Judging by tweets, I worked on a new song for a couple of hours last night. Part of me is pretty happy because that's the shortest I've been able to work on a song at once. What? Let me explain.
Usually, if it's late at night and I feel the inspiration for now music, I fire up Renoise and start a new song. Over the next five or six hours, I quickly draft, compose, edit, and fine-tune about five minutes of audio. And I never notice the time passing until I hear roosters (because I live in that part of town) and see early rays of sunlight peeking from under my drawn curtains. And then I glance at the clock, affirming what I'm dreading. Another night's gone by, and the coming day will be heck on my nerves. You know, because of lack of sleep and all of that. So I'm more nervous about poor decisions. And... okay, I digress.
So, last night, I knew what to expect (the rush and thrill of fresh sounds plus the time sink they inevitably become) and limited myself accordingly. Instead of spending the night, I spent just a part of it. And possibly, that was a good thing, because I've been tired lately and I need to acclimate my internal clock. See, I've been trying to go to sleep at a decent hour and wake early. For eight hours or so, that means hitting the sack at ten, so that I can rise at six. However, long nights at the keyboard and headphones doesn't really help with that.
Anyway. I thought there was probably something wrong with me, in that I could spend so long at a single task. Or, maybe, this behavior meant that I really learned the software, and so using it was second nature and I was truly making music as fast as I could think of it. Maybe. But that sounded too good to be true, so I fired up my super advanced research tool: Gleaning Orders of Opulent, Gorgeous Learning Ephemera. Or, Google, for short. (I can't believe I just did that.) Within a few minutes, I had my answer: flow.
Yes, I like Wikipedia. More to the point, flow is that state of total involvement in an activity. When I'm drawing, the moment where my pencil is part of my hand, and not an unwieldy tool to get the job done. When playing guitar, I don't feel inhibited and I can noodle for hours. And when in front of the computer, composing music, the time can fly by and I don't even notice.
The nice thing about flow is that it's not restricted to one activity -- that is, flow follows from immersion in any activity. The current image on the Wikipedia article depicts a young Girl Scout braiding plastic. I don't find it hard to imagine her playing piano with the same level of concentration. Or modeling with Lego. Or, closer to home, surfing the Internet.
Better said, raiding the Internet, or, researching by making heavy use of it. Like any task with a goal and a method, information culling can be reduced to a familiar set of steps that can be adapted to suit the current sub-goal. For example, let's say that I'm trying to find information on my momentary insomnia. I might search for such for [musical insomnia] because I'm only awake for so long when I've got a bassline stuck in my head. Currently, the results mostly point to how to use music to overcome insomnia; not quite what I had in mind. So, I adapt the search to [need no sleep while composing] which is closer to my experience, although unwieldy. However, the focus is still on sleep -- not the music. Another adaptation to [time flies when composing] which still has that narrow "composing" as part of the query, but has the broad "time flies," which should gather more relevant hits, since it is a common phrase. And on the first page, someone mentions the "zone."
And that's the magic word which jogs my memory. The zone. Of course. And from there, we're quickly at the concept of flow, after subtracting "zone diet" and "twilight zone" from future queries and searching Wikipedia on a hunch. In fact, the Wiki article for "In the Zone" is about a Britney Spears article. Thankfully, there exists a link to Flow (Psychology). And that's where I began to understand.
Right. So, sub-goals. The overall goal is to learn about what's happening, but along the way, I had to continually adapt my search query; the sub-goal was to find the most relevant information using the most relevant query. Of course, because "the zone" is such a popular phrase, it would take a while to finally distill results until they centered on psychology/mental phenomena. That's where adapting to Wikipedia comes in -- using two large resources in concord to access data quickly.
Like flow, the approach can fit to other topics. Can't think of an old song? Search the lyrics, then plug titles that seem familiar into Wikipedia to check the date. If it's a song that you know you heard in 1994, there's no way it could be that big hit from 2002, right? but it might be, so you hop on Youtube to check, and then you realize that you might just bypass Wikipedia altogether because almost any song is on Youtube these days. And that's pretty cool. So, the goal is to find an old song, but sub-goals include developing an easier way to find that song (adapting to Youtube instead of Wikipedia) or eliminating obviously incorrect results.
Another example: a song I still love to this day is Old Feelings, by drum and bass artist Beckett. For a while, I was dying to know from what song he sampled. So, I searched the lyrics. Repeatedly. What's sad is that I couldn't understand what exactly was said. Hence, I had to enter many, many variations of a few phrases. So, the sub goal became "find the proper lyrics," while the goal remained, "find the source material." Eventually, I located an old jazz song from the 30s: Undecided, by Ella Fitzgerald (a woman who should need no Wiki link, but here you go in case you do).
I did not expect that.
At first listen, it didn't seem to fit quite right. But after a while, I heard more lyrics that sounded perfect -- at the very end. There it was. Perfect.
And so ends my short thoughts on flow and goal-oriented research. In a different post, I may talk about broad research -- scattershot research -- where the goal is just to know more, but not specifically about anything specifically specific.
Specifically.
And that's the magic word which jogs my memory. The zone. Of course. And from there, we're quickly at the concept of flow, after subtracting "zone diet" and "twilight zone" from future queries and searching Wikipedia on a hunch. In fact, the Wiki article for "In the Zone" is about a Britney Spears article. Thankfully, there exists a link to Flow (Psychology). And that's where I began to understand.
Right. So, sub-goals. The overall goal is to learn about what's happening, but along the way, I had to continually adapt my search query; the sub-goal was to find the most relevant information using the most relevant query. Of course, because "the zone" is such a popular phrase, it would take a while to finally distill results until they centered on psychology/mental phenomena. That's where adapting to Wikipedia comes in -- using two large resources in concord to access data quickly.
Like flow, the approach can fit to other topics. Can't think of an old song? Search the lyrics, then plug titles that seem familiar into Wikipedia to check the date. If it's a song that you know you heard in 1994, there's no way it could be that big hit from 2002, right? but it might be, so you hop on Youtube to check, and then you realize that you might just bypass Wikipedia altogether because almost any song is on Youtube these days. And that's pretty cool. So, the goal is to find an old song, but sub-goals include developing an easier way to find that song (adapting to Youtube instead of Wikipedia) or eliminating obviously incorrect results.
Another example: a song I still love to this day is Old Feelings, by drum and bass artist Beckett. For a while, I was dying to know from what song he sampled. So, I searched the lyrics. Repeatedly. What's sad is that I couldn't understand what exactly was said. Hence, I had to enter many, many variations of a few phrases. So, the sub goal became "find the proper lyrics," while the goal remained, "find the source material." Eventually, I located an old jazz song from the 30s: Undecided, by Ella Fitzgerald (a woman who should need no Wiki link, but here you go in case you do).
I did not expect that.
At first listen, it didn't seem to fit quite right. But after a while, I heard more lyrics that sounded perfect -- at the very end. There it was. Perfect.
And so ends my short thoughts on flow and goal-oriented research. In a different post, I may talk about broad research -- scattershot research -- where the goal is just to know more, but not specifically about anything specifically specific.
Specifically.
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