Synesthesia, Apophenia, the Bicameral Mind, and Lawnmowers

I rarely spend time talking about the musical creation process unless asked, but I’m making an exception here because of the slightly unusual nature of this little project, and because of some interesting things I’ve learned lately relating to stuff like synesthesia, apophenia, the “bicameral mind”, and hemispheric functions of the brain. More on that below. First, a little background on the processes you weren’t asking about.

Feel free to skip it and just zip way down and LISTEN to the stuff 😉 

Most of my creative musical output happens in a few ways, the first two being the most common:

1) I basically dream a song and wake up (often in the middle of the night) and feverishly struggle to capture what I was hearing. Sometimes I wake up in the morning with a song in my head, thinking it’s just a familiar tune, then after a few minutes making coffee or whatever, I suddenly realize it’s a NEW one, and scramble to capture whatever I can.

2) Total ignorance and accidents. I’ll be riffing on a guitar or keys with pretty much no intentions, and suddenly a simple “pop hook” figure blurts out of my mouth unexpectedly, unleashing a little flurry of further ideas. Since the best pop songs are so simple, it doesn’t take much in the way of “further ideas” to suddenly have a new pop song. Likewise, trying a new audio plugin, just two little sounds or chords will just ignite something, and 30 minutes later, a basic song is half in the can.

3) Either for a soundtrack, or because of a left-brained “idea”, or just for the challenge, I will work with actual intention, pondering the right progressions, words, tone etc. You know, the conventional sense of “composing”.

4) I’ll be feeling a bit meditative, and just start noodling with some kind of sound, improvising a couple layers with no rules, until VOILA! A new ambient or instrumental piece. Maybe a “bumper” sort of thing.

This As-Yet-Unnamed Project

The project at hand is a little different from all of these, because I had thought a lot about something before the “creative accident” happened, and then I thought a lot more because of new things I had been learning about cognition, and suddenly, it all became pretty conceptual.

Synesthesia, Apophenia, Hallucinations, Creativity, and The Bicameral Mind

Since childhood, I was aware I had some wiring problems. From the age of about eight I was sleepwalking, having pretty significant Deja vu feelings routinely, and all manner of other mild dissociative state experiences. I could write an entire book about the arc of where my perceptual aberrations led me, but I’ll spare you here.

What IS relevant is that odd concepts like synesthesia, patternicity, and the bicameral mind were becoming way more pervasive in pop media. An acquaintance of mine – Christen Lien, a really gifted violist/composer – mentioned she had been interviewed by Dr. Sanjay Gupta about synesthesia. The show Westworld leaned briefly into bicameralism. There seemed to be a resurgence of interest in the hemispherical functions of the brain. And the internet in general seemed to be obsessed with all manner of illusions, both visual and audible.

All of this brought into focus for me once again the overlap between “madness” and creativity. Face it, if you spend your days making up sights and sounds and words for others to consume, there’s a pretty safe bet that you’re nuts in one way or another. Either you’re crazy enough to think your stuff is worthy of such a time investment, or you’re crazy enough to not CARE if it’s worthy, because you COULDN’T STOP DOING IT IF YOU WANTED.

Okay, WHAT DOES THIS ALL HAVE TO DO WITH THE MUSIC HERE????

The short version? Along with having some other odd perceptual quirks (synesthesia, prosopagnosia, various “autism spectrum” traits), I also have a tendency to hear harmonic overtones in just about any sound, but especially droning sounds that actually do contain them in some form, like when a motor is humming, and you suddenly realize it’s a pitch.

Early this summer, I was trying to work on a song on my guitar, when suddenly the mowing service showed up at the apartment property where I live. Their riding mowers were LOUD. I could barely hear myself play, but realized the motor was droning pretty close to a “D”, so began kind of furiously improvising what I later jokingly called a Redneck Raga. It was actually kind of cool. It’s not included below, but will be in a final collection.

Anyway, it reminded me of being a wee one and falling asleep to the oddly comforting sound of transport truck tires whining in a red shift on a distant freeway, and many other sounds like that.

So I Had This Idea…

I challenged myself to find a variety of droning/whining motor sounds, and jam to them. Simple as that. I’m not much of a fan of most “noise” music, so – without any especially rigid rules – I felt I’d try to keep things a little more “musical” or “western harmonic”. Not sure if I succeed, but here are the early results.

With the exception of the last two pieces, these are all basically once-through improvs on guitar or keyboards, playing over a motor sound that has been treated only with delay of some kind. The delay used was either from real-world “impulse modeling” of large spaces, or very long tape delays, using real tape!

The Last Two Pieces

The other two pieces, although they sort of sonically coordinate with the motor pieces, and are improvs over some source material, have very different origins:

“Arkahcalak” is “Kalachakra” backwards. Years ago, a dear friend who has long since passed away performed and recorded a piano recital at a local concert house. It was an eclectic collection of classical pieces by artists ranging from Scarlatti to Villa Lobos. The recording of the collection was titled “Kalachakra”, and sold to benefit a local Tibetan Buddhist group. This friend was a mind-blowingly gifted pianist, so while his gifts managed to make it all work somehow, the piano was notably out of tune, and not that well recorded. I learned this when I thought it would be fun to take some of this music and “manipulate” it to make something new. This friend and I were very fond of artists like Eno, the Dadaists, and Burroughs, who all used some inventive and seemingly random methods to create art. After trying to simply improvise with some of the selections, it hit me that this friend deserved better. So I started doing things like reversing and stretching, and adding impulse-response driven delays, and THEN I jammed over it. I like to think that wherever this friend’s consciousness is now, he can hear the backwards music travelling back through time. I hope he likes it, and that it isn’t on the contrary part of some fucked up Bardo experience for him.

“Kaua‘i ‘O‘o” is built around one of the saddest sounds I’ve ever heard. There’s a recording out there of the last male Kaua‘i ‘O‘o, a Hawaiian bird which is now believed extinct. I wept the first time I heard it, but I don’t know if I would have if I hadn’t heard the story first. In any case, again – this was a quick improv over the recording. If you cry, I hope it’s for the bird, and not how terrible my improv is.