimited time scale without the need for pedantic like add one note on you can still have meaningful unique expression going on infinitely yeah yeah the reason why the reason why i think that is that because the the the way that music is structured built upon waves which is directly analogous to the way that the universe works is that to exist as as an entity in the universe like your point in the universe in this particular point in space time is unique right like it's never going to occur exactly the same even if you have infinite time infinite things generating you're never going to have that exact same moment back yeah that's true um i mean i'm i'm mostly thinking along the lines of if we get uh ai that can generate you know from from like you know with no sampling no kind of midi happening at all just you know from like you know samples in the in the aif file you know just directly generate you know things that sound like polished pop songs and you know orchestra pieces like like um something like that could conceivably generate you know all possible or like a very large you know space of possibility you know that includes uh what would seem to us to be exhaustive certainly absolutely um yeah and especially because what we would find musically appealing or gratifying is i think a very limited subset of all those possible forms of expression definitely definitely yeah i mean this is i don't know about you but this is kind of uh especially since leaving school but uh it can be easy to just uh especially if you've been playing one genre of music for a long time it can be easy to get jaded with it because um uh a lot of it seems like the same formulas over and over again with you know and you kind of you know you can expect what's gonna happen the next bar of a piece you know uh kind of you know pretty regularly well um and it doesn't mean like that genre is bad i mean every genre has that you know it has like its tropes and it's you know it's kind of its stock uh you know forms and everything well i'll tell you what it ain't music unless it has a one four five chord progression gotta go one four and then five sometimes just one and five country music there's nothing wrong with three chords i mean like it gets the job done yeah honestly like like you know i love playing blues and like part of part of what i i think makes blues cool is that it's it's almost entirely dominant seventh chords or like the basic structure of it is and uh and that's you know it's kind of what you get if you uh if you go up the harmonic series um that's like the first that's like the yeah basically that the default chord of nature is a is a dominant seventh chord which is really interesting um yeah absolutely but yeah the fact that the blues is that is that harmony like most of the time i think it's just like pretty cool um yeah and isn't it true that the blues evolved with uh uh or stemmed from people playing guitars with their own unique micro tuning so that it was often in line with the harmonic series more so than equal temperament oh i didn't know that that's super cool yeah i mean you just have like a dude sitting in in the dirt floor of a shack with his guitar that has is not that has been untuned but that he just tuned it to his own ear yeah yeah no i mean i and there's like there's something yeah i mean there's something about that that is totally unique i mean you know um and and blues is definitely i mean a lot of folk music is this way but blues especially is like micro tonal a lot of the time you know yeah with and those unique tim unique stan sounds that each individual artist creates this they're so captivating and effective yeah yeah yeah this is something i think a lot of about a lot with especially pop music today is uh it's so much focused on the timbre of yeah things know and like i like like you know any any kind of pop vocal stuff which is you know all all kind of can be traced back to blues you know more or less uh yeah is uh is like that wow oh fascinating i mean you know they're also they're also you know the people who sound like you know or like you know there's like the ten people who all kind of sound the same but uh you know then they're also you know people within uh within those genres that are just you know they're so much of what makes them successful is just they sound like no one else you know um like who i don't know like uh like thundercat anyway he like he uses this falsetto voice that's just like no one else sounds like that and just kind of like his inflections and stuff um yeah right i'm into it it's really good but yeah i mean him you know like cedric bixler zavala from the mars volta getty lee from rush john anderson from yes um a lot of a lot of like the rock singers i like have really weird not weird voices but again like no one else sounds like them and and not everyone's like into it like donald fagan from steely dan too i feel like that's kind of the same way he just has really weird like vocal inflections and uh just kind of york yeah of york yeah yeah i totally see what you mean yeah so what do you what do you think are the things that music does for society um well definitely i think the largest force of of wyatt has become a part of society is that it has a remarkable ability to create social cohesion where you have individuals with reasons to have conflict and yet you have this glue that kind of holds everyone together and says yeah okay i can i can exist despite my grievances with you or my differences with you huh yeah i think i i get where you're where you're going with that i guess it's um i i think it's it's kind of a um complicated connection between those two things um or at least um or it's like indirect or it's um because i don't think you know people are you know especially now uh people don't really think of art or music as like uniting people across divides so much just because everything is so politicized like you know um uh i mean yeah i'm sure they're you know there are tons of artists i'm sure you know most artists have you know pretty uh at least you know mildly diverse fan base bases depending on who the person who the person is um but i do think it is you know um like our taste in art tends to be pretty uh segregated by politics to some extent hmm yeah although i think that may just be a artifact of our particularly intentionally divisive culture that it's not a natural thing that's arisen but it's something that's been carefully manipulated by people who uh feel that they have more to gain by keeping the populace divided yeah although i mean i think you've always kind of had the you know the art in the courts for the royalty and then you know the folk musicians making music and the people in the court claiming that their music is so much better and you know um uh so i feel like that's uh that's part of it you know it's it's maybe it's more of like a class type thing because you know it's it's uh like it's the perception that only rich people listen to classical music or um you know i wonder how that's aged though because i totally don't feel like that's the case anymore yeah i'm sure i'm sure our generation that that's totally gonna get flipped um although i don't know i mean i feel like it's hard for either of us to really have an accurate um perception of what the average person's taste in music is right now because like we're so surrounded with people who have very similar kind of eclectic tastes to us and so it seems like that's you know that's most people but yeah but you just you think people in general are becoming more open to other kinds of music i don't know if there's an opening trend i'd like to think so but um i think regardless within a community that music has the remarkable feat of making people cohere um even also on the on the level of creating music like you know that choirs that with their regularized uh synchronous breathing that their heart rates actually become synchronized with each other um and that that can extend actually to other effects even so much so that uh hormones can be synchronized yeah i believe it yeah yeah i think it's really beautiful like if you think about the fact that you know everyone's brains are kind of concentrated on the same thing and you know literally like you know your entire nervous system is involved in this thing and it is kind of like you're in this creature that's that's purpose is to create the sound and yeah you surrender your individual identity to become part of the group yeah the group the beast that is creating the sound yeah yeah that we can kind of you know uh it's not quite telepathy but we can we can synchronize our our actions so so carefully um that it seems magical this is actually something i wanted to uh talk about is like uh when uh when there's music that's really rhythmic or you know lots of very small subdivisions um i feel like that uh that what that's showing you is very empirically and you know objectively as possible where time is you know at those moments and yeah and for everyone in the room that they're agreeing more or less on where those time you know steps are happening and it's kind of amazing because like that like you know when else are you gonna perceive time is exactly as like you know a string of like 30-second notes that you know that the drummer is the drummer is playing right like if you think about how exact of a of a marking of time that is uh-huh it's kind of crazy wow yeah that's really fascinating um but that's that's i feel like that's one of the other powerful things about music and in a group is that it it kind of unifies people's uh perception of of time in an interesting way it's it's really cool though i i think our our internal clocks are much more powerful than we give them credit for uh have you ever had the experience where you go to bed and set your alarm and then after a few days of that uh waking up at the same time you begin to wake up just like a minute before your yeah totally yeah how do you predict out of nine hours of rest down to the minute yeah although i mean you know there's stuff like that that's i that's like the circadian i don't know if that's the right word but whatever part of your brain is that that creates the circadian rhythm um but that's like one o'clock and then you have this other clock that's like your conscious perception of time which is way all over the place as far as you know how long something seems based on how much attention you're paying to it or yeah you know what what your emotions are like or you know what this is you know whether it's stressful or not um how close it is to the end of the school year yeah how old you are yeah but it's interesting i actually uh i haven't read victory with victor wooten's autobiography but i i know he talks in it about playing like metronome games where you like uh you put the metronome on something ridiculous like you know one beat per for 30 seconds and then just try to keep the you know the pulse in your head and then just like hit it exactly on the yeah it's like it's crazy yeah yeah i i did read it the music lesson there's a scene where he talks about this uh fictional kid who comes into his house and says all right well uh you know he shows off how good of a drummer he is and he goes and puts on a metronome on headphones uh takes off the headphones puts puts it on victor wooten uh hits a downbeat walks into the kitchen pours themselves of a glass of orange juice comes back right on the downbeat yeah [Laughter] yeah i mean it's also so amazing that that level of uh precision with time and and uh and pitch and just uh you know dexterity with whatever you're using to you know create the sounds that that can be so much of it can be internalized and just you know very quickly just you know you can just spit out a bunch of really complex information with you know with you know your fingers or your arms or whatever that you know you can uh you know play an entire you know beethoven's not like how how many however many bits of information that is you know just instantly just you know without if you haven't memorized it it kind of feels you know it can feel effortless and it's just you know um yeah something that's that's uh wired into your brain such a gratifying experience do you remember the first time you're playing something really difficult on your instrument and you you reach that sort of zen moment where you separate from yourself as the actor doing that and you're just looking at your hands doing all these like crazy movements and hitting every note and you're just like holy [ __ ] who's doing that yeah yeah how's this happening it's funny i don't know if i really had a moment like that that i can remember i mean really i mean honestly yeah i mean it might have happened somewhere in high school when i uh actually was it was probably in high school because like i started i started playing that's when i started playing like wc in chopin for the first time and where it was you know my hands kind of knew where a bunch of things were that my brain didn't yeah and uh yeah it was probably yeah do you know uh chopin's nocturne in in e flat yeah probably can't remember but um yeah that piece was one of the first chopin pieces i tried to learn it and there's a bunch of like leaps in the left hand for like the bass note and the chords and uh you kind of have it has to be like a muscle memory thing it's it's interesting you said zen like because it doesn't it can be zen-like but it can also be just you're thinking about something else and then you know you're still you're still playing and actually i i i kind of use that when i'm practicing you know if like i'm working on something that's really hard okay let me slow it down let me repeat it until i have to think about it and then uh at some point you know when you're repeating it and you're still like working out and then your brain will just kind of gradually start thinking of something else and you'll still be doing it you'll be like okay now i can move on i have that yeah yeah absolutely i use the same sort of technique quite often it's useful when i'm trying to remember a song that i used to know and i know it's still in there but you go back and you play a short distance of it and then you get to a spot and you're like [ __ ] i don't know where it goes from here yeah but you know you know it so what you what works for me is to to stop start again and zone out and just think about nothing yeah or or just think about anything yeah and then you'll notice oh i just played the whole song yeah let's do that a couple times and then you'll it'll bring it to the forefront yeah i i've you know i'm sure you've had your share of like memory slips on stage did i do the repeat i better do it again just to be sure yeah i know i it's not really stuff like that i mean for me i i i've done stuff like that for sure but um i mean i've done stuff like that you know so many times but um the ones i'm thinking about are you know that like the the it's like you know a piece i've been practicing for literally like months if not years and i i've played it so many times i i feel like i know like the back of my hand but at some point during the performance i look down and i'm like i don't know what my left hand is doing here i know what my right hand is doing but what the hell is my left hand supposed to be doing um and uh [Laughter] i've definitely had that that experience yeah it's interesting because you can it's usually just like there's this one little bit of information that you're not remembering and that's preventing you from getting you know to the next part and if if someone just gave you could give you magically that little piece that you're missing you'd be like oh yeah yeah like you know yeah get the rest of it out um yeah and it's i i i in some ways performing has gotten easier as i as i've performed more but in some ways i just get more in my own head sometimes yeah well i mean i mean uh and part of it is is honestly like the the actually stressful performances i have are actually like uh kind of few and far between uh and uh so every time i i sit down to perform it's like okay let me have the right mindset you know and i'm i'm not as because i'm i'm used to like performing in like you know mildly like pretty low stakes but it's it's always like oh it's embarrassing if i mess up like it's a rehearsal right like i don't want to be messing up but if i mess up it's not the end of the world so i'm in a lot of situations like that and then like only very rarely now am i in the actual like i'm on stage performing you know this better be good i don't want to you know make a fool of myself um and yeah whenever i feel like whenever that happens now i i kind of um it's it's like i know i i don't want to get into my own head so i get into my own head that type of thing yeah um but i i mean the the the trick with that is just i i just try to just concentrate like completely on the music like just the notes and just how i'm gonna play them and you know just you know zone everything out and um but i feel like it's a lot it's usually somewhere in the middle of the piece where i my my brain starts to go you know kind of spinning off especially if there's like a little flub or something and you know you have to kind of not think about it yeah yeah i i find that the more i practice and the more the more i have experiences like that uh the more i can practice intentionally so that uh okay because because what that does is it just reveals like oh this is a part that i don't know as well i mean i've been just coasting by it filling it in but it's not like uh a cornerstone of my understanding of this piece yeah and when you start to recognize that you have those little blind spots that when you when you go to practice you can start to iron them out totally yeah and it is just kind of a matter of like weeding out those little like holes in your in your memory uh yeah it's yeah it's interesting you mentioned that the the term blind spot because i i feel like that's um that's something i like that happens a lot in like when you're teaching someone to read cheap music and even me like if there's really dense you know music notation like sometimes you just literally won't see things because they you know there's so much information there and your brain is just we'll just like filter it out [Laughter] um yeah that's one of the ways i i i feel like music kind of gives you a a window into the way your brain works in the same way that like language language does because it's uh it's the same kind of uh like symbolic representation of of something yeah definitely i'm teaching a class right now uh like introductory free class through the library of beginner ukulele and guitar and uh themed uh on the focusing on music as a mindfulness practice and one thing that was pertinent for this class was uh this metaphor that has arisen in certain meditative practices uh cultures uh maybe you've heard of having the metaphor of a garden as a sort of like a sacred space within yourself that you cultivate um you know you you go through the effort to keep it growing and it's just you you come back to it every day and that creates the sanctuary this safe peaceful space where where chaos can't can't enter in yeah yeah i think i've heard about about something like that and it's exactly the same thing with music it's when you when you practice you're you're cultivating that garden you're engaging with music which is inherently a structured uh an organizing principle mm-hmm and so so you're like creating a place where the the harmony can enter but where disorder cannot right yeah you're kind of you're kind of using your your will to to separate separate things that you know are that that you you think are are like aesthetically pleasing and aesthetically not pleasing you're kind of able to make those distinctions yeah and and and it even goes to the level of like for example learning a particular piece of music and learning to play it accurately maybe when you first start out you're not hitting the beats on time and you work at it and work at it and you're weeding out that inaccuracy to the point where you can get it you can play every note precisely on time you've created an ordered structure this piece of music that when you play it there's no room for that disorder to get in there there's no you're not going to miss the note because you know it totally that reminds me of when i went to this summer program for new music uh specifically contemporary vocal music in la this past summer and uh we did like a meditation exercise with everyone pretty much every day at the beginning of the day and um david the guy who's leading it uh who's leading the whole like workshop concert thing um he he would always ask us to picture like a mind palace and like our room within the the mind palace and then we were also supposed to like uh imagine some kind of like manifestation of our our emotions so you know like the fear sadness uh joy but the idea was that there's a part of that that's you know that's your sanctuary and there's another another part of it where these emotions kind of exist and um okay and you can kind of use that to focus your music making i i do think there there's is something to the fact though that um it's not that you need to be totally you know like a well-balanced person who's you know got all their demons in check to you know create music but like there's a there's a really interesting relationship there between you know on the one hand you can't really create much if your life is such a chaotic mess that you just literally don't have the time or the energy right but at the same time i mean a lot of people would probably say that if you're have living like a totally comfortable just you know everything is is provided to you and you don't really have to um you know nothing's nothing usually at risk and and you're just kind of living like a sheltered life then then it's it's very possible that your your music won't be quite as as meaningful as it could have been yeah yeah definitely yeah so like the place where that disorder and order meets is where meaningful music is created maybe something like that i think it's i think i'm more thinking along thinking along the lines of uh just you know if if you're thinking about the emotions in your head um like how for for lack of a better term how out of whack do they have to be you know to like to create interesting things that are happening like create interesting interesting music um maybe out of out of whack is it the right word but i mean obviously if all your emotions are are like flat then you know and you get arvo pert [Laughter] hey that's a weird way of mispronouncing milton babbitt's name he has some good music i mean i was just you know talking though about how there is there's some music that that can be like not emotional so i guess that's not really um i mean that's not the only way to look at it but as far as like uh um i guess i'm thinking about it more from like the the standpoint of inspiration you know like are you gonna feel inspired if your emotions aren't you know kind of stimulated in some way hmm yeah i guess it depends depends on the viewer again the listener yeah i will say though that having a musical practice is the number one thing that has kept me sane and helped me regulate my emotions and cultivate patience and and clarity of thought yeah totally and just yeah like you were saying kind of a practice that you come back to every day and and cultivate it's just uh yeah it's a very very good way to just kind of take it one day at a time yeah because because we as humans have a tendency to uh latch on to things to obsess over we're compulsive creatures and it what whatever there is if there's space in your life that space is gonna get filled up by something we're gonna latch onto something if it's video games or tv or sports or or anything and so i think it's a really powerful thing to latch on to something that is uh an organizing structure it's your it's like you're harnessing all that energy of compulsion and routing it into creating something that is other than compulsion yeah yeah i mean it's like any you know i don't want to use the word hobby but anything that you're making like gradual but concerted and regular effort to to get to you know some kind of beautiful thing that that could just be you know randomly created if you follow just you know your your your desire for instant gratification you know at every point um yeah there's something there's something powerful about that yeah so i think one of the most fascinating things for me about music compared to other art is it's uh it's impermanence right hmm and it's kind of transitory by nature just because it uh sound can only exist you know as a as a movement of something yeah and i think you know even more than something like you know dance or theater uh that still involves moving through time um because music is essentially invisible like there's some other layer on there of just kind of ineffability yeah yeah and just because it's it's so tied to the the present moment and it only exists there and it's it's only through the memory of this string of present moments that we have something we can call like a unified piece you know or unified yeah piece of music yeah it's the attention to each individual moment that creates the the perception of a unified piece whereas if we were waiting to get to the end like like alan watt says like what's the point of music is it to get to the end if that were the case then the conductors who can do it the fastest would be the best ones or better yet just cut out and play the last chord you've seen that math problem that goes around right where it's like if uh orchestra of 60 musicians takes an hour and a half to perform beethoven's 9th symphony how fast can 120 musicians perform i would i would i would pay to see an orchestra perform beethoven at like 1.5 speed or like or like you know 0.5 speed or something double speed double orchestra yeah i'd pay to see that yeah yeah and you can't uh everyone who's listening to it at the same time is kind of on a level playing field like in order to experience the piece in its entirety yeah you can't speed up time and get to the end of it you have to wait just along with everyone yeah yeah for sure there's yeah there's no way to judge it you know truly until you get to the end yeah yeah and it's like reading a book in in that you know if it's really long and you get to the end it might not feel like it was worth it yeah but um you know it always reminds me when i think about like long pieces about you know just hiking to it to a a distant mountain or something that you know you have to hike at least a day to get to at all um oh wow and that you know how many people actually get to see that um and it's not the same you know i would consider you know scrubbing along to the midpoint of the song as like a picture of the mountain or something i don't know um like uh yeah there's something about about getting up to that point naturally and like the state your mind is in and then uh what you experience at that moment is unique to you having experienced the whole thing that came before yeah it's all part of the same experience [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Post Wave Podcast

Views: 33

Rating: 0 out of 5

Keywords: arts, philosophy, music, podcast

Id: 7ZDcOrdQUJM

Length: 84min 13sec (5053 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020