Music is a Conversation

Today as I was searching around on YouTube for John Mayer music videos, I found a fan-made video for Assassin.  I came across an interesting thread of comments (two of which are the top rated comments on the video):

The ending of this song sounds a bit similar to the ending of ["Wrapped Around Your Finger"] by Sting. Both great songs! =)

...the lyrics from "Wrapped Around Your Finger" actually tell the same story as "Assassin" - only from the other person's perspective. I think that's why John plays the riff in the end.

That's remarkably insightful for YouTube comments. I didn't see any connection at first; I thought it must have been pretty subtle. I even listened to the end and I thought the comment was referring to the palm-muted stuff, but that was the same background riff that had been there throughout the song. I had to listen to Wrapped Around Your Finger to even know what I was listening for.

The riff is very prominent in Wrapped Around Your Finger. D, Eb, D, Eb; C, D, C, D; Bb, C, Bb, C; etc. It appears just before every verse, and at the end of the song.

Now, I went back and listened to the ending of Assassin again. It was subtle, but immediately obvious: John plays the riff quietly in the background starting at 5:15 in the linked video (with the key changed appropriately).

Now this is not a particularly original or unique riff. Of course, anyone who has studied a bit of music or literature knows that there is no new content, just new interpretations, so that's not surprising. But this is more than a coincidence: John Mayer is a musician that is very aware of himself and the artists that have influenced him. Proof that John likes Sting/The Police lies in the fact that he has covered a song by The Police before: Message in a Bottle. Moreover, that riff is deliberately played quietly, like an echo, and doesn't quite seem to match the rest of the song. Why include it? The second comment quoted above has the answer. It's the same story, from a different perspective.

Well, I had to look up the lyrics to Wrapped Around Your Finger and really think about them before it made sense to me that they were the same story, if interpreted in a certain way. The most salient feature of the connection is that the tables have turned around on the speaker. There was the status quo, and then something changed, and now the speaker is looking at the situation from the other side. And of course, John's song isn't literally about an Assassin. The way that they are opposite perspectives is that, in John's song, he becomes the victim of his own game at the end; in Sting's, he rises above his partner's game.

More importantly, he includes the riff because music is a conversation. It is a nod to the influences on his music, and to a story which no doubt inspired him to write his own song. When you realize the significance of that nod to another artist, it gives you a frisson. Musicians do not operate in a vacuum. They have teachers, they have colleagues, they have influences. Everyone in every career becomes who they are because of who they met and what they learned along the way. Many people choose to ignore that fact, or to try to hide it (because plagiarism is bad, mmkay?).

Of course, that's not so easy to do in music, where there are only so many combinations of sounds that we find pleasing, so in it's usually better to acknowledge the influences. (Or parody them, if you're like Weird Al or The Lonely Island. By the way, I challenge you to assume that Semicolon by The Lonely Island is an absolutely brilliant song, and come up with a few reasons why that is so.)

Music theory even gives us these wonderful formulas that, according to some, have been heavily abused. You may have seen videos complaining about the overuse of the 4-chord structure in songs, like the Pachelbel Rant. Well, why are they used so often? They sound good to our ears. As a side effect, many of us are tired of hearing them.

In pop music, it's inescapable. People will rate songs highly if they are easy to listen to. That's why the charts look like they do. But when you have songs like I Just Came to Say Hello (which I can only listen to for a few seconds before I have to turn it off or leave the room), or Icona Pop's I Love It... I mean honestly, they're not even trying. They've got 2 chords and no real instruments being used at all. Where's the artistic integrity in that? I won't deny this kind of thing can be catchy (although, maybe not at this extreme). Still, I'm not going to call it art.

You can use the same old musical formulas, and create something which is so heavily based on another work that acknowledging it is inescapable. The Piano Guys have some of my favorite examples of this. Take a song that was successful on the pop charts, translate the lyrics to another language, and apply a completely different texture of sound (using real instruments!), and you end up with amazing covers like Peponi (Coldplay's Paradise) [Info] and Khushnuma (Don't You Worry Child) [Lyrics].

You don't need to create entirely original content to be recognized as talented. You just have to acknowledge that creating art is all about the conversation between yourself and the art and artists that shaped your work.

I think if you asked John Williams what his influences are, he would be more than happy to tell you a long list of works from classical composers and his contemporaries that have inspired him. Unfortunately, when the references are a bit too strong, people tend to get angry, as on this forum:

[Williams has ripped off] ... Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet," Sibelius' "Finlandia," Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition," "The Rite of Spring" and "The Firebird" by Stravinsky, Korngold's theme to "King's Row," Persichetti's 6th symphony, Neverending Story, "Death and Transfiguration" by Strauss, and Holst's "The Planets." Does anybody out there know of any more rip-offs?

He's not wrong about any of those influences. If you listen to the beginning of the Finale of Dvorak's New World (9th) Symphony, it's impossible not to notice the stunning similarities in the ideas. (Jaws will jump out to most people, as well as a texture reminiscent of Star Wars, and others.)

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The result is that we have brilliant music to listen to in the movies, and that music helps to tell us a story. The musical ideas are similar, but the presentation is different. Remember that art (and especially music performance) is as much about presentation as content.

Have you ever seen musicians on stage look at each other and smile? (One example was observed by a comment on the video of Wrapped Around Your Finger I linked earlier)  If you're a musician, especially if you've played in a band or Jazz ensemble, you might be familiar with that feeling where things just melt together and you go into this euphoric state where you're entirely lost in the performance.

Learning music and working together gets everyone speaking the same language. When you play together enough, you start to have the same ideas, and the effect can be truly powerful to experience. That's just one of the reasons I encourage people to learn an instrument and experiment with other musicians.

Have a conversation.

Digital Painting - Progress Update 1 (~20 hours)

I had about a week off between my internship and returning to Austin for school, and I decided that now would be the best time to begin working on a hobby that would take up a lot of hours.

I had no idea.

I had no idea how meditative the act of painting something could be. Focusing on the tiny details. Considering the big picture. Adjusting. Adjusting. Get the colors, the lines, the shading, just right.

Here's what I have at the end of approximately 20 hours:

When I started this whole project, I roughly sketched in color the general shape of things (with my apparently terrible sense of proportions). Then I started playing with brush types and pressure sensitivity and came up with a setting that worked for hair, so I started drawing that in. I shaded the neck line. I was most proud of the hair at this point in time, but I was so embarrassed by the face that I didn't want to show anyone.

But I showed some close friends anyway because they are so supportive of my new hobby. They were kind to only point out the stuff that was cool about it (namely, the hair), knowing this was my first try and that the rest would come in time.

Here's my first checkpoint:

It still gives me chills.

The hair was a base layer of brown, a layer of rough highlights and lowlights, a layer with three different shades of a darker colored base, a layer of "specular reflection" where the light would illuminate the hair, and a layer of shine, the lightest color.

I liked the hair so far, so I thought the best way to motivate myself would be to thicken it up and add more texture. I turned off the layer with the horrible facial features and just started filling in the hair.

After a total of about 5 hours working on the painting, this is what I had:

Not that much different, but the hair is fuller and that made me happy. I took a break for a few days because I had to move from Seattle back to Texas.

I needed to do something about the face.

I watched some YouTube videos, most notably this one about painting a realistic eye, and took some knowledge that I happened to retain from watching friends draw faces, and came up with some
line art to replace my grotesque, childish drawing of facial features.

Maybe the proportions aren't quite right yet, but it's getting there. It's certainly a huge step up. That took probably about an hour to really feel right.

The next step was the hardest. Actually filling in the eyes. I wanted to do shading on the sclera, iris, pupil, and get them looking like an eye. I'm hiding the line art in all checkpoints past this. After about 7 hours, I finally had this:

I was amazed when I zoomed out and looked at the whole thing how much better it looked. I only added enough shading around the face to bring out the outlines of the features but it already looks so much more real.

Close up:

Next: the shadow and highlight around the eyes (about 1 hour):

The tears (about 1 hour):

The shadow on the iris (30 minutes):

The reflection on the iris (2 hours):

I'm especially proud of that last step. I made a layer in white and dropped opacity to about 20%. Then I used the eraser tool to shape the light that's coming in so that it seems like it's coming from objects. Then I erased even more completely the places where the incoming light is obscured by the hair and eyelashes, and the eyelids and bridge of the nose. The effect from the bridge of the nose is more noticeable in the other eye:

Finally, I added the eyebrows and some shadows to contour the edges of the face and give the hair an appearance of depth (about 3 hours).

At the end of all that work: here's what I've got:

I probably underestimated the times. I figure I've spent about 15-20 hours on this already. Maybe I stopped a lot to admire what I had accomplished.

It's amazing to look back at checkpoint 1 and where I am now, and it's like watching the development of my artistic skill in a single painting. I can't even believe that I have exactly as much experience with doing digital painting as it has taken me to get to this point.

I think I'm going to like this hobby.

Love and Acceptance

Let's start today with a viral video. I actually saw this yesterday, but it seems like it would fit into today's theme.

http://gawker.com/man-with-ocd-blows-internet-away-with-hauntingly-stirri-1111560858

It's a powerful poem. And it made me realize several pretty different things.

People of all walks of life, people with all kinds of problems, people with disorders, personal challenges, living in poverty -- whatever, can all feel love. And love can be beautiful no matter where it comes from or how it happens. It changes people. It changes societies. We can understand love because love is a constant in human nature. We need each other, and when we see that another person also needs someone, we can't just ignore that. They are more human to us in that instant than at any other time.

How interesting... As long as we're thinking about how we value other human beings, what value does that bring to us -- to see someone else expressing love for someone? I think it's the reminder of our own love for someone or something. That's something we can relate to, and something which, I think, we all need to be reminded of every once in a while. And we welcome that kind of reminder.

It also made me remember how much I used to love browsing not just the images but also the literature and poetry on DeviantArt. This is a powerful poem. Poems are great when they are delivered live, but there is definitely something to be gained from reading poetry from all sources. Something nice about dA is that you can read poems from amateurs and find meaning in them. But more importantly, there's a community of poets whose work is right at your fingertips, and all you have to do is reach out for them. Click on one, then another. It's uncanny how in one sitting you can see all kinds of different works (even if they're all poetry) from so many different kinds of writers.

I used to write poetry. I use to write literature. I used to do photography. Evidence of all of those are on my dA page.

I also used to do some art. But all of those works (paintings, drawings) are in physical media. A couple of my pieces are displayed in my parents' house. Much of the rest of it has been lost. But I never really committed to doing art. I have just continued to follow interesting topics in art, especially digital artwork on dA.

On the bright side, I turned all my attention toward music for the last 10 years.

This summer I've finally gotten a tablet with a Wacom-powered digitizer: the Surface Pro. I've already started to work on a digital painting which is coming along pretty well considering I've never attempted to create artwork in this medium. I think it will be good for me to work on developing a new hobby. It will be something new to invest my time in, and add some variety to the next few years of my life, since I'll be working on my Master's in CS and it will be a struggle to add classes from different disciplines to that plan.

I'll post soon with the results of my first attempt at digital painting. It will be embarrassing for me to post something so imperfect, but I know that I need to get better at finishing the projects I've started, and it will be a good learning experience to finish it and get it out there, and then know what I need to work on improving.

It's important to accept ourselves and our talents for what they are. Maybe I'm not that good at digital painting right now, but eventually I could become good at it, if I put enough effort into it.

It's also important to realize what skills we have that we are already very good at. We are not imposters in our own lives, even if it sometimes seems that way. For me, self-acceptance and hard work are the keys to assuaging this feeling. I can always work harder to improve at the skills I already have, but something I often forget is that there is such a great reward in working to develop skills I don't have yet. It's good to have a reminder that everyone else feels like they don't know or do enough already, and that I'm not actually at a disadvantage as I start out my journey to become the person I want to be.