What is more important in music?

[hoggy]

44 minutes ago, thejewk said:

I don't know where one ends and the other begins. I suppose curiosity and play are the things that mostly drive me to produce and listen, and I find experimentalism for its own sake has value as a part of the process.  The experimental approaches increase my curiosity, which leads to experimentation, etc.  

Ultimately I don't think it's a coherent question.

Maybe not, but that's an interesting answer, which is why I asked. You didn't mention emotion/intuition etc. though, so where does that fit in?

[thejewk]

5 minutes ago, hoggy said:

Maybe not, but that's an interesting answer, which is why I asked. You didn't mention emotion/intuition etc. though, so where does that fit in?

All music, whether I'm listening or making, elicits some sort of emotional response.  The variance comes from what that emotion is, and whether it is desirable or not.  

Intuition as a listener?  I don't really see it as a relevant factor.  As a creator? Curiosity and play, both are inextricably tied to intuition.

[hoggy]

2 minutes ago, thejewk said:

All music, whether I'm listening or making, elicits some sort of emotional response.  The variance comes from what that emotion is, and whether it is desirable or not.  

Intuition as a listener?  I don't really see it as a relevant factor.  As a creator? Curiosity and play, both are inextricably tied to intuition.

Is the starting point ever trying to create something which reflects something you feel emotionally?

[TubularCorporation]

A banging donk.

[auxien]

4 hours ago, hoggy said:

it's kind of tangentially, fractionally a little bit true actually, in a limited way though, like not to get *rich* but I think there's something to be said for making something for *people* and not just your own self-interest and obviously getting rich is a boring goal, but some kind of success - like, "I want to make something a bunch of people will love and come to and enough people will pay for" - but the latter part only because if they pay for it you can spend more time making music people will get something out of instead of just doing stuff in your bedroom that nobody else connects to - which is a fine thing to do too, but I do think part of music being really good is making something socially valuable, at least for someone

obviously it's a weird one though, you don't wanna think about it too much, but maybe just to make something for part of yourself that others might also feel, or part of yourself which has some relationship to others

I can feel the impending wrath already on this one

naw i think there's def some real truth in that tho...i said it in a trolling fashion but there's some seriousness underlying. music has always been about communal sharing to some extent or another...and now, how we show appreciation to anyone doing a thing we like is with money. 

that's what irks me a touch about the juxtaposition of the two in your original question...it's really both, p much always. someone might think 60/40 one way, or someone else 40/60, but that's about it.....the communal sharing of music is inherent in it traditionally and continues by and large today. even an unknown Soundcloud/Bandcamp poster wants others to hear their tunes, so the outwardness is there. and the inwardness is also always there in most any musician, to some degree. not trying to rag on you for posting, it's a silly question on a silly forum for silly discussions so it's 100% okay, and it's obv led to some (interesting?) discussions lol

[thejewk]

1 hour ago, hoggy said:

Is the starting point ever trying to create something which reflects something you feel emotionally?

As in: "I am going to make a song that reflects the feeling of loss"?

No, never.  I might discover that half way through though.  It's just never a conscious decision at the outset, and it's never as reductive.

[hoggy]

37 minutes ago, thejewk said:

 it's never as reductive.

Yeah, not in a reductive way, for example sometimes I do written stuff by focusing on an image or a memory and write what comes to mind that expresses the feelings I have

[hoggy]

1 hour ago, auxien said:

that's what irks me a touch about the juxtaposition of the two in your original question...it's really both, p much always. someone might think 60/40 one way, or someone else 40/60, but that's about it

Yeah it’s kinda like what do you like most in Cherry Coke, Cherry or Coke, because without both it’s not a thing, but if you’re forced to choose, it’s the reasoning for the choice I find interesting

[thejewk]

41 minutes ago, hoggy said:

Yeah, not in a reductive way, for example sometimes I do written stuff by focusing on an image or a memory and write what comes to mind that expresses the feelings I have

A perfectly legitimate approach for sure, and a lot of music in my collection was clearly written that way, just not something that appeals to me creatively.  

[springymajig]

21 hours ago, hoggy said:

 was there an opinion in particular you think I could better engage with? Genuinely curious, because I'm definitely up for that. Would genuinely appreciate you pointing any of those out

I realise now my original post was a little vague... the only part that was meant to be directed at you was "do you really care" cos I suspected you DID care (good!) but were being ridiculed for it.

The part under that was aimed everyone being snarky

15 hours ago, toaoaoad said:

I just couldn't resist Fade Rhombus' "melody" comment because "melody" is a word that is thrown around a lot here and is often used to criticize more "experimental" forms of electronic music. But what is melody really? It's ultimately an arbitrary opinion, just like the broader question "What is music?" 

To the statement that without melody there is no point to music, which of course is ludicrous, I would argue that rhythm is far more important in music than melody (and if you really wanna get technical melody/harmony is just a form of rhythm anyway, considering the harmonic series and physics of sound etc. but that's a nerdy digression). If you look at the history of human music you will see that it all begins with rhythm. And most obviously as we are all on a friggin idm forum I would think it's universally understood among users and visitors of this site that there's a shitload of great music out there that does not contain "melody" but has rhythm.

Even so, there's a ton of great music that has neither conventional melody/harmony nor rhythm (at least in terms of metric rhythm because yeah you could also argue that any sound or sequence of sounds has a rhythm). Obviously for example noise music and some drone stuff etc has neither of these things (conventionally speaking). Some cultures of the world consider the sound of the forest, birds etc to be a form of music. (But of course individual birdsong has both melody and rhythm so yeah). Maybe people just don't want to talk about it because it's so abstract. And I don't generally want to talk about it because I have a music degree and people around here feel threatened by that lol.

This is the stuff I find interesting... I watch a lot of music theory stuff on Youtube... have you seen that video by Adam Neely on the whole "rhythm is harmony" thing?

11 hours ago, hoggy said:

I think it's just discussing a different aspect of it - what would "discussing music" be to you then? Something like "this bit of music makes me feel like X" or "this makes me think about Y"? - and yeah I'm not saying it has to be true for everyone, but when I listen to music, I do think stuff like "wow, I love the creativity of the person who made this, I wonder what was in their mind when they made it, were they focussing on a feeling, were they trying to make a sound they hadn't heard before, were they trying to speak to an imaginary other person" etc...

totally fair - but I *am* interested in that - obviously some others are not, so they meme and criticise the thread, and that's ok - sometimes the meta-conversation can be interesting too - like "why am I interested in the topic and other people find it stupid and annoying?"

@chenGOD This is me too, very interested in the why of any discussion, even if I don't agree, and to be fair, I find the posts you've made since (making reasoned arguments about why you disagree with Hoggy's questions) far more interesting.

[chenGOD]

4 hours ago, springymajig said:

making reasoned arguments about why you disagree with Hoggy's questions

yer honour, i submit to the court that i have never made a reasoned argument.

[hoggy]

I think this thread has kinda run it's course - Inward looking - emotion, honesty, intuition, expression wins - which I kinda expected, some music might not be the most radical but still resonates emotionally, and some music can be totally new and different but is just boring because there's no human feeling invested in it - even super cold robotic music can resonate with some sense of human fascination and excitement. On the other hand, sometimes someone can express themselves very sincerely, but because they do it artlessly, it just doesn't hit you, because it sounds like a description of an emotion, rather than something living and breathing, and I think how you make music live and breathe is by having it relate to a wider community or a real or imagined listener, either reacting against it, speaking to it, intentionally ignoring it...

When it comes to music creation, you might start by looking inwards which you spurs you to look outwards for how to express it, or you might start looking outwards and it leads you to express something you experience inwardly, without necessarily being aware that's what is happening (I like this way more, because of the non-conscious aspect) - but there are probably many other modes of approaching music that don't even look inwards or outwards, and the two might not make sense as a dichotomy, since both are embedded in each other.

Also, the adjectives I used to characterise the two sides of the dichotomy may not make sense, for example, you could have:

Inward looking: innovation, ambition, radicalism, experimentation
Outward looking: emotion, intuition, honesty, expression

And actually both of those seem more interesting to me, emotions focussed on other people for example, or an ambition to change yourself in a way that will make the music better, or change yourself through the music - or like Throbbing Gristle did one time, role playing as completely different people to change the concrete sense of self you have