Sound blob imagination

Sound, Imagination, Craft

I think of imagination as akin to the wind - you can never see it directly and only come to know it through that which it sets in motion. Imagination can work for good or evil. It can compel ambition and discipline just as much as it can inspire staring at a blank wall for longer than seems socially acceptable. Imagination gets variably described as active or passive, we dream something up just as much as imaginative visions come to us.

In music the rules of craft are well known and framed on concepts of functional harmony, melody, rhythm, lyrical structure, song form, style, and emotion. Attention paid to any one of these aspects of sound varies wildly for musicians and listeners alike. I’ve previously written about my own struggles with the forces of craft (Jazz Police post) and rarely a day goes by that I don’t find myself sparring with them in one arena or another. Comprehending craft well enough to employ its devices in your musical constructions is undeniably helpful. Understanding it to the point of mastery is dicier than advertised, depending on your goals. And pledging our allegiance to craft above all else can usher us into a fluorescent lit room that smells of sanitizing agents and is in desperate need of a window.

My point here is that imagination and craft are not the same thing. Craft necessarily enlists imagination. Imagination may or may not enlist craft. And this brings me to my main example, a sound blob…

Let’s talk about this sound blob in terms of craft. You go first, please. I can talk about this sound blob along the lines of texture, maybe even tossing in a crafty word like ‘timbre’ to convince you that I mean business. We could boil it down to a known process, how I made the sound, the tools used. We could call it a drone and then have a category for it. But insofar as we often look to the rules of craft as the arbiter of quality in art, the audio example above is an abject failure. So knowing that I can choose to pursue something more Serious, or another approach might be to try to greet the sound on its own terms. In this case, the sound blob has no real precedent.

I don’t mean to say that a sound blob like this one has never been made before but that we cannot judge it along the lines of harmony, melody, rhythm, etc. Or rather, we can quickly dismiss it as a resolute failure along all of those lines. Abstract art often poses this challenge to critics and the quick solution is to put it in a historical context whereby a given work can be judged relative to accepted masterworks that preceded it. But if we instead want to try to engage with the sound as a possibility for a production environment, as an element that might develop into something more sonically enveloping, those guiding principles of craft and criticism become rather flimsy, academic, unhelpful.

Enter imagination. If you greet this same sound blob not through the lens of how sublimely it flails under the light of craft but instead as a sound that might take you someplace, what do you hear? I hear characteristics of the sound that I like - the high shimmer, the crackling distortion, an implied if wavering pulse, the low mud. If I widen the imaginative lens, this becomes a character in sound form. This sound is the person you passed on the street the other day, how their way of walking made you feel. If I filter it, this sound becomes an agitated insect inside a glass jar after you seal its lid. This sound is not the wind itself but the aluminum can that it scrapes and rattles across the asphalt in the first light of dusk. Maybe none of this fits but I hope it conveys a process.

I worry this post is too vague or comes across as somehow pretentious. That’s not my goal. Truth be told, I’m working this idea out. The crafty musician part of me struggles with the free ranging sound designer who creates sound blobs such as the one above as a regular practice. And I often work with musicians and other artists who want my input creating soundscapes or sound environments less beholden to the traditional rules of music. When I start from an evaluation of a given blob relative to the rules of the craft, I tend to come up empty handed. The rules of craft take us as far as the river, but from there we’ll need to swim.