Specificity

Artist's Statement
          What is music? That is what I sat down to figure out this week. It wasn't easy, exploring the medium to render it's core. I appreciate the profound definition given by John Cage, as demonstrated in his experimental piece entitled 4'33". Although I find his definition of music valid, I couldn't help but feel there was more to it. As I experimented with several different ideas I came to the realization that of course Cage was right, all sound could be music! Yet having the potential to be music does not mean all sound is constantly music. This is the tangent that gradually brought me to my conclusion. All sounds can be music because music is the organization and orchestration of sounds to bring about human emotion. I find it so interesting that sound waves emitted from any number of devices and instruments can cause us to cry, laugh, become motivated, or to smile. The powerful force behind this medium is the combinations, repetitions, and intervals that the artist utilizes different pitched noises. These combinations of sounds (even without words to accompany the music) can carry the above mentioned emotions. My piece is an attempt to manifest these emotions through singing. I have recorded my voice (at some points 15 different layers of me) in a variety of different feelings. Each emotion is connected to the next by a common note. This was done to show that nature of music. 1 note can have a completely different feel when put in combination with another. I tried to bring about excitement, solemnity, happiness, adventure, anxiety/fear, and even feelings of awe and wonder. I sang these combinations, but in reality it could have been accomplished with any number of instruments or a combination of many. In fact, inspiration for this piece came from the THX theme song, Deep Note, which was originally created entirely from computer programming. I think it is so interesting that those 200 lines of programming are now associated with the excitement of the theater and movie watching. I feel that music has much less to do with what makes the noise, rather the design that is put into combining a variety of sounds for an intended purpose. In the reading Show and Tell  we read about comics being a mixture of different types of art (pictures and words). I feel that the same can be applied to music. When powerful words are put to powerful music the feeling is multiplied, but my project is more interested in the base of music and the power carried in the sounds themselves.