Music: "Colors"

Some music and some thoughts on music and philosophy

I recommend listening with eyes closed and with good speakers/headphones.

If you’ve been subscribed for a while, you’ll notice that I posted this last year. I listened to it again recently and noticed some things I really wanted to change in the mix, and then I ended up doing a significant rework. I don’t want to say too much about this track right now other than that it’s about colors. Well, at least that’s what it was originally about. It’s also sort of turned out to be about Angulimala. But originally, it was colors.

When I write music, I like to think in terms of colors: this part needs more blue, this part is getting too green, etc. To me, the different sections of this track are different colors. I see each of the sections as sort of changing the general tint or color palette. I won’t say which colors I see right now (wait until I make the video for this), but I’m curious which ones you see.

Also, I guess I should note that the little vocal bits that pop in and out are me singing, but I used SoundID VoiceAI to change the sound of my voice. I think the singing is a pretty minor part of this (I consider it an instrumental), but if you have moral qualms about AI: That plugin only models the voices of singers who have consented, the singers get royalties when you purchase the plugin, and the processing runs locally on my computer (i.e., environmental concerns are no different than any other kind of sustained CPU/GPU usage). That’s the only place that AI is used, and it still retains my performance. If you want to learn more about that, check out this vocal track I did and my explanation of how I made it.

This will go on Spotify, Bandcamp, YouTube, etc. eventually, but for now, I’m just posting it here.

Some reflections

[I thought it might be interesting to share some thoughts I was turning over as I worked on this. These are unpolished. Unlike some of my other posts, I’m not trying to present some type of argument, but just share the headspace this track came out of. Read if you’re into that sort of thing, otherwise you can skip it — I’ll likely turn these various thoughts into more polished essays eventually.]

I’ve been going through some type of new phase lately. Well, part of it is new, part of it is a continuation of old patterns. The old part: I have a thing where after I write a long Substack post, I get tired of so much verbal reasoning, so I go into a sort of music mode. The new part: I feel like this time around my music mode is more deeply integrated with my broader spiritual practice and philosophy study. I’ve always wanted this to be the case, but now I’m feeling the connection more. I still feel that music is a spiritual obstruction more generally, and especially at the highest levels of practice, but I’m nonetheless seeing ways that I can gain some insights from it.

Mixing has always been my weakest point musically, and I’m seeing that that largely comes from a low-level sense that I need to “get it right” — that there are certain rules I need to follow and can’t violate (no more than 3 dB of gain reduction when applying compression, use EQ cuts before boosts, etc.). Those rules serve as a sort of conceptual overlay that end up obscuring whatever I’m actually working with. For example, when I bring in the guitars, even though I might explicitly be asking myself “how do they sound and what do they need?”, there’s this underlying compulsive questioning, “what am I supposed to do here?” Keyword “do”: there’s always been this sense in the background that I need to do something to make things sound good.

But the reality is that sometimes things just…sound good as they are. Sometimes you just turn the guitar bus fader up, and they sit nicely in the mix without any EQ or compression. Before, I just wouldn’t allow this to happen. Now, I’m taking the opposite approach: let things be, only intervene when truly needed. Be more skeptical of the urge to fix things, and allow the thought “yeah, sounds good enough” to stay.

My mixing is feeling more natural now. I’m feeling myself get out of my way. I feel where I tense up around one knob or another, and how it feels to release that and just sit with the sound and let it breathe without rushing to change it and make it right in some way. It makes me think of the Buddhist concept of sīlabbata-parāmāsa, the fetter of attachment to rites and rituals. Discerning the truth requires sitting with what’s there and truly knowing whether it’s right or wrong. Approaching everything through a set of rules obscures the truth because there’s a low-level compulsion running through everything. That doesn’t mean that rules are all bad, it just means that they can only serve as rules of thumb, and developing a skill requires seeing how the rules emerge from the truth of the matter, not how the truth emerges from the rules. I think the process of mastery is coming to see that increasingly clearly.

Another thing I’ve been contemplating lately is whether I even like philosophy proper or if I just like the aesthetic pleasure I get from it — or whether these are really different things. This was partly sparked by the recent debate here about continental philosophy. Briefly, my take is that continental philosophy is more interested in bringing the aesthetic and emotional aspects of philosophy to the foreground. Analytic philosophy, on the other hand, seems to be intent on getting to some type of mathematical or logical truth that is beyond all that. But I’m skeptical of this. When I see a good logical argument, there’s a sort of aesthetic appreciation of it. This should be obvious — mathematicians and physicists talk about this all the time. What I’m skeptical about is whether aesthetic appreciation is as separate from truth claims as we tend to think — that aesthetics are just an additional “epiphenomenon” instead of something deeply baked into the concept of truth itself. In other words, we have a sort of Euthyphro situation: does everything that is true happen to be beautiful, or is everything that is true true because it is beautiful in a particular way?

The reason I’m thinking about this is because I’m trying to better understand what I’m doing when I make music. Part of what has made mixing my weakest point is that I’ve always been interested in the “abstract music” more than the sound itself. I’ve always felt somewhat distanced from many other musicians because they tend to talk about sound, and I have always just sort of thought “what does sound matter? We’re talking about music.” In other words, I’ve always been really into the sort of logical relations between notes, thinking that we merely perceive them via sound, but the sound isn’t the important part. But lately I’m wondering what this really means. When I write a melody, it feels as if I’m constructing an argument and then developing that argument. The process is oddly similar to how it feels to write a philosophical argument. So although I do obviously believe music and philosophy are different, I’m trying to better parse out their similarities and differences.

In other words, I don’t know that aesthetics are “just aesthetics”. I think the sort of aesthetic satisfaction that comes from good philosophy is the same as a real spiritual satisfaction. People talk about truth in art, philosophy, science, music, etc. What type of truth are these all getting at?

I’m increasingly getting the sense that they’re all sort of chasing a vibe to greater or lesser degrees. I’m using the word “vibe” sort of tongue-in-cheekly and overly broadly here, but also sort of pointedly, in the sense that I’m curious whether some very serious things, like truth, are really a lot more silly than we tend to think they are. Not that there are no stable and objective truths, but just that maybe truth is more like “hey man, that’s pretty cool, I dig it” instead of “thou dost speak of the divine and insurpassable that transverberates the heart”.

Maybe a vibe can be a (preverbal?) truth. I haven’t really followed the intuition debate on here, but it seems to me that most philosophical arguments start with an intuition of some sort, which is sort of a vibe. For example, harming people is a bad vibe, so that becomes a basis of moral reasoning. And how would we be able to know that 2+2=4 without the “vibe” that recognizes “that’s right, and I know it’s right”? In the same way that we recognize memories on the basis of the feeling of mnemicity, which we could call a “memory vibe”, we recognize everything based on some type of vibe (and if all recognition, including recognizing knowing, relies on memory, which relies on mnemicity, which is a feeling/vibe, then a lot more of truth might rest on vibe than we tend to think).

Anyway, I’m not trying to collapse everything into vibe or subjectivism here (nor do I think that even if everything were just vibe, that would require subjectivism — the vibe could be objective). I’m just wondering how or if the sense of logical inevitability I get from a good melody differs fundamentally from the same sense of logical inevitability in an argument, and if it’s actually possible to tell the difference. I wonder if when an argument works, it’s really just because it loops around and reinforces the vibe that we already know or recognize as “truth”. Sort of like it increases confidence in the vibe. And in that sense, it’s like developing faith from a seed of knowing.

You could say the same thing about my approach to mixing now. I trust that there’s a vibe, and my goal with the mix is to increase the listener’s confidence that the vibe is worthwhile. My music is an argument for the vibe. Maybe the idea that music instills a certain mood is wrong, and instead, music argues that a certain state of mind is a good one, and it argues with your mind or guides you there through sound. And that’s why music ultimately points to silence: that’s the conclusion of every musical argument.