Motivation & driving questions

One of my strongest, musical memories is from my first year in college. I still had the ‘91 Chevy Cavalier I’d bought for $500 from my Auntie Val in Derry, NH and I’d brought it with me to Cambridge, MA. It was a 45 minute drive to go back and visit my family, and I made the trip many times, often leaving late on Friday evenings for a weekend visit. This particular night, I was driving on my favorite route, skipping major highways for the slower path down Route 3, flipping through the radio stations. When the seek button landed on 90.3, I thought it was just static. Not the white noise style of static one expects on the radio, but a pitched static. Like when your parents leave the television on while they sleep down the hall and your young ears can still hear the high pitched whine. It was a whining, humming static, but it gripped me. It didn’t crinkle or go in and out the way a station that is almost out of range does. I kept listening. And as I listened, as minutes and minutes and more minutes passed, from that single tone emerged a second tone dipping ever so slowly below the pitch of the first, causing rhythmic beats as the distance between the two pitches grew. As I listened, they moved slowly from dissonance to consonance to dissonance and then unison again. It was sound. It was noise. It was music.

The difference between noise and music

In some music genres, this line is explicitly a blurry one. And whatever genre that two-tone piece falls into, it isn’t the only one to play with the line between noise and music. Whether heavy metal, free jazz, punk or noise, genres that play around with this line are some of the most reviled and hated of musics. From the response of the elderly to Elvis Presley and the Beatles, of popped-collar preps’ to Iggy Pop and the Stooges, of white, suburban parents to rap or grunge, of any of us to the specific sounds we deem too far from the established patterns of our personal mainstream to be acceptable.

Depending on what we’ve heard before, our definition of acceptable is different, but there are certain characteristics we all use to differentiate music from noise. These have to do with particular ways that sounds are organized and related in music. Pitch, rhythm, volume, and timbre—the color or texture of a sound, the thing that makes my voice sound different from yours or a clarinet different from a trumpet even when we all sing the same pitch—are some of those central characteristics, and as discerning listeners of sounds, we come to distinguish music from noise based on the relationship of these characteristics.

But, as is said about many art forms, music—at least good music—is much more than can be captured in the deductive listing of the characteristics which can fully describe and differentiate one song from another. While it might not be inaccurate to say that music is organized sound, it becomes very inaccurate to say music is the organization of sounds. While there might be rules and patterns to fall back on within certain musical traditions, there is something at the core of good music, something I’ll call Energy for the purposes of this document, that is more than the sum of the theory and technique of which a musical piece is composed. In recorded music there are the shapes of the notes, the subtleties of attack and decay, the most minute deviations from the regular rhythm of the song that happen in the 2nd but not the 1st verse. There might be lyrics, the repressed expression of the singer’s accent, or the fact that you can in some inarticulable way hear them smiling in the recording of the final verse. And in live performances, the potential expressions of this Energy grow exponentially. It is for this reason that some very simple songs, songs with only a few notes or an incredibly repetitive melody, can be so effective. And, I believe, it is also for this reason that novices can have such a strong, real place in music-making.

The power of the novice

The power of the novice isn’t a concept I came up with. It is a more broadly held idea, across many fields but especially in those which require heavy specialization and training to enter into, participate in, and contribute to, that innovation can often be stymied by the narrowed perspective and insularity that specialized fields cultivate. Trained practitioners will often look in the same places, following the same leads and intuitions, to try and solve a problem. In contrast, a novice—any novice, but especially someone who brings a developed practice from a different field—can be in a place to recast problems in new ways and create solutions which traditional practitioners cannot, exactly because of their specialized expertise, experience, and implicit commitment to the way things have always done.

In music, novices don’t necessarily have the technique or the theory; they don’t have the symbolic manipulation or the muscle memory; but they can have the Energy*. *The musical ideas that new players can have, based not on training specific to their instrument or genre but on their previous relationships to music as listeners, singers, players of other instruments, producers, etc. can be more than enough to create moving, effective music. Perhaps using fewer, slower notes mixed with the intuitions they’ve cultivated in other domains, novices are able to use the skills they do have to create music that speaks, emotes, creates tension and release, which goes somewhere, in a way that better trained musicians don’t always.

I believe there is a real way in which musicians’ formal training can get in their way of having good, new, musical ideas, giving them traditional frameworks, precedent, and “the shoulders of giants” to lean on rather than investigating that inarticulate Energy that differentiates music from noise. Novices, however, are not beholden to multiple masters. They aren’t thinking about their jazz forefathers and the first chair clarinetist above them and their conductor and their childhood vocal instructor who told them to hold their shoulders back just so. They are more likely to be thinking about the specific expression they are creating right here, right now, in this context, for this audience, using whatever technique and theory they have. And that’s what’s real.

A story about Ornette Coleman

I was first introduced to Ornette Coleman through his jam Friends and Neighbors. I love that song. So good. It was only after listening to him for many years that I learned, through my partner Kris’ copious knowledge of reviled, underground musics, that Ornette did a lot of things that deeply offended Musicians of his time. In addition to playing free jazz, which is its own kind of affront, he had his 12 year old son Denardo Coleman play drums on a number of his albums. (Here’s the title track from the first, and another track from that album with a little more drumming dynamism.) Denardo wasn’t a child prodigy. He wasn’t a Drummer. But he was a musician, and he had Energy. He got the job done, asking what he could musically do at each moment. Another affront done to the jazz world by Ornette was his taking up of the trumpet and the violin. He wasn’t trained on either, though he was a skilled saxophone player. He didn’t focusedly study either instrument. He didn’t intensely train under some great master. He just played. As a novice. He used his Energy, not the technique of instrument playing, and… depending on your taste… he made some awesome shit.

Ornette Coleman was notorious for this kind of thing, but punk and grunge musicians often formed bands playing instruments they’d never learned. Many folk traditions, while giving deference and respect to players with experience and expertise, are explicitly organized to make space for the meaningful participation of novices, learners, and non-musicians. In this program of study, I want to understand the difference between noise and music and the implications that distinction has about the power of “novice” musicians to contribute to music in a deep, real way, not in spite of their lack of musical training but exactly because of it.

Driving questions

• What’s the difference between noise and music?

• What is the Energy—beyond theory and technique—that makes music good?

• How can traditional, musical training get in the way of making good music?

• How can we untrain ourselves musically in an analogous way to how we might deschool ourselves academically?

Next steps: Prospective programs and projects

These are some notes and plans for the projects I’m currently pursuing (or trying to get to pursuing) within my program of study.

Meta — Design, deploy, and document at http://shaunalynn.org/noise

If good music has Energy in its sound, this site has it visually—in its colors, motions, and interactions. It captures a sense of the novice, communicating quality through well-scoped visual design choices which mirror the types of trade-offs a novice musician must make in order to create great music. That said, it should also be functional, serving as a (relatively) static landing page and portfolio site for N&tN endeavors, similar to my personal site, with some spaces for sharing related resources, updates, etc.

Anticipated milestones, artifacts, elements:

1. A mock-up and site map

2. Very brief description of my interest/direction of inquiry

3. Portfolio of “finished,” documentation-worthy work, or at least layout for this

4. Ongoing wonderings, nuggets, questions, resources, AKA bloggggggg

Short term project — Small Scale Song Stereotype Snippets (5S)

Making music is different from studying music. It’s different from appreciating, listening to, analyzing, and doing comparisons of music. Making music is live, at least in part. Even when you’re in a studio, you have to sing, hit the drum, or hit the loop pedal. At some point, the rubber hits the road. In studying music, you can sit. You are meta. You can reflect and rewind and fast forward. I want to cultivate my ability to answer questions about music using the tools of close listening, programmatic analysis and comparison, and acoustical analysis and comparison.

Anticipated milestones, artifacts, elements—probably in the form of blog posts:

1. Challenging my musical stereotypes and assumptions by answering questions using Echonest and related APIs into song characteristics, e.g.

   1. Did Adele sing every chorus in Rolling in the Deep?

   2. Did Oasis really only write one song?

   3. Is all Dub Step at the same BPM?

2. Close listenings to specific solos and melodies to draw out patterns, decisions, and other aspects of the music which make it good, catchy, moving, etc.

3. Timbre portraits, comparing different sounds/instruments through language (woody, wet, sharp) and acoustical properties (spectral analysis, waveform, etc.)

Longer term project — Improvising Improvisation: Tips, Tricks, Stories

At School of HONK, anyone can try out solo improvisation. Whether you’re a professional sax player or it’s your first day playing the trombone, you’re welcome to participate in the group’s music in this way, contributing your unique, solo voice in an ensemble which, most of the time, relies entirely on members’ ability to listen and be an ensemble player. With different backgrounds, in life and musical training, this project seeks to collect the stories of why, when, and how people improvise at School of HONK. What notes do they play? How do they come up with musical ideas? Were they intimidated the first time? Are they still? How do they learn more and improve? What do they consider to be great improvisation?

Anticipated milestones, artifacts, elements:

1. Collect video interviews with School of HONK members

2. Code some of the common things they identify and describe to analyze

3. Collect great, iconic improvisations and match with members’ criteria

Program plan — Musical Maps: Using our ears to remember & represent

When we hear the word “map,” our minds go first to visual artifacts. Whether they are traditional, spatial/geographical maps or nontraditional maps drawn with different projections or weighted by population or voter turnout or number of cows per hectare, they are all visual. To whatever extent maps are an attempt to represent and remember, however, there’s evidence that other senses might have something to contribute. Scientists have studied the direct connection between smell and memory. We’ve all experienced the way a song can bring you back to particular moment in your past. In this program, we will explore nontraditional ways to represent and remember information (as “maps”) and specifically look at how we can use sound and music, whether as the subjects represented in our maps or as the form or representation of some other subject.

Evocative projects and investigations:

1. Creating digital landscapes that are animated visually and aurally

2. Making interactive, musical memoirs, including templates to make this happen

3. Musical field guides laying out the various aspects of specific songs

4. Maps of hometown/childhood/a decade—laid out spatially, temporally, aurally

5. Creating a map of bands who influenced each other, sampling maps, etc.