Sitting in a room alone with a piano and a pile of staff paper loosely bound and labeled with cardboard covers and masking tape. The marker scribblings of useful names like “Book 2” or the ever popular “Book 4” giving the only meaning to what is inside. Of course, in the different books a line would end with “Book 2 p 15” to point to where the line or passage picked up. Light melodic themes or huge polyphonies. Scratched out in pencil using the notation one would find in the Grove book. Hours and hours and hours of sounding things out and transcribing them for later.

That was work.

To make it more difficult, one could start playing with electronic music. Or tape music. Both of those requiring special equipment that one might or might not have. Access was limited to one hour blocks two or three times a week. Top that off with a desire to make music with what looked like the most promising tool of all: the computer. The computer of 1992 being something that could be virtualized and parallelized on the software found on most household appliances now.

Why do we do that? Look back on what was available then and instantly shake our heads over how much more power we have now? More computing power. “Better” software. Less expensive devices. There is so much excitement there that it’s almost forgotten that the speed with which we travelled from one to the other lapped human creativity 100 times. In spite of having everything it would take to build a polyphonic synthesizer and set it up to play tone collections as of yet unheard, we hear more and more Apple Loops. Canned snippets chained together and distributed as novel.

I’m not hating, really. It’s frustration, that’s all.

On vacation to Lake Superior a summer or so back, I took along a voice recorder and set it down to capture the sounds of the lake for later. One of my preoccupations with electronic music and computer music was to process found or collected sounds. Grabbing the near silence of the woods in the heat of the day or the lapping of a Great Lake against rocks that have been making that sound for a million years and twisting them. Pulling them apart. Isolating tiny pieces and stretching them to see what they have inside. Those were the times in the studio that really moved me. Hearing things that were there and weren’t there at the same time. Some of those sounds became instruments. Layered with others pulled from the same source, there was a deep connection and yet very individual voices. Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass all in the same rainstorm.

The past 5 or so years have been full of personal development. Something shifted inside of me and I decided that I was going to change my trajectory. I ended up back where I started and, no surprise, I started to feel the same comfort and the same confinement I knew when I was very young. I don’t know that we ever shake where we’re from. I know I haven’t.

I don’t know what prompted it, but I started to survey the computer music world. So many tools! So many things to chase! That was always so much fun back in the infancy of the internet: discovering a new tool for music. Installing it. Troubleshooting it. Making a noise with it. Capturing that noise and wringing it into something that might resemble music. Discovering Plug Data was like lighting that fire all over again.

https://plugdata.org is a way to put Pure Data patches into a DAW like Logic. Why does this even matter? It allows me to build out massive patches for synthesis or signal manipulation and run them against source recordings or just sequence them more easily. It also lets Logic handle all of the MIDI and Audio bullshit so I can open things and get to work without a bunch of nonsense. Finding this will turn out to be critical for me.

I’ve spent a few hours in front of the screen doing what I used to love doing so much: building sounds from nothing to something.

I know why I stopped. I’m hoping I can keep going. I want to make music again.