Phase Changes in Creativity
Like phase changes in matter, people involved with creativity deal with them as well. Composers have been known to have revivals of what they valued before, such as neoclassicism, or in art, a return to representation.
Music as a vapor
Music production is a simulation of the listening brain into distinct and digestible inputs. Music production is kind of like a "vapor" (not considering the genre Vaporwave); Sometimes it can make a state change to a "solid" (traditional music), but not usually. We can make songs more ambient but we can't make ambient music more like songs. Ambient music is sometimes only a music pumped with air, a "froth", a "meringue", angel food cake--all good but not for real dining. It is a "comfort food" but sometimes not for the person making it.
Ironically, writing ambient music isn't as calming as playing an instrument. Ambient music can be a very diffuse intellectual activity, unlike other music which uses motor skill. If you performed an fMRI on someone twiddling with knobs and pushing buttons (even if you could) it would look different from a scan of someone playing the piano. Another MRI of someone using a musical interface on a computer with all interactions done with a mouse would also look different, and probably not much different than someone using any software. Yet both the composer and audience listen with the same mindset but have different roots, i.e. the composer had to juggle both over a long period.
I find music production both interesting and very frustrating and not calm-inducing at all. It is work about making something work on a perceptual level in a completely abstract way--and have it be a resolved idea. When it works universally it can seem to be magical, even with all the flaws smoothed out by the mass acceptance of it. It's like the experience of looking at popular paintings: They are popular for many different reasons but have one big "like". Yet if you looked at what the artist had to go through while painting millions of dots over a year it means something else and might gather a pathos.
Music production probably enhanced our cognitive abilities more than what music would have done if it didn't co-evolve or be syncretic with electronic music and/or noise and synthetic timbre. The shift happened when we could make sounds other than what an instrument makes. Consider two people on a stage playing what seem to be guitars: Once an instrument becomes more of a controller, the musician is merely the "ventriloquist". The sound is detached from the instrument as an object and is a sound that could exist in some other form, like vapor changing state to a solid. Perhaps it was a liquid at some brief moment in the state change, but the listener can't perceive the part of it. Electronic music is a continuous vapor or current; there is nothing in its climate that could convert it to another state, or harness it, and even if you did it might be one or two notes. If you played them on guitar or piano it would be almost nothing musically--but not insignificant as a usable compositional unit, or as a connection node for the artist. Those two notes might be of little significance to the average listener, but might be an active creative force for the artist in terms of how it is contextualized in the flow of the work. That minor interval played with an interesting timbre might go well with some visual element--which is essentially a syncretic phenomenon. A person playing the same two notes with any device or controller and experiencing its produced sound is really a listener, and a passive thinker, not a player. The passive thinker/listener is not utilizing the part of the brain (and consciousness in general) involved with manipulating some physical object or surface: columns of air, strings, or membranes.
(I wrote about this in an older essay "Beyond Music". Instrument design and the sound were conjoined and then became separated and have been becoming more estranged over the centuries and will continue to become separated.)
The same frames of mind exist when reading, and has changed over the centuries.
"Wolf uses the tools of neuroscience to examine what happened to reading in that transition from old print to new screens—“how the circuitry of the reading brain would be altered by the unique characteristics of the digital medium, particularly in the young.” Her focus is neither the reading mind, nor our tastes, knowledge, intelligence, or skills, but the physical organ inside our heads. Those other things are shaped by what our brains are able and disposed to do."
The body as a vapor
Music-making can happen organically without any training so it is unlike many disciplines. The best autodidacts can fill in the gaps between intuition and basic motor skills. The mind is already pre-wired for music because it doesn't involve the intellect initially. All it needs is a "formatting" as a hard drive needs formatting before data can be stored on it, or as we conceptualize data now as being more of a vapor in a cloud. (As above, "shaped by what our brains are able and disposed to do.") The notion of a "bar line" is central to music-making because, except for music that is played rubato, music and language make sense only because of the bar line in the mind. Music notation symbolizes this, as does punctuation: Scriptio continua, with no spaces between words or punctuation, can still be deciphered because the reading mind is already formatted to place the "distancing" between the words and sentences. Your brain is wired to suss that out, as it is for finding rhythms in the flow of life, i.e. finding a musicality.
Music as a solid
Musical rhythm is always potentially embodied, i.e. it has to be played with the body in order for it to fully exist. You can make a machine make rhythms, but it never involves the body, except the fingertips typing the code. We play musical instruments by using the fingers primarily, but the whole body has to move with it, as well as the spirit and mind. If it didn't involve the body to begin with, it might just relate more to "inner hearing". Hearing and listening do not need the body, but they include, similar to what happens parasympathetically when reading or viewing something that triggers it emotionally.
In sum, the emotional experiences of the writer or composer can be different from the reader or listener. The best experiences are those where they are the same eventually. The passage of time does this where we are all on the same page cognitively: The writer finally gets what we perceive collectively, even though the phase changes from the vapor of ideas to the solidity of reality.
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