I’ve jumped off into the land of Reaktor. I’m off in a process of music creation that is totally unknown to me. I’ve been a Reaktor user for years and years.. but that doesn’t mean I have a clue. In part this is because I’m embarking in a direction Reaktor has always suggested to me but that I’ve never explored in any great depth. At this moment my library of tools.. out side of Reaktor, has grown and matured in such a way that it can facilitate these sorts of directions in ways it couldn’t in the past.

Ableton Live, a program that is centered around the idea of “loop sequencing” is a big part of this. With Live you can take an audio file.. take a part of that file, and make a loop out of it… and manipulate it in a variety of different ways. So if you find your self generating huge amounts of raw audio material, from whatever sort of process you might engage your self with.. you can go on a kind of creative editorial process.. I guess.. and sorta take things some place.

I say I guess because I really have no idea where I’m going with all this: I’m just engaged in the process. There’s any number of directions I could see myself going in.. from where I’m at now, with respect to what I’m doing now.. but it’s all fairly unknown territory for me.. so the ratio of success to failure is probably not very high… depending on how you measure success.

There’s a growing feeling that I have a lot to learn out here. When I listen to the products of this process, as early on as I am in exploring it, there’s certain things it suggests to me in relationship to the sort of work that I normally do. It’s as if there’s some sort of a continuity, that what I’m looking at are two ends of a world of creative possibilities.. and it seems to me that learning to bridge the gaps between these two ends.. these two worlds really, is an objective that would be important to explore.

As it strikes me now, there are a few principle elements who’s exploration will bridge these gaps. #1 Is music theory, #2 is sound synthesis, #3 at least to my current mind set is linguistics, and #4 is probably audio engineering.. kinda sorta broadly. If there is a #5 It must have something to do with my own creative process.. my own ideas about composition and music creation, and artistic what have you…

Music theory is a strange sort of world that I haven’t explored very deeply at all. In a sense, spending years making music is an exploration of music theory in a practical sort of way. By creating music you develop a feel for what works and what doesn’t.. What grasping of traditional theory I have operates as a conceptual framework for how I interact with sound.. though this grasping is a rather surreal sort of grasping. What strikes me as important about exploring theory in greater depth is that it could yield any number of insights into what I’m doing.. and allow me to travel in directions that I haven’t really traveled all that much in, and to do so with greater ease. Though as I write these words I’m, in the back of my mind, thinking “screw theory, we’ll just explore melody in new ways.”

Sound synthesis is a different ball of wax altogether. Sound synthesis is basically about how synthesizers synthesize sound: What are the different methods of sound synthesis, how do they work, how do we use them for creative expression?

Linguistics is a strange curve ball in all this. I’m reading Leonard Bernstein talking about a connection between music theory and linguistics. It’s suggestive to me of a different way of thinking about composition then ether traditional music theory or my own approaches to composition. It brings you into thinking that musical language is somehow innate in our beings… It’s innateness, among other things, suggests that there might be other fruitful approaches for thinking about and creating music. Lets leave it at that for now.

Audio engineering brings us into a very large space that extends the subject of sound synthesis into other areas. We must think about things like psycho acoustics… yes, developing a mastery of mix engineering is a project that I’ve now been engaged in for sometime. The subject of recording engineering is probably important in here somewhere.. and the full subject of digital manipulation of sound is to.

The creative process is one where we look at all this stuff we hope to learn.. the core principles.. and try and find ways of breathing creative life into them.

I don’t know if any of this makes sense.. but its what I find myself thinking about tonight. This is sorta like a journal of my adventure into Reaktor land.. my reaction to these new processes I’m starting to explore.

If you’d like to get a sense for what sorta music I make.. and clearly this would help make these words a good deal more comprehensible, here’s a link to Indra’s Net.. which would be a CDs worth of music I’ve recently made freely available to anyone who might like to hear.

This month.. that is the month of november, I’m working to put make and put out a new CDs worth of material.. its in this new material that we hear these new experiments mixed with my older processes… though taken to new highs… Here’s a link to the november CD, Zar Matt A Thustra’s Deep Space Adventures.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 10:59 am and is filed under Music Production, Zar Matt A Thustra's Deep Space Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.