I've noticed that, as a general rule, programmers are really good at sharing and talking about progress made in their work. Artists are fairly good at this as well. But musicians? We are really, really, really bad at it.
(Warning: navel gazing ahead!)
My guess is that musicians are generally trained to perform rather than create - the goal is to become capable of repeating something perfectly and on the spot. So while the journey there is interesting to ourselves, it's also not something we want to share with the world at large. It's a shadow of what we're trying to do. So we shy away from showing "unfinished" things. We don't want people to think that's the extent of our abilities.
Composers, though, do have a progress bar of sorts. There are things we can show that eventually add up to a greater whole. Maybe because most composers start as performers, we still have those weird feelings about sharing. Maybe because we so rarely work in teams, we're not accustomed to communicating with anyone about what we're doing. Also in play is an institutionalized fear that non-musicians can't understand the meaning of a work-in-progress and will judge something unfinished without understanding what to look for. While that's got some validity, it's also very self-perpetuating. If sharing music-in-progress were a common thing, people would have a better sense of how to approach understanding an unfinished piece.
(Okay, it's safe now, you can come back)
Point of this is, I would like to get better at sharing things in progress and make more contributions to this blog. I've been working on the second concept piece for a while now, but I don't really know what is interesting to other people. Whether or not anyone wants to read posts from me about all the weird little things I encounter is not something I have any sense of.
So... what do you want to know? What would be useful? What interests you?
I would love to read about how you go through the process from a concept to a finished piece... what drives your choices? How does the emotional tone you're trying to hit play into instrument choices, melody, key, repetition, layering, etc? How does the setting of the game drive or constrain the music? A lot of that might be very basic music theory 101 kind of stuff for you, but to lay-persons like me it's fascinating.
ReplyDeleteAnd vice versa, where would you like to drive the tone of the game, through the music? What are you trying to make the player feel with this piece? When your track is a stand-alone piece of art, you (may?) want it to stand on its own, but in the context of a larger work (and collaboration) like a game, communicating and explaining the intended impact seems more relevant? To me it seems like each of the major disciplines that feed into the game have a say in the tone and emotional content: art, writing, programming, and audio. Share your goals!
I just also have to say, god, if I had a nickel for every time I showed a work-in-progress to coworkers/bosses/clients and they said "Uh, it looks kinda... unfinished. Can you fix that?", haha.
ReplyDelete