I've recently begun to make music again. By recent I mean just now. Sat at the computer I pondered my process and the sounds that might be generated by my approach, and I began to loathe everything that I had made before today. This loathing excited me, because as always it heralds fresh ideas. My boredom and short attention span propelling me to a new creative location.
I began by detesting music itself, hearing hum drum melodies and riffs borne out of routine - detritus bearing these hallmarks constitutes so much that is consumed by humans for leisure. Its easy to imagine how it happens, people tinkle on on the keyboard or strum the guitar and magnetise to the same old chord structures like a blue bottle feasting off an ancient cow pat. No effort to expand the repertoire, complicate the sequence, or do the opposite of what seems natural.
The challenge - to make easy listening music without reverting to the same old shit. I believe people do avoid the same old shit by making an effort to forget what comes naturally, so the creator must avoid what has been hammered in by convention. Perhaps by choosing to focus on the fertile plane of instrumentation known as Signal Processing musicians can be more free of convention because less convention exists, and the conventions laid down are not so much musical in nature.
By being analytical of creative process and by looking into the causes/patterns of creative ideas it is possibly to identify why that hungry bluebottle hovers the way he does. Enthusiasm for different sounds and approaches will be more likely to generate an exciting result, and consciously or unconsciously this requires the creator to avoid the "classic" routes within the process.
It is possible to see advancements of musical sound in history by charting a crude evolution: over the past 2000 years it can be seen that pitch variations became more and more volatile, utilising greater and greater changes in pitch to create melody which increased with each passing century. This continued into the Renaissance and Romantic periods where the far reaches of 12 tone harmony were explored and mastered, demonstrating greater musical complexity than the music written prior.
The use of non instrumental sound for music was at first realised and then some time later popularised by forward thinking composers, also music using more and more "bent notes" and pitch slides, then the electric revolution. A new world of sound was opened up, and with it signal processing - the age of the synthesiser. Now we have digital, and its time for artists to discover the evolutionary steps of sonic creativity that may lead to future classic sounds.
I think that the artists like Does It Offend You Yeah and M.I.A are trying to go beyond what has gone before without restricting the upbeat and anthemic quality of pop music, and I like it. I urge artists to try and make something new, don't ignore your instinct, but challenge it! I"m sure its worked for people in the past.
