Mentally Dissecting Music

It’s been a while since I had a chance to sit down and layout some thoughts for this blog. Time has been limited and work has been crazy. At the moment I am waiting for a new build to kick off, so I thought I would ramble for a moment.

Over the years I have heard many people talk about how a person’s perspective of a subject changes as they learn more details about said subject. I guess this is the root of learning and is to be expected; yet the one comment I hear most about this process is that some subjects lose the “magic” when the secrets have been revealed.

For example: The art of making movies. The other day I was driving with a co-worker of mine and he was talking about how he took a film class back in college. Ever since he took the course he found himself focusing more on the movie process then the movie itself. Plot holes, bad shots, horrible edits, etc. This knowledge of how the “magic” of movies are made, in his opinion, took away the enjoyment of the movie going experience.

So the question that has been posed to me over the years (and what I am going to ramble about) is: now that you know how music is made does that effect how you enjoy music?

I am going to pull a Clinton and say, “That depends on what enjoy means…”

If by enjoy, you mean sitting back and letting the entire sound roll over you and seeing the piece only as a whole or as an experience, then my answer would be that my enjoyment process has decreased greatly.

On the other hand, if you mean enjoy as in the process of truly appreciating good music and reveling in that fact that you are hearing it, then I would say that my enjoyment process has increased dramatically.

It really gets down to this: artists perceive their art form in a totally different way then someone who does not produce that kind of art. This isn’t some kind of ego stroking “You will never understand my art the way I do” kind of bullshit comment. This is more of a, “We look at the art in a different way because we have spent so much time focusing on it.”

This is true with anyone who specializes in a subject. A mechanic sees a car in a totally different light then a non-mechanic. An account looks at the numbers in a way that a non-account would never understand. There is nothing wrong with this; it is all about perspective and knowledge.

So, back to the original question… yes, my enjoyment of music has changed greatly over the years. My friend Nevada once asked me how I listen to music. To use a played out metaphor, music is a forest and I tend to look at the trees and the animals then the forest itself.

I listen to the bassline asking myself, how did they do that? What filter where they using? What patch? As my knowledge of the studio grows it becomes more about revelations then questions. For example I may hear a song and think “Oh, they are just running the bass synth through a filter with a high resonance and tweaking the cutoff on the 3rd eight note to get the rhythmic pattern on a single whole note.”

All of a sudden I am no longer listening to the song as a whole, but more of a research example to expand my knowledge. The more I think about it the more I feel like a scientist poking at a frog on the dissection table looking at how the frog is structured.

My explanation of this process horrified Nevada (well, that might be a little harsh, I don’t think anything can really horrify Nevada). Then she posed the question, if you spend all your time breaking the song apart how can you enjoy it as a whole?

I feel on some levels I am still hearing and enjoying the whole song. My subconscious is grooving too it, but honestly my conscious is ripping it apart bit by bit, analyzing it and figuring out how it was done, could I recreate it and if so could I possibly make it better.

But to me, this is enjoyment. I love music… it is my religion. It is my passion. I think about it all the time, and hearing a song is like studying a subject, reading a book on mathematics, learning about it in real time.

Yeah, sometimes I should sit back and look at the forest and ignore the trees, but this is how I enjoy music and I wouldn’t change a thing.