F. was struggling with finishing a track, so I thought about leading this exercise in terms of what makes a musical composition “finished” or not.

Abstraction

I was thinking about this problem as the challenge of adding form to the formless, which is something that I have had to do in other modalities:

  • Patternmaking in cordswaining
    • When we outlined both feet to make the sole, then took the average of the two feet (mirrored) to make the pattern
    • Drawing the curve of our upper as we visualized it, but going back and using the bezier curve for the final shape
  • Choreography
    • When developing choreo, I might first move to the music in a way that inspires me, but then I need to simplify those moves in order to disseminate it to others. This might strip some nuance out of the movement, but allows others (and myself) a way to repeat it
    • e.g. the instructions “left arm moves forward, draw 180 arc with your hips, dévelopée right leg” leaves out much detail, but is more concise than, the embodied action(s)
  • Translation/detranslation (telephone signal processing/transmission)

The idea I’m trying to get across: even though the idea you have might be highly complex, you need to simplify it in order for it to be transmissible to others (or sometimes, just to yourself at a later date)

(I know the analogy is not perfect, but it seems like you’re struggling in knowing what you’re trying to express, and I think musical composition is a microcosm here, where you have an idea in your head but your voice or cybernetic extension (ableton) doesn’t know quite how to express it)

Application, or “Templates of Form”

What makes a song sound “complete”?

Our ideas of “completeness” or “finishedness” are likely a familiarity with the common Western construction of “Sectional Form”:

Many songs have patterns of blocks that use repetition in blocks of 4 or 8 (this has been true in western music since the Renaissance).

This is a rule you can break, but following this standard will likely lead to the resolution of your current issue.

Exercise

One exercise we did in Madra Guia’s class was picking a song and trying to determine its structure. For our exercise, I picked Lorn’s Anvil, which I broke down as the following:

A - 8 bars of high arpeggiated synth, fade in, becomes distorted
B - bassy vocals and percussion enter, synth fades out 
C - the synth melody is repeated with a different instrument/voice
B - almost identical to B above
C - almost identical in pattern and melody to C above, some variation of texture and accents
A' - return to minimal synth of the beginning

The rhythms and structure here are quite simplistic; imo the texture of the track is largely due to the varying quality of the timbres over each block.

(I then tried to make a track of my own just going off of the structure above. I would describe the result as a low-resolution charcoal sketch. It has the skeleton of a track but doesn’t feel very detailed or “filled-in”. The result is: https://soundcloud.com/degeneratesolution/thrummedthrough)

A few ideas on how to address F.’s stated problem

  • Do the exercise above with a couple tracks of your choice (i.e. were there any inspirations for this track? anything you think it’s structurally similar to? If not, just select 1-2 tracks that you like.)
  • Try and figure out what the structure of your track is right now (use A/B/C notation). Do you see any ways in which the structure could be made more symmetrical or adhere to a simpler pattern than how it is right now?
  • (this is a more abstract one, but) sometimes when I’m making a track I just try to dance to it, or imagine I’m choregraphing to it, and sometimes a section will come up where I go “okay and after this is a drop followed by a spin” like… the patterns I have in movement are referencing or reinforcing the idea of what should come next