Knowledge vs. Perception - Some thoughts...

I am interested in whether anyone else has felt this way:

I am on the computer/guitar/piano, writing music. I start writing a melody or some chords, and everything I write looks so familiar… I write a melody and before it even gets anywhere, I’m thinking “BORING… that’s just the old 5th - 9th leap that I use all the time,” or “that’s just another one of those IV - vi chord progressions that have pervaded every emo and post-rock song since the 90s.” After a while every idea I come up with starts to look like an old family member who I love but just don’t want to talk to today.

I think here’s two main causes of this:
- firstly, knowledge is interfering with my ability to perceive sounds for what they actually sound like. I am not really listening to what I’m writing, because I “know” what it is…
- Secondly, the visual tools I am using makes the harmonic relationships between the notes way too obvious, making them look boring & simple. Because what I’m seeing is the same old notes in the same old configurations, my attention is drawn to these relationships, and away from the timbre, the form, and the various other subtle aspects that can make a new piece of music sound new.

Last night I wrote a song at the piano… in F# major (that’s right, 6 sharps, and I’m a pretty terrible pianist). It was great fun - the harmony started to move around in really mysterious ways as I explored the ideas, and I kept forgetting which scale I was in, resulting in interesting but instinctive harmonic shifts. I wrote the bones of 4 sections, and I was loving the sound of it. After I scrawled it all down to paper I decided F# was a bit awkward, so I transposed the whole thing into an easier key.

Suddenly, after transposing it, DISAPPOINTMENT - there were all my old boring friends again, in broad daylight. The old mixed-modal shift between vi and bVI, old mate mixolydian with the minor v. Without the veil of mystery applied by my lack of experience playing in F# major, all of these chords seemed so much less exciting.

Sometimes a similar thing happens with other music that I love. Under recreational listening conditions I’m not analyzing the harmony, especially when the timbre or texture is clearly intended to be the feature. And it’s in this mode that I often fall in love with certain pieces of music, and am totally overwhelmed and moved by them. But if I switch into analytical mode, sometimes I realise that the musical materials being used are embarrassingly simple - the kinds of chords or rhythms that I would feel self-conscious about if they were in my own music.

Am I the only person who has this problem?

I think there must be a gap between my mental schema of what makes good music, and what I actually enjoy as good music. Every human being has loads of different schemata to help them make sense of the world. Schemata help you get a movie you like when you go to the video store - even if you are totally unfamiliar with every film in the store, years of experience has given you a useful bank of information about genres, DVD cover artwork, and titles, which enables you to make a pretty accurate prediction about what you will like and what you will hate. If you didn’t have this schema you would need to read the synopsis on the back of every DVD, and have to start from scratch with each one to figure out whether it’s the type of film that will scare you or make you cry or laugh.

So schemata are helpful. The problem is though, that sometimes they are wrong. The brain isn’t so interested in building an accurate picture of the world, but rather in building a useful one. Racial prejudice is a pretty good example - people build up a schema based on limited and inaccurate information, leading to the belief that another race is bad or inferior. Modern physics is also fascinating in this sense - our experience of the world is tactile and predictable, so it’s very difficult to feel intuitively comfortable with the fact that space is curved and sub-atomic particles can be in multiple locations at once. Despite the fact that this is the reality, it is not our experience, and therefore does not enter our schema of how the world works.

So my very rational and non-musical schema which tells me that some harmonically relationships are good, and some are bad, is a helpful one. It’s probably what’s gotten me to where I am now - composing in the dark by trial & error would just take too long! But I am recognizing that it might be wrong. There is a clear error when the analysis machine in my brain tells that my favourite music is crap and boring. It’s too reductive - it doesn’t incorporate the capability of music to be mysteriously more than the sum of its parts.

It’s this kind of thinking that has led me to the current PhD plan, which is to compose in 4 totally different ways, using different visual tools and different perceptual environments. I’ll assume that there are no avid followers of this blog and explain what these are:

- 30 minute body of work for chamber ensemble, fully notated, and developed using notation.
- 30 minute body of work for instrumental rock band (Mr. Maps), developed collaboratively in rehearsal & not written down.
- 30 minute body of work constructed digitally from recordings of improvisations.
- 30 minute body of work inspired by and to accompany artwork, using mixed methods.

My hope is that by composing with chunks of audio for example, where the pitch content is invisible, or writing collaboratively with a band where nothing is ever written down may help to sidestep the schema problem, to allow me to expand my expectations of what music can and will do. Music theory is very helpful, but the quantum-esque uncertainty of music needs to be acknowledged - the fact that knowing a bit of music theory doesn’t mean I can predict and understand the complex web of relationships between timbre, pitch, rhythm, form, etc. The schema needs to be changed, or at least loosened up a bit.