Abstract Language
The womb is a self-contained world. But anybody inside its walls will not yet know that, as it occupies a time and space within which its inhabitants cannot yet know anything. We are waiting to be born, to cry out, and to experience life for the first time. For many people, that sense of isolation extends well into childhood. It can sometimes continue afterwards, occurring anytime you feel as though you are not supposed to encounter experiences beyond the edges of a narrow path laid out before you.
My adulthood did not involve knowing how to play a musical instrument. It's a skill often thought to be learned during that developmental time in your life which does not count, that early era before you turn into a complete person. But what happens when the wave of that expected passage of time crests and passes by, yet you still don't feel you’ve discovered everything you will eventually want to do? Even when your opportunities to come of age have been deferred to begin with, the beginning stages of trying anything new as an adult may feel like regressions. Music can feel that way in particular, as often as it can simultaneously feel like both a language everyone is already presumed to understand and a medium which transcends the dimensions of a song.
I began my journey to acquire the vocabulary of music after the official starting line, leaving me with further to travel. In elementary school, when I heard the names of bands floating through the sphere of my nascent social relationships, they always sounded like curses issued in some incomprehensible tongue. Discussing music could compel other children to like or hate you; bands’ names alone were capable of summoning conflict or zeal just from their invocation. In an absence of any discussion of why they might be good or bad, judgments of music groups appeared to be purely a system of social hierarchy, wholly independent of the emotional dimension of how a song might make you feel. I stayed as far away as I could from music as a potential topic of conversation, and my eventual discovery of bands I liked occurred years later within the confines of headphone speakers. As reluctant as I was to imagine taking the risk of sharing music I liked, the idea of making any of it myself never crossed my mind.
I could not have suspected what would happen that might make that perspective change. But even before the social impact of the coronavirus arrived in my life, I’d increasingly found I was spending too much spare time isolating myself with a new, highly abstract personal hobby that appeared to serve no external purpose. My only consolation was that the act of dragging around the colorful blocks used to compose melodies and drum beats inside the FL Studio software was at least replacing some of the time I had previously spent playing video games.
But my musical engagement might have already begun long before I realized it did. If so, it arrived as an absent-minded thought at fourteen years old, listening to the sound of running water and feeling like it had a rhythm to it. For years afterward, I still was only vaguely able to respond to questions about what kind of music I liked. But my inability to answer that question was no longer a function of my lack of musical awareness. Music had an immediate feedback loop between my senses and some emotional part of my brain. It seemed crude to share that with others. Music had an immediate mental feedback loop between my senses and some emotional part of my brain, so much so that it seemed crude to share such an unfiltered part of my personal psyche with someone else. When you react to music, it’s like a magnet flips inside of you; something is happening outside of your conscious decision-making, and you can’t necessarily fully control your reaction to it.
I would eventually find myself at parties where people encouraged me to dance to music along with them. I started dancing by trying to copy the same footsteps my friends were making, but they cheered after I spontaneously threw my arm in the air. You look less awkward and more adept when you lose yourself in an instinctive reaction to the music. Being condemned at a younger age for not liking the same boy bands may have had negative consequences, but dancing to something I cared about seemed to have better results because my underlying enthusiasm could not be faked. Music seemed to defy certain rules and boundaries even as it created others. Maybe there could be multiple ways of relating to music, even within ostensibly social contexts.
It was almost as if my previous avoidance of music had occurred because I’d cared about it too much all along, because I’d felt it spoke to something too essential. In addition to feeling like another language or system of rules I needed to learn, music could also, in the terminology of the philosopher Jacques Lacan, seem to evoke a yearning for the primordial, pre-linguistic state of existence known as the Real. My opinions about music existed not only within the Symbolic (in Lacanian terms) framework of social regulations in the world around me, but also pointed towards sources of emotional resonance I didn’t want to reveal, or perhaps did not even know how to describe.
Listening to music I liked involved an act of letting my guard down enough to allow my mind to exist without having to justify how I felt. While listening to music I could relax inside a bubble of my own personal space. I could be myself. If an associated feeling of stillness in my mind became quiet enough, I could even begin to hear a deeper seismic rhythm beneath the surfaces of the rhythms I was listening to, one from beyond my time, in some buried passage of human artistic transmission being handed off from one generation to the next. Sometimes I began to feel the pull of that rhythm while walking down the street, and I would absentmindedly notice floating through my head ideas of lyrics for songs of my own. I began to write them down.
The act of writing songs often felt like something I was not really allowed to do. I continuously felt as though, no matter how many years had passed since the idea of making music had occurred to me, I always eternally remained the same age of being too old to start. It was only after a quiet moment of personal reflection during a power outage that I decided to sign up for my first piano lessons. I had time to practice, since I was waiting to hear back about new opportunities after a detour in my career path. I was living in Florida at the time, and I sometimes felt as though I existed in the endlessly delayed temporal state of the movie Groundhog Day as I drove through morning swampland mists and past lumbering alligators to reach my teacher’s house.
Music similarly seemed to have the capacity of being able to freeze the passage of time. Perhaps a logical explanation would be that engaging with a medium which existed across short time increments, and focusing on subtle and minute variations in time, might make me start to think about time in a different way. But the careers of many people in my Millennial generation also existed in states of suspended time. Some of the appeal of making music for me seemed to come from it feeling like precisely the wrong thing for me to be doing at that moment; it wasn’t taking me further along on any paths I had spent years anticipating, and thus it offered the possibility of perhaps leading somewhere unpredictable.
While I make music, it’s like I exist as some other person. Paradoxically, this seems to be enabled by some of my limitations. The clumsiness with which I approached music for the first time incited a sense of oblivious freedom, because I knew how ridiculous my pursuit was from the start. Creating something gross and ugly had its own power. It’s thrilling to be bad at something, because the work carries no risk of taking you closer to achieving something you don’t want to accomplish. If you’re trying to escape too many expectations, it’s a relief to be involved in an activity that has none.
But the question of an audience perplexed me. When any creative venture encounters an external public, there is a sense that it exists as a cohesive continuation of the existing world. Initially, though, it begins as a projection from your personal reality, a reality that hasn’t yet become ruined by confronting the existing world. Yet if you exist far enough outside the boundaries of who is expected to make music, then it becomes harder to foresee that concern ever arriving. The question of an audience perplexed me.You will likely have no choice but to make anything you release non-commercial. The prospect of your music existing as a continuation of your own personal eccentricities might even be imaginable, if you have access to enough time to create it. I had always noticed how profiles I read on music review websites tended to emphasize the individuality of artists in ways I didn’t hear about within my own career field of architecture. I began to wonder: what if I could author more of my own ideas?
I became more open-minded about music once I started making it. I read about songwriting from a book of examples taken from country music. I looked up YouTube videos of songs from old video games I hadn’t heard in years, and learned about their place in electronic music history. When an evening of freeform synthesizer experimentation produced sounds reminiscent of a robotic chant or a deranged march (in addition to my inexperienced attempts at recreating popular riffs), I couldn’t help but think that the results, unexpectedly conjured in sudden and spontaneous emergence, almost seemed kind of cool.
I learned as much about music production as I could, in part due to an ongoing perceived need to supplement my subjective experiences with more logical technical skills. I learned that there exist a few surprisingly formulaic ways of making electronic music sound epic, such as by tuning two oscillators seven semitones apart, or by running a synthesizer’s output through a flanger effect. A sequencer could sometimes substitute for a low-frequency oscillator, and you could make your recordings sound more dynamic by raising or lowering the volume of different instruments at pivotal moments within a song. Or panning them. I learned what a backbeat was, and about how recordings of drums could be processed to sound like splitting tree trunks, or sacks of flour dropped on the floor, or imploding oil barrels. As I was going through that whole educational search I even managed to finish writing a few songs.
At a certain point along the way, I began to wonder about what the purpose of my pursuits was. I tried to think of potential justifications. Maybe getting into music could help me meet people. It led me to look up a few Wikipedia articles on related topics in physics. Maybe I somehow had a deeper awareness of my surroundings now that I could recognize the distinctive plastic sheen of a 1980s Yamaha DX7 within songs heard over the speakers at the shopping mall. I didn’t know how to explain to myself what I was doing; at that point, the concept of having a hobby still seemed alien to me.
In trying to make sense of my new time-consuming interest and how it fit in with my expected path, I was reminded of a quote by the philosopher Theordor Adorno, in his essay “Free Time.” In it, he questioned the merits of separating recreational and remunerative personal activities. In Adorno’s words, written in reference to his own musical pursuits, he claimed:
“I have no hobby. Not that I am the kind of workaholic who is incapable of doing anything with his time but applying himself industriously to the required task. But, as far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognised profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the very idea that they had anything to do with hobbies – preoccupations with which I had become mindlessly infatuated merely in order to kill the time – had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now widespread, barbarous mentality. Making music, listening to music, reading with all my attention, these activities are part and parcel of my life; to call them hobbies would make a mockery of them.”
When Adorno subsequently went on to criticize his society’s divided spheres of work and leisure time, it became more challenging to recognize the applicability of his ideas from a twenty-first century perspective. In a world where business is increasingly conducted at home and after hours, and cultivating entrepreneurial personal projects outside of work is almost expected as a means of getting ahead, there now exists even less of a distinction between work and the serious categories of leisure which the philosopher once found enriching to his broader life.
Among Adorno’s more famous musical opinions was his condemnation of then-contemporary popular genres, and their associated commercialism. But it was those opinions which served his career advancement in a manner in line with the expectations of today’s contemporary capitalism. Adorno, however, would not see the irony in this. He described his academic work as holistically overlapping with his unprogrammed leisure time, in a manner which might be difficult for many people to recognize today. Within increasingly high-pressure and competitive university environments, it is hard for us to imagine such a relationship between work and recreation.
I continue to wonder what it means to have a hobby disconnected from both my work and my life. Music doesn’t seem to offer any opportunities for integration with my career, and it requires too much deliberate attention to simply be a way of passing the time. I wonder if the interest appeared not as a way of helping me, but rather as a response to the conditions of deferred opportunity my generation is subject to. Making art is almost like an act of crying which operates on a macro scale: when enough of a sense of longing builds up inside your mind, you don’t know what else to do except try and express yourself in some fundamental way, one which transcends even the restrictions of language.
Works cited:
Adorno, T. W. (2001). “Free Time”. In: J. M. Bernstein (Ed.), The culture industry. London: Taylor and Francis. p. 188-189.
