Criticism, Language, Society

Evidence of effort

Posted on by rudiseitz

Why do we pay attention when someone shouts?

It’s not only because the sound is loud – it blocks other sounds and hurts our ears.

It’s not only because there’s a social norm that shouting indicates urgency.

It’s also because shouting takes effort. A person can’t shout for very long before getting tired and hoarse. So someone who shouts is making an investment, and we sense that.

If our physiology allowed us to shout with the same ease as we speak, then shouting would lose significance as a gesture. We might still notice it, in the way we notice an emoji, but we wouldn’t take it as seriously.

This example reveals that when we communicate, we do more than exchange information with each other. We model each other. We imagine what it might take for the other person to make the gestures they’re making. Our empathetic model of the other person affects how we experience their words and actions. 

It’s always been possible to game the system of empathetic modelling, so to speak. For example, some people just naturally have loud voices. They’re not putting in extra effort to speak so loud, but we respond to them as if they were more passionate than the quieter ones. Those who speak softly are at a disadvantage when it comes to garnering attention, even though they might be the ones trying harder.

Until recently, writing was hard. The only way someone could produce a large body of text that exhibited good prose style and good logic was through time and effort. Some people were much more fluent at writing than others, but we could assume that any person who wrote a tight essay or a well-organized book must have cared about what they were writing, or at least, they must have had a motivation significant enough to compel them to invest the time and energy required.

Now it turns out that computers can write for us, and they can write better than many of us. So how will this affect our empathetic modelling of the written word? How will it affect our ability to be moved by what we read?

Surely we will still find meaning in text, but there will be a cloud of uncertainty about the purported author’s investment in the act of creating that text. Did they spend hours laboring over a from-scratch essay or did they just lightly revise the near-instantaneous product of a machine?

Already some writers are saying “AI is my partner. It helps me express myself.” If the writing is good, informative, entertaining, why should it matter how it was produced? It should matter because communication is more than an exchange of information. Communication is an experience, and that experience can’t be detached from the context – from our understanding of the properties of the medium, including its difficulty. 

If we want a glimpse of how this is going to go, we can look to photography. The internet is awash in photographs and we can still enjoy them and learn from them and sometimes be moved by them. But we can never be sure how they’re made. And that devalues them. A digital photographer might have labored for months to get a certain shot – their dedicated practice finally combining with luck to achieve a miraculous result – or they might have taken a lackluster image and enhanced it by clicking a few buttons in photo-editing software to achieve that marvelous color and detail. Or maybe they just typed a description of what they wanted and had the software generate the photo for them?

If it’s a good photo, who cares? We care because we want to be moved, and our ability to be moved depends on our ability to connect with the artist by imagining their process of creation. Empathetic modelling.

The prerequisite to being moved is having our attention captured. And our attention is captured when we see evidence of effort. Proof of work. Demonstration of commitment.

With technology, we’re making things easier and easier so that no creative product can any more be seen as proof of work. Awe at an artist’s labor is replaced with a question mark. How did they do it and how much help did they have from machines?

Is there something morally wrong with getting help from a machine? That is not the question at hand. The question is what happens to aesthetic experience when the process of creation becomes increasingly machine-driven? The question is what happens to our response to a communication act when empathetic modelling is infused with doubt, when we can no longer discern what an author wrote and what they merely took? What happens to aesthetic experience when machine-brokered magic is inserted into our image of the process of human creativity?

Our obsession with authenticity should tell us something about this. Why would we gaze for hours at an old masterwork hanging in a museum but not at a forgery that looks identical to it? That’s because when we see the authentic work, knowing that it is such, we imagine the great artist laboring to make it, but when we see the forgery, we image a thief working to deceive us. Same image, different empathetic modelling, different experiential outcome.

If we look back to the time before machines could write, a time when photographs could only be made with light hitting physical film, it wasn’t a time of unbridled bliss. Glorious words could still be ignored or misunderstood, and photographs themselves may have seemed too easy to make in comparison to paintings, too easy to be worth a viewer’s deepest respect. But anyone who tried to take a photograph would have come to know the difficulty of it and been able to appreciate the accomplishments attained in the best photographs.

Imagine a world where we’re all shouting, all the time, and we can’t be moved by any of it. That is the world we would get if, through technology, we made it effortless to shout.

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Personal Development

Practicing Finding Meaning

Posted on by rudiseitz

If a person is too weak to lift a certain desired amount of weight, no friend or coach would implore them to “Possess more muscle mass!” Instead the advice would be to “Spend more time at the gym!” Do the exercises that would build strength over time.

And yet, when a person struggles to see a situation constructively, when a person fails to overcome a gloomy outlook and imagine a promising path forward, their friends and acquaintances will often tell them to “Think more positively!” As if that could be achieved with the snap of a finger. As if it could be done without time and practice, without “going to the gym.”

Building muscle is something we know we have to work at, but thinking positively is something we expect ourselves – and others – to be able to accomplish just by making one simple decision.

Experience shows it’s not so easy. If you’ve ever been depressed and a friend told you to look on the bright side, you might have responded with anger or annoyance. That’s because you’d already tried to look on the bright side and if it had worked, you wouldn’t still be depressed. Now, the friend is placing the guilt on you for not achieving sudden success in the endeavor of positivity.

We don’t simply “possess” an outlook on life; rather, we create and recreate our outlook through the thousands of thoughts that flow through our minds each day, and the thousands of decisions we make about which thoughts to emphasize and which to ignore. To change our outlook, it’s not sufficient to change one thought, we need to practice navigating the continuous flow of thought in a different way, and we need to apply that new approach over an extended time.

An outlook is actually not like a painting, hanging on a wall, where with a few strokes of a brush, we can alter what it depicts forever after. It’s more like improvised music – where each note fades away soon after it comes into being – and the whole thing simply disappears if we stop playing. To make it sound different, we need to play in a different way, and to keep playing in that new way over time.

A while ago, I heard someone lament that they’d been “ghosted” by more than one attractive date they’d met online. After promising beginnings, these dates had suddenly stopped communicating. So this person had invented a little story to explain their romantic misfortune. Every date who had ghosted them must have been a professional assassin, who had been hired to kill them, but who had fallen in love with them and just couldn’t finish the job.

Great story, right? It’s an example of the way we can use our imagination to change how a situation feels. Being ghosted, no more an insult, becomes the highest possible compliment in this view. Of course it’s a humorous fantasy, but it’s not so far from a possible truth – some of these disappearing prospects might have sensed a romance blossoming and might have run away because they weren’t ready for it.

Is it right to see this story as a product of work? Well, it’s creative, it’s funny, and it didn’t come from nowhere: the person who thought of it might have taken some time to put it together. So yes, it can be seen as a work product that required an investment of time and creativity and returned a value: a laugh, a better mood. This story alone is not guaranteed to cure loneliness or frustration but it might help a tiny bit, and these tiny bits add up.

Creating stories like this – little fictions that help us get through life – is a skill that can be practiced. What’s another story for the ghosting situation? Maybe all of those vanishing dates were “put there” to help our hero develop the strength and resilience he or she will need to go out and find true love? This is a common narrative where we see a hardship as an opportunity that’s been created for us so we can learn something we need to learn. It’s a way of finding meaning in randomness and pain. The phrase “finding meaning” deserves emphasis here. The idea of “thinking positively” can sound superficial or forced, but any time we say “thinking positively” we might as well say “searching for meaning.”

Just like a health-conscious person might wake up every morning and do a 30-minute physical workout to build strength and stamina, a perspective-conscious person could wake up every morning and do a 30-minute viewpoint workout, practicing optimism, or positive thinking, or finding meaning. This could involve meditation. It could also involve storytelling – devising narratives that cast a positive light on uncomfortable situations, stories that help reveal lessons in adversities. A version of this has been called gratitude journaling. Another version is known as prayer. If we really practiced at our outlook like this every day, with the same dedication some people have for working out at the gym, how much better might we feel? And if we aren’t putting in this daily practice, why should we expect our outlook to improve?

I used to think that I’d rather know the truth than feel good. But I came to believe that we can’t know the truth directly, we can only gaze at it from one perspective or another. And the perspective we adopt affects the decisions we make, which shape the reality we come to inhabit. So we might as well adopt — through practice — the perspective that shapes our future for the better.

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Meditation

What could be more important than this?

Posted on by rudiseitz

When we bring our attention to our breath, we might find that other points of focus seem more compelling or important. It’s our stubborn sense of “what’s important” that makes meditation difficult. The exam we have to take tomorrow, the trip we’re going to go on, the bill we have to pay – all of these might seem more pressing, more urgent than our current breath.

We’ve been breathing all our life, and we know that our cycle of breathing will continue whether or not we pay it our attention. So how urgent could it be to concentrate on our breathing? But if we stop thinking about that upcoming exam, maybe we’ll regret our lack of foresight? If we don’t image how poorly it could go tomorrow, if we don’t consider what more we could do to prepare, perhaps we’ll fail?

Threat awareness always seems more important than breath awareness. So meditation challenges our very concept of importance. It surfaces a conflict between 1) our intention to focus only on our current breath and 2), our idea of what’s critical and threatening in our life right now that demands our attention.

We already know how breathing works – inhale, exhale – there’s nothing new to learn here. But we don’t know how that upcoming trip is going to go – there might be something new to learn in imagining it. If we take the time to consider what we’re going to pack and what we’re going to do when we arrive, maybe it’ll all go better? Why would we instead give our attention to familiar old breathing?

Indeed, meditation can seem like a waste. Rather than preparing for future dangers, we’re sitting in a chair doing nothing. Yes, we know that idleness, in the form of sleep, is necessary for health, but if we’re getting enough sleep why would we need to meditate – again being idle – on top of that? If we can use our waking awareness to get ready for the novel challenges that lie ahead, why would we squander that awareness on the most familiar, repetitive thing there could be?

Reframing the situation helps. If it’s hard to maintain your focus on your breathing because other things seem more important and pressing, try this: think about your ability to breathe. 

There’s your current breath – the inhale or exhale that’s happening right now – and there’s the ability it represents. 

Now ask, what is more important, the exam I have to take, the trip I’m going to go on, the bill I have to pay, or my ability to breathe?

Of course, if you couldn’t breathe you wouldn’t be taking that exam or planning that trip or getting ready to pay that bill. It should be clear that your ability to breathe is more “important” than pretty much anything else that might be on your mind. And quite likely, any threat you’re facing in everyday life is not a threat to your ability to breathe.

If you fail the exam, or the trip goes poorly, or the bill is paid late, guess what? You’ll still have your ability to breathe. You’ll still have the thing that’s most important.

And when you take the exam, go on the trip, pay the bill, if you can maintain some awareness of your breathing throughout, you’ll probably feel calmer — you’ll perform better and make better decisions. So if those things — the exam, the trip, the bill — are really important, then cultivating a skill that will help you navigate them – the skill of breath awareness – must be important too.

There are some situations, it should be said, where breath awareness is not a path to calm. When our breathing is uncomfortable, labored, or hyper, we might find it triggering to think about the importance of the ability to breathe.

But when we do feel secure in that ability — an ability so basic we take it for granted throughout much of our lives — we can use that security as the foundation of our practice. Confident that our breathing will continue, we can perceive any other thing that might clamor for “importance” in our mind as secondary to that life-giving ability. And when we as meditators recover from a distraction, we can be sure that whatever distracts us is not more important than our next breath, because our next breath is a prerequisite to the one after that, and every other one that follows.

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Criticism, Music, Personal Development

The Critic vs. The Advocate

Posted on by rudiseitz

If we treat our opinions like prized possessions, like gems that must be protected from theft and insult, perhaps that is because we see them as expressions of our true self. In defending our opinions we are defending our identity.

But if we trace an opinion to its roots we may find those roots embedded not in the deepest core of our being, but in a more superficial place – in the assumptions of a persona we inhabit – the invisible assumptions that we aren’t aware we’re making as we play one role or another in life.

The COVID lockdown kept me from attending any live classical concerts in 2020 and 2021, so when I finally stepped back into a concert hall in early 2022 I felt I was reinhabiting a persona that had been dormant – the persona of a classical music aficionado, a particular kind of classical music aficionado.

Twenty minutes into my first live concert after so long away from the scene, I wasn’t loving it. My dissatisfaction soon blossomed into a critique – a whole story I could tell about the conductor’s choices and how I believed they misinterpreted the music. The friend sitting beside me would surely ask my opinion at the end, and now I had something to say.

I might have suffered through the rest of the concert and then given my negative “review,” but this time I understood that my reaction could not exist in a vacuum. My time away from the concert hall had helped me see, from a fresh perspective, how tightly my reactions to the music depended on the foundational assumptions of my adopted persona. I’ll call this persona “The Critic.” Here’s what makes him tick:

  1. He has heard the best of the best. He is proud of all the listening he’s done and he’s constantly measuring new performances in a competitive framework. When a performance is less than stellar, he feels he has been denied something he deserves.
  2. He believes in the value of criticism. He believes a listener should always have an opinion. Criticizing a performance is helpful – it separates the good from the mediocre, which creates more space for the good to shine.
  3. He has high expectations of his own responses to music. He remembers the heights of rapture he has experienced when listening to great performances. He is hoping for that rapture to happen again. When it doesn’t happen, he takes this as evidence that the performance lacked the power to move.

With these assumptions now flooding back into mind, I realized I could just as easily embrace their opposites, situating my perceptions atop different foundations instead. In fact, there’s a separate version of my identity as a classical music aficionado that I’ve embraced just as often as The Critic. I’ll call this alternate persona “The Advocate.” Here’s what makes him tick:

  1. As a listener, he believes his greatest skill is the ability to find something to appreciate in any performance. The more joy that can be found in music – no matter its imperfections – the better it is for him, for listeners at large, and for the cause of music itself. He believes that by expecting only “the best,” a listener makes it impossible to enjoy what a performance is actually offering, so listening should begin without expectations. 
  2. As a listener, he doesn’t feel he needs to have an opinion. He doesn’t need to know “what he thinks” about a performance. He doesn’t need say anything. All he needs to do is to listen. And to thank the musicians for doing the work.
  3. If rapture is not happening for him, that might be because his mood isn’t receptive to the music, or because he’s not the right listener for what this piece has to say. Though he trusts in the power of music to move him, he can’t conclude that the music must be lacking something if he’s not moved. There could be many other reasons.

For the rest of the concert, I decided to listen optimistically rather than pessimistically – channeling “The Advocate” rather than “The Critic,” looking for elements I could appreciate in the performance, wherever I could find them. The result was that I started to have a better time. When my mind wasn’t crowded with complaints and objections, I could hear the details better, and many of them were beautiful.

At the end, I thanked my friend for inviting me and let him know I had enjoyed it. What about my planned critique about the conducting? I saved it for… never.

As I think back to the concert a year later, I remember it as a good experience. When we choose to see things from a positive perspective – we’re not only improving our experience in the moment, we’re actually planting the seeds of better memories.  Do this enough and as you look back, more and more, it will seem as though the past is full of bright spots.

Should we ignore our authentic reactions, and silence ourselves when we believe the music isn’t being served by a performer’s choices? No, we should be honest. But honesty is more than complaining about what we don’t like. Honesty is being aware of what we’re looking for. Are we looking to be disappointed, so that we can signal our high standards, so that we can feel useful as critics, so that our superior perceptive capacity might be confirmed? Or are we looking for pleasure in music? Are we seeking joy, and if so, are we doing the hard work to find it, to embrace it? How much risk are we willing to take to create the possibility of being delighted?

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Meditation, Personal Development

Meditation and Stimulation

Posted on by rudiseitz

When we meditate, we’re learning to be comfortable with a lower level of stimulation than we typically crave. We’re detoxing from stimulation.

The quest for stimulation fills our waking moments. We seek it in food, sex, work, movement, art, media, narrative, and the general business of living.

If you observe someone reclining in a chair, doing nothing, it might seem as if that person is not seeking stimulation. That’s where mind-wandering, brooding, daydreaming, and rumination enter the scene. When we sit still, the quest for stimulation is internalized. 

To think is stimulating. Worrying is a kind of thinking, and a highly stimulating kind. We hate worrying, but on some level, it excites us. Our craving for excitement is a reason we might keep worrying even after we notice that our worries are hurting us. People pay to see horror movies but when they realize they can catastrophize in their own minds for free, it can be hard to stop doing that.

Lessening our need for stimulation has several benefits. If it’s the need for stimulation that keeps us addicted to worry, then reducing that need might break the cycle of addiction.

Detoxing from stimulation might also provide some relief in the struggle with procrastination. Because what is procrastination? If we discard the element of guilt that fuels avoidance, what we’re left with is a craving for stimulation. We procrastinate because the thing we’re supposed to do is not stimulating, so we find ourselves constantly drawn to things that are more so. But when we engage in a distraction that’s highly stimulating, we’re feeding our addiction, we’re reinforcing our dependence on stimulation, making it even more painful to return to the unstimulating task. 

Meditation can help us reverse this trend. Through meditation, we can become comfortable with an even lower level of stimulation than the task we’re avoiding. After meditation, when we then engage in that same task, the task might seem stimulating enough. It’s relative. That’s not to say meditation is a quick fix to procrastination – but it can help.

To operationalize this insight, we might try an experiment. Let’s work on a difficult task, and when we feel the fidgety impulse to stop, let’s not resist it. We’ll embrace the compulsion to procrastinate. But instead of checking email or eating chips, we’ll take a meditation break. Let’s allow ourselves to procrastinate as much as we want as long as the avenue of procrastination is limited to a three-minute meditation break any time we want, no questions asked.

Is that really going to help? Like a lot of things, it all depends on how you do it – the details of execution are important – but it might.

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Music

Baubles: The Journey of a Tune

Posted on by rudiseitz

Some tunes travel quite a long way from their inception to the popular form we know. If we follow the remarkable journey of the tune Baubles, Bangles, and Beads, we find that it begins in a classical string quartet by Alexander Borodin (1833-1887), then it experiences a rebirth in the 1953 Broadway musical Kismet, then it starts to swing in a 1953 hit by Peggy Lee, and it keeps swinging in renditions by The Kirby Stone Four, Frank Sinatra, Sara Vaughan, and too many more artists to mention here.

Here is the place in the second movement of Alexander Borodin’s String Quartet No 2. where the journey begins:

Fast forward to 1953, when Robert Wright and George Forrest created the music for Kismet by adapting material from Borodin’s works. In Kismet’s Act 1 there is a scene where the beautiful Marsinah, lead female role, has been given money by her father. Now surrounded by merchants, she marvels at the “baubles, bangles, and beads” they are hawking, and imagines how these sparkling jewels could help her find a suitor. Marsinah’s role is sung here by Dorretta Morrow:

In the same year, 1953, we can hear Baubles removed from its theater context, now in a hit recording by Peggy Lee. One aspect you’ll observe about Lee’s recording is how it doesn’t swing for the first half — nothing we’ve heard yet has swung — but in a gentle, seamless transition around the 1:42 mark, we can hear Baubles acquire a groove. It’s a magical moment:

Now stopping for a visit in 1958 with the Kirby Stone Four, we hear a bright, boisterous, up-tempo rendition that is much the opposite of Peggy Lee’s intimate, slow, and beguiling version. Stone’s perky mix of jazz, pop, and instrumentally-inflected unison vocals has been known as the “Go” sound:

Continuing with the theme of brightness and vibrancy, Sinatra’s 1959 big-band performance is just as brilliant as we’d expect from Frank:

And while 1964 is not the end of this tune’s journey, not by far, it’s a good place for us to stop, with a remarkable performance by Sara Vaughan, perhaps the most spontaneous and free of anything we’ve heard yet in this tour:

Here’s the Borodin, where it all began, one more time:

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Visual Design

The Allure of the Ouroboros

Posted on by rudiseitz

Why is the ouroboros – an image of a serpent swallowing its own tail – so alluring?

To understand this, we need to consider why the image is so potentially alarming.

Looking at the ouroboros, we see an animal engaged in an act of self-destruction. Is this a deliberate act or an unwitting act? Does the snake not recognize its tail as a part of itself? Will it feel the pain and release itself before the process of cannibalism is complete?

These are the questions that might come to mind if we interpret the image literally. But if we allow for some magic in our view, we need not be sure the snake is pursuing its own demise. We might also imagine that the snake is giving birth to itself. At the point where the tail seems to enter the snake’s mouth, we could see it emerging from that same mouth, as if the mouth appeared first and spit out the rest of the snake.

We could also imagine that these processes of consumption and emergence are concurrent – that as the snake swallows more of itself, more is generated.

If the ouroboros were intended as a literal depiction of a snake devouring itself, we should expect to see the snake’s body enlarged in the place where it contains the swallowed portion of the tail, but that’s not how it is typically drawn.

The fear of snakes – ophidiophobia – is not without foundation. Snakes move quickly and some carry a deadly venom. In the Garden of Eden, the serpent carries the venom of temptation. 

But the ouroboros is a symbol that dates back to ancient Egypt: it can be seen on Tutankhamun’s tomb. Surely it is not the serpent of the Book of Genesis: it’s too preoccupied to threaten or tempt. If a person is afraid of snakes, perhaps they could take some small comfort in seeing that the ouroboros is in no posture to attack. 

Considering all of this, a viewer might still feel unsettled by an ouroboros when the symbol is presented all alone. But another remarkable quality of the ouroboros is the way its circular structure allows it to enclose another image, so that it functions as a picture frame. In this case, the ouroboros absorbs some of the character of what lies within.

Sometimes the ouroboros is used as a frame around the mythical Tree of Life. In a new image I have commissioned, the botanical features of the Garden of Eden lie outside the ouroboros — a double one — and a rosette window, offering a view of the cosmos, is enclosed within.

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Creativity, Music, Personal Development, Visual Design

An Experiment in Engagement

Posted on by rudiseitz

“Marketing is the final extension of your art.”

This quote is from Derek Sivers, in Your Music And People.

The way an artist discusses their art, distributes it, and promotes it — all of this is a continuation of the creative act.

If I take Sivers’ point seriously, what does it mean for my own efforts at sharing my music? If I really think of marketing as an expression of my creativity, rather than as a chore, what would a “creative” marketing effort for my album Meteorite look like? And what would I do if money and time were no object?

It’s taken me a year of personal change and family tragedy to come to answer. I’ll save the backstory for elsewhere and jump to the vision I’ve arrived at.

To be clear, this isn’t a vision of how I’d handle the nuts and bolts of PR, like how I’d grow my mailing list, what I’d post on social media, how I’d reach out to journalists, etc. I don’t need a vision for that, I need a schedule. What I’m presenting here is a vision for how my album, or really any album, could be more engaging, to more people… how, to some extent, it could be set up to market itself.

The vision is that the album is more than what I’ve made. My music is the inner core. Around it, there’s a whole sphere of music and art — made by other artists — that connects to it and plays off of it. That will be true if I succeed. Imagine this:

Along with a great album cover, there’s a portfolio of visual art that goes with the album. Maybe there’s enough art for a gallery exhibit, or a small book. There’s enough art that an interested viewer can spend as much time looking at the album as they can spend listening to it. Each piece of art has a story about how it connects to the music. Each track in the album has its own illustration, and there other artworks that depict musical processes, moods, common themes at play. There are many connections among the artworks and you can see some artists responding to work by others.

Along with music in the album – 35 compositions written by me and performed by my collaborator on clavichord – there’s other music surrounding the album, music that connects to it, echoes it, reinterprets it. Other musicians have taken themes and fragments from the album and created their own remixes. Maybe there’s an EDM track where you can groove to one of my tunes against a dance beat. Or maybe there’s a fantasy or a fugue that a classical composer has built from one of my canon themes.

Along with the music there’s also choreography. You can see videos of dancers moving to the music. Maybe there are animations. Photographs. Maybe there’s some poetry too.

The idea is that the album would be more than just my music, my creativity – it would be a larger constellation, including work by other artists, work that plays off of mine and engages it in a kind of counterpoint. Each piece of art or music in this larger sphere could serve as an entry point, helping a listener get interested in my own material, but it would go both ways: my material, my project could help a listener discover another artist.

To achieve this, I’d basically be taking my PR budget and not spending it on conventional PR but investing it in artists. I’d take any advertising funds and use them instead as a commission fund. I’d hire other creators to make something that expresses their own creativity while connecting in some way to my material, using a fragment or idea from my material and developing it in a new way. I might define how this should be done and provide detailed feedback along the way, or leave it all to the artist — each piece would be different. Along with commissions, some of these projects could be structured as collaborations.

This is not to say that all these artists would be a big group of friends or that they’d all even have to know about each other and be on board with the larger vision I’m presenting here. In some cases, I might simply hire someone to make a piece that I want made, without their needing to be aware of the larger context; in other cases, the artist could become a co-creator with me in this larger outreach experiment.

How would any of this help with marketing or promotion? A few ways:

  • Each artwork in the larger sphere is a chance to “reach” a new listener or viewer who might respond to its particular style
  • Listeners and viewers who encounter the project would have a whole universe of interrelated art to explore
  • Each artist involved in the project might share it with people they know, because their work is part of it
  • People might take an interest in the project because it’s an unconventional way of doing outreach and they want to know if it works

The main point is that art is powerful. That’s why I make art. But the particulars of style and format can limit the size of an audience. Not everyone responds to canons on clavichord or even knows what those things are. The question is, if you were to bring the full power of art, music, and dance to bear in translating and amplifying those canons on clavichord, would all that power be sufficient to gain a wider audience, well beyond the small group of people who already like this sort of thing? I can only believe the answer is yes.

Am I really able to do something like this? Is it pie in the sky?

Earlier I wrote: “What would I do if money and time were no object?” I believe that a good way to lead one’s life is to ask that question, write down the answer, and then find a way to do that thing anyway, even if money is an object and time is an object.

My answer is, if money and time were no object, I’d do what I just wrote about. I’d commission artists to make stuff. That’s because the only thing more exciting to me that creating new stuff is supporting, inspiring, or encouraging other people to create new stuff, especially if it’s stuff we both like and stuff that helps us both.

I didn’t quite know all this about myself until recently. I’ve been finding it out. I began learning it from another project that I started in 2022 (still ongoing) to actually buy music from independent musicians. And I’ve learned it from some mentoring that I do at my day job, totally unrelated to music.

As I write these words, I’ve commissioned three pieces of visual art for Meteorite and am starting to collaborate with a friend on the first EDM track based on material from the album. Of all the things I’ve done in my life, making my album felt pretty amazing but doing these commissions and collaborations has felt, well, equally amazing. So I’m going to figure out how to keep doing this, in whatever ways I can, with the resources that I do have available.

Commissioned art as of 2/25/2022: Meteorite Impact, Magic Mirror, The Garden and the Cosmos

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Creativity, Music, Visual Design

The Garden and the Cosmos

Posted on by rudiseitz

This image by calligrapher and illustrator Svetlana Molodchenko, made with watercolor and gold paint on paper, is two things. It’s work of art made from ancient symbols. And it’s a cover for a musical album, a collection of 35 canons composed by Rudi Seitz, titled Meteorite.

“Looking at Svetlana Molodchenko’s artwork is like stepping back to a long-lost era of finery and grandeur – a Renaissance painting, a medieval cathedral or perhaps even an Ancient Greek villa. Rich in detail but with a light touch, there’s a sense of craft and luxury in everything she draws. The viewer plunges into another world, where past, present and future merge.”

Album Cover:

As a cover, the image includes many references to the contents of the album. The rosette is a reference to the sound hole of a clavichord. The double ouroboros represents the two voices of a musical canon, engaged in an infinite cycle. The birds, the comet, and the multi-colored stone stand for the three largest compositions in the album: the birds refer to Birdsong, the comet refers to Meteorite, and the multi-colored stone refers to Ammolite. Considered together, the eight gems could represent one octave of a diatonic scale; they also refer to the naming scheme used in the album, where canons get their titles from gems and minerals.

Artwork:

Independent from its purpose as an album cover, this image is a self-contained artwork. As such, it can be interpreted in whatever way the viewer finds most appropriate, but here is one interpretation:

The songbirds and botanical pattern we see in the periphery of the image, against a background of gold, represent the living world – they are things we might find in a garden, possibly the Garden of Eden. But the serpents we behold in this garden are not free-roaming symbols of sin or temptation; rather, they form an ouroboros, a symbol that traces back to ancient Egyptian iconography. These serpents are living beings, members of the garden, but the fantastical way they consume each other, and in turn give rise to each other — an eternal cycle of renewal — sets them apart from the ordinary world. Viewed by itself, an ouroboros might bring to mind the discomfort of an animal being devoured, but when an ouroboros is used as a frame around another image, it takes on the character of what lies inside. Here, the ouroboros encloses a rosette, the geometric pattern we might see in a Gothic cathedral window. As the only man-made element here, the rosette represents an expression of reverence through the pursuit of symmetry and balance. The multifaceted gems embedded on the rosette echo its geometry. These are not gems of ostentation; rather, they are bearers of color and possibility, showing the different components of the white light we see in the stars. If the “outside” of the ouroboros in this image represents the living world, the “inside” represents inanimate beauty, mathematical perfection, and the heavens. The ouroboros itself is a transition between these two worlds. In a highly symmetrical design, the eye might might seek exceptions to the perfect order. Asymmetry can be found in the arrangement of the stars, the comet tail, and the blending of colors in the top stone. Taken as a whole, the image depicts a window for gazing at the cosmos, and represents the way art — and music! — can be such a window, such a device for contemplating the infinite.

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Personal Development

The Peril Of Pairwise Comparison

Posted on by rudiseitz

Do you prefer the sweetness of ice cream or the bitterness of broccoli rabe? And if you didn’t know, how would you find out?

For me, ice cream is cloyingly sweet. It leaves me bloated and gives me a sugar craving the next day. But broccoli rabe, with garlic and olive oil, in the context of a meal, is perfect.

Assuming I had never tried either food, what if were to conduct a side-by-side comparison to discover my favorite? I’d taste some ice cream, then some broccoli rabe, then some ice cream, going back and forth until my preference became clear.

Ice cream would win. The sweet food will always prevail in a pairwise comparison because of the way it interacts with the bitter food when they’re crowded together in short-term memory. 

Though I don’t have a sweet tooth, my palate still responds to sweetness. The momentary pleasure leaves me wanting more, and once I’ve had something as sugary as ice cream I can’t enjoy the bitterness of broccoli rabe for a while afterwards. But the inevitable victor of this duel is the opposite of my true preference. If I had to pick only one to keep in my life, it would be broccoli rabe.

Most of us know it’s not a great idea to pit a savory food against a dessert in a taste test. One food can change the way another food tastes, giving the dessert an unfair advantage. But in other areas of life, we assume that a side-by-side comparison is the best way, maybe the only way to identify our favorite item in a set of options. The strategy is broken, but we think it’s dependable.

I was comparing two versions of a painting, one simpler and the other more complex. Flipping back and forth between them, I always preferred the simpler version. It took me three days to realize that the complex version was the better composition.

What happened? When looking at the images in rapid succession – specifically then – the simpler one always stood out as a relief for my eyes, quicker to scan, easier to comprehend. But if I looked at the complex image by itself, for an extended time, I could see that its complexity was a virtue, not a flaw. The piece wasn’t too busy. It just didn’t perform as well in a contest of first reactions.

When editing a photograph, we might boost the color saturation and then do a before/after comparison. Often we find that the enhanced image catches our attention; returning to the original feels like a letdown. But if we had looked at the original by itself, never seeing the enhanced version, we would not have said “this image needs more saturation.” It’s saturated enough. The need for more saturation only arises when we offer it to ourselves as an option and then take it away.

When editing an audio recording, we might make it louder by a small amount – a quarter decibel. In an A/B comparison, a listener might not realize that one version is louder than the other, but they might feel that one is richer, fuller, somehow more alive — that’s the magic of loudness. Taking the listener’s feedback, we’d make it louder, and louder, and louder again.

Other edits we might make, like changing the EQ or adding reverb, can have a side effect: they sometimes make the recording a bit louder. And that makes us think it’s gotten better. Unless we “level match” the input and output, it’s hard to know if the character of the sound has improved, or if we just like the output better because it’s slightly louder. 

Side-by-side comparisons can help us make decisions. But even though we’re sampling the options one after the other, not simultaneously, we’re still not sampling them independently. The memory of one option influences how we experience the other option.

We want to pick the option that would give us the best experience if we came to it fresh, but the comparison only tells us which option seems better in the artificial context of flipping back and forth.

A taste test between ice cream and broccoli rabe? You might laugh if I told you I’d done this. But how many times have you chosen the figurative “ice cream” in a pair of other things – versions of a sentence, versions of an idea – that seemed like perfectly good candidates for a side-by-side comparison?

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