Search Results for: music

A system of irreconcilable regularities

German pre-Romantic philosopher, Johann Georg Hamman, held that music was given to man to make it possible to measure time:

We do not measure time regularly, like clocks do, but with many differing rates of speed. In the complexity of today’s experience, it often seems as if simultaneous events were unfolding with different measures. These different measures coexist and often blend but are not always rationalized in experience under one central system. We might call this a system of irreconcilable regularities.

Sort of like the strange but extremely valuable science of how pedestrians behave. Differing rates of speed, moving together in the main – or not – toward the same purpose, differently, together together, or together alone. A system of irreconcilable regularities and irreconcilably regular.

Where the borders are

I contributed part of the Icograda Design Education Manifesto 2011 update. I explore the dissolving/ed borders between consumer and producer, collaboration as primary form of interaction in design, and “beautiful seams” as a response.

The updated Icograda Design Education Manifesto and supporting essays — including this one — is available for download. To obtain a printed copy of the book for a nominal fee, please contact the Icograda Secretariat.

The comfortably crisp borders between creator and consumer have dissolved. As a result of technological, social and cultural advancements in product design, the borders that once separated producer and consumer are no longer recognisable, permanent or possible.

Relying on these traditional boundaries can be a disadvantage for contemporary designers. We carry our social networks in our pockets. We crowd-source our private financial decisions with strangers online. We read a single book across devices on a number of screens. It is critical, then, that designers do not see borders, but design beautiful seams.

By not seeing borders, designers expand their possibilities at a time when websites have migrated off desktops onto streets and computing in public is becoming a behavioural norm. With the blurring of borders between disciplines, and across devices, time zones and communication spaces comes a new mode of collaboration. The changes necessitate a new form of collaborative enterprise — not just with team members, but with the target audience.

As we experience this shift, our collaborative activities must evolve in at least five critical ways:

Collaboration is interactive

Traditional frameworks for production are evolving into interactive activities where the consumer participates in creation. While traditionally a passive role, consumers are more frequently introducing their own stories, values and content into the production process. One-to-one works have become many-to-many works, and the do-it-yourself (DIY) culture is giving way to a do-it-with-others (DIWO) movement.

Collaboration is responsive

With the emergence of tools that allow consumers to take part in product creation, consumers have taken on a new role. No longer passive, they have become co-creators – moved from nouns to verbs. Consumers actively create alongside designers, often through improvisation. Improvising – the act of creating in the moment and in response to an environment, results in the invention of new patterns, practices, structures and behaviours.

Collaboration is sensemaking

To create patterns is natural not only as designers, but as humans. We make sense of chaotic environments by giving shapes and concepts meaning and form that we can categorise – poster, website, building, typography, interactive, stone and so on. Creating categories gives our experience boundaries.

Collaboration is continuous

Collaboration is both discipline-respectful and discipline-agnostic. It is a historically rich creative process that has influenced artistic mediums from music to dance to theatre. As a method it is evolving from a bounded behaviour that is a useful tool in specific cases to a life-long process that calls on various disciplines to work spontaneously, harmoniously and holistically.

Collaboration is personal

People should be fiercely passionate about good ideas so that their collaborative efforts are a natural extension of themselves. Confidence can bridge a gap between desire and outcome if our integrity of thought and authenticity of creation remain intact. We have the ability to both do good work and to make it personal. Confidence is good’s natural extension.

Finally, as we consider these shifting borders, we must consider the areas where those border lines meet — the “beautiful seams,” a term coined by Mark Weiser, chief technologist of, at the time, Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre. Weiser intended for users to explore systems and to find moments of beauty within them. If our role as designers is to create platforms and frameworks, we must be conscious of developing recognisable seams for others, so that they can play, discover and configure in those spaces.

As borders continue to shift, designers and users overlap, time zones matter less and boundaries blur, it is at these beautiful seams that designers have the most opportunity to create, to present possibilities, to demonstrate beauty, to teach and to learn.

Apropos of borders, in NYC, I am at 40˚34″N 74˚00’W.

How to be a person/novelist

Murakami on how being obsessed with music helped him be a novelist (emphasis mine):

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz.

Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more.

Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words.

Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow.

Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work.

These are just as important a set of guidelines for music and writing as they are for how to be a person.

1. Have predictability or rhythm
2. Find a melody or a narrative
3. Create harmony to support the narrative
4. Improvise
5. Make it public/ship it

[via rgreco]

What do you do? Or, what don’t you do?

Jon Tan on who we are:

I am a web designer. I neither concentrate on the party venue, food, music, guest list, or entertainment, but on it all. On the feeling people enter with and walk away remembering. That’s my job. It’s probably yours too.

Worth remembering.

[via Rob Greco’s delicious]

Language landscapes

What if we read language as something else? Color, music, landscapes. What if the letterforms were something else entirely? Ingrid Fetell points to the reason we read so easily — our letterforms have evolved from natural forms (break mine):

Neuroscientist Marc Changizi writes in his book The Vision Revolution that the reason we read so easily is because our letterforms evolved to look like natural objects, (or more correctly, parts of objects) which our brains are primed to process quickly because they surrounded us in our ancestral environment. Reading a text is then very much like reading a landscape. 

Our letters look like they do because our brain is fast at processing edges and contours, which hold information about an object that could be urgently relevant to our survival, but slower at processing stimuli less urgently relevant to survival. (Is that a cliff edge or a gently sloping hillside? A tiger’s sabre tooth or a ripe apricot? The fastest way to know is shape.) Our letters are not colors because such a detailed level of color identification is not as urgent a mental task; the systems for “reading” color are just naturally slower, (though colors hold lots of intrinsic emotional significance…

Hidden acoustics

Music can reveal acoustics hidden in architecture as violinist Ruth Palmer reveals with her Bach-centered tour, Hidden Acoustics. She says:

Bach’s solo violin music has its own hidden acoustics in its counterpoint, and I have found that solo violin allows me the purest link to the space and acoustic of the building in which I am playing. To me, when the piece of music and the building match in spirit, something magical happens.

Pairings are indeed magic. Food, fonts, partnerships of all kinds — sound and architecture should be no different. What sound is hidden right before us? How has music perhaps evolved our spaces, and what might be possible if we imagine our spaces more grand than we can even see? Some clues, perhaps.

Sonic attention

Alex Ross profiles John Cage and his 4’33”, which taught people how to listen:

It has been called the “silent piece,” but its purpose was to make people listen. “There’s no such thing as silence,” Cage said, recalling the première. “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering on the roof, and during the third people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”

Marc Weidenbaum explains:

Cage taught us many things, as Ross lists them — he prepared us for laptop music, helped get Fluxus and happenings going, welcomed the contrasting elements of chance and procedural instructions. And he taught us to listen. The inclusion in the two poems of sonic imagery [in the same issue of The New Yorker that contains Alex Ross’ extended piece on John Cage, there are two poems that involve descriptive passages about sound], so to speak, reminds us that we don’t just listen with our ears. Sonic attention in the world also means recognizing sound in what we read.

See also:
Conversations: The sound of silence

What would happen if you sat down and did nothing? As Cage put it, “Art is a sort of experimental station in which one tries out living.” What does it sound like?

Momentary infinities

On the last day of summer, Jeremy Denk doesn’t try to sum up the past few months:

Go ahead and try to sum it all up. If I was working at the Whitney staging a retrospective of my summer past, the Summer of No Blogging …, it would mainly consist of a performance art piece entitled Practicing Maniac. Various rooms: always the same maniac.

Instead of looking back, try to imagine everything, a time forever:

Infinity is something you’re in awe of, which seems impossible, but (like a horizon) is there all the time, defining your every step. I find infinity not in Mozart’s continuity, but in his gaps, ambivalences, in glimpses, in the leap from one image or idea to another. If the cadence and the style is a box, a scaffolding, the four-bar phrases, the whole rigmarole of compositional framework … then music’s a box for holding infinities, momentary infinities. How do they fit in there? They’re hiding in the corners of phrases, behind barely touched-upon moments, which imply vast other things.

I like this. If you can squint enough to see the container, you might see infinity. As designers, and as people, we get hung up on the entirety of experiences, lasting experiences, but sometimes infinity is only a moment.

One equals one

Nico Muhly on writing, specifically writing choral music:

I like the idea of these specific texts having been sung basically every day since the sixteenth century — you have to set the texts delicately, obviously, but because everybody knows them so well, there is always possibility for small explorations into funnier textures and procedures. Another thing to keep in mind about these settings is that they are designed to be listened to while standing up; nobody wants an endless Magnificat. …. The only other text of this kind that comes to mind is the announcements made in transit: “mind the gap”, “fasten your seat belts”, “the nearest emergency exit might be located behind you”. Repetition is built into the texts on a macro level; why not, then, explore repetition on the surfaces of them as well?

So we have an idea of the audience. We can be there, standing up, with him. And then:

[T]he first movement begins with a somewhat obvious word-painting: the poet speaks of carpenters and we have the thwack of wood against wood, he speaks of deckhands and we hear a ship’s bell. However, the ant-farm soon vanishes and the texture dissolves into a lonesome solo violin outlining a delicate passacaglia. After an extended instrumental interlude, the choir emerges, talking about “the delicious singing of the mother”. The first movement ends — as do all three movements — with a wordless sung punctuation: a series of repeated pulses.

Some years ago now, a colleague and I pitched an audio interview series idea. “What Design Sounds Like,” it would be called. (I believe the credit is his for the name.) We frequently talk about design, have opinions about design out loud, we thought, but what if we took the artifacts away, and were only left with the words? And further, not text, but one thing, simply audio. What does design sound like?

As I went from Google Reader over to Nico’s site hoping he’d included a clip (he often does) so I could listen as he narrated, I lost track. There were sopranos, and a haze of technology, and Morse Code. But all in text. And then, the reading was finished. The pieces had ended. And I had heard it. With one thing, with text, he had done it: what music reads like.

Later, of course, I tracked it down. But there was no need. He created the experience already, contained, complete. As I listen to the album now, I now understand what John Updike said of churchgoing, “Taken purely as a human recreation, what could be more delightful, more unexpected than to enter a venerable and lavishly scaled building kept warm and clean for us one or two hours a week and to sit and stand in unison and sing and recite creeds and petitions that are like paths worn smooth in the raw terrain of our hearts? …. Only in church and at the polls are we actually given our supposed value, the soul-unit of one, with its noumenal arithmetic of equality: one equals one.”

Taking everything away gives us that arithmetic.

In praise of anacoluthons

Daniel Wolf on writing as if composing music:

Run-on and runaway sentences; hanging sentence fragments; needling repetition; odd punctuation; obscurities and neologisms; abrupt shifts of register, both up and down; anacoluthons; non-sequitors; too much stuffed away between ellipses, brackets, braces, or parentheses (when not hidden in footnotes below); seemingly arbitrary settings of text in italic or boldface character; metaphors mixed and mashed; knowingly faulty logic; opinions presented as facts; abused rhetoric (all 38 of Schopenhauer’s Arts of Being Right on display and then-some)… Guilty as charged! All I can ask is that you, dear reader, bear with me even if these aspects of Renewable Music’s house style book grate like so many fingernails on blackboards or even more ants in a bento box on a Saturday picnic turned to thunder, lightning, rain, gentle rain, then too much rain… The idea — and there really is one, here — is that the webblog is still a new medium, and one which has not yet found its extents and limits as a form of prose (or not-prose), and one which is not yet immune to the methods of an experimental composer, thus the breathless and short-of-breath and stuttered lines, the sudden interjections, jarring accents, and ragged articulations, and all those sounds, those troubled, troubling, consoling, caring, sweet, everyday, exotic, exhalted sounds… What could be better than to aspire to a condition of music? My fault, my failure then, may not be the experimenting but rather the stubborn fact of not having experimented enough.

There’s a certain thrill to the unedited, to posting without copy editing, to letting it out without checking, to giving it over without apologizing. To get the good you have to give the bad, and that means being willing to be troubled and awkward and wrong in public. If you do so, good comes with it. Unedited with diplomacy. (Even when the occasional commash gets by.)

“Good writing,” it has been said, “has music in it.” And I would add, good design has writing in it. What then does a run-on design look like? A design fragment? A dangling wireframe? Art directed non-sequiturs? So in need of being right, we try to be tidy and squared around the edges, but in fact, perhaps our design work should be less in need of punctuation. Not more.

Design for life

Ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: “design for life”. In a healthy society this design for life will encourage every profession and vocation to play its part since the degree of relatedness in all their work gives to any civilization its quality. This implies that it is desirable that everyone should solve his special task with the wide scope of a true “designer” with the new urge to integrated relationships. It further implies that there is no hierarchy of the arts, painting photography, music, poetry, sculpture, architecture, nor of any other fields such as industrial design. They are equally valid departures toward the fusion of function and content in design.

This from László Moholy-Nagy in 1947 in Vision in Motion, a compendium of the modern movement. Moholy-Nagy, best known for teaching at the Bauhaus until 1928, and director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937 until its closing one year later.

Whether in academia or profession — or, more telling, places that blur the lines between — as relevant now as it was then, if not more so.

Tape tasks

The Mixtape Club is an organization dedicated to the art of the mixtape. Ten people, ten tracks, ten album covers:

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention … and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and … oh, there are loads of rules. [via Hornby]

But as Sarah Vowell so frankly puts it:

Making a mix tape isn’t like writing a letter, it’s like having a job. …. I can make a tape of “I Believe in Miracles” but I cannot perform miracles.

Either way, a top five list, noticeably absent.