Welcome.

You’ve discovered a blog. This one is about music, and sometimes other things, but mostly that.

One of my favorite things about music is how unlikely the very concept is. Sound is wavy air, and the varying pressure of that air against your eardrum is what your brain registers as sound. Music is a specific interpretation that we apply to certain sounds. The honk of a car horn isn’t really that different from a loud note played on a trumpet, but one is considered obnoxious and the other artistic; one is welcome in a symphony orchestra and the other is not. The difference is largely due to cultural conditioning – if your parents had played car horn quartets for you as a small child instead of nursery rhymes you’d probably find them quite musical. Many non-western cultures use organizations of sound (scales, mostly) that sound quite dissonant to anyone unfamiliar with them, and I’m sure the opposite is true. Balinese Gamelan, for example, are tuned so that the frequencies are just a bit off, and the “beating” effect between the two pitches is the intended “in tune” sound.

I love music. Mostly western music, though I make an effort to branch out. What I find myself internally confronted with when I think that thought is the difficulty of defining what it is that I love about it. Do I love Green Day’s “Basket Case” because it uses one of the most common chord progressions in pop music? Or is there something undeniably “good,” about it that I am appreciating? Is it just an emotional reaction to the noise? Pop punk is a genre that, cerebrally, I am aware is not really all that great, but it was the soundtrack to my teenage years and the nostalgic value outweighs any illusions I have about being highbrow in my tastes.

I make my own music, and it’s always been my ambition to do that “professionally,” meaning that any situation in which I don’t have to go to a job that doesn’t have anything to do with it would be a win. That’s not currently the case, but through the string of office jobs I’ve held it’s become increasingly clear that I’m happiest when music is involved. I can be making it, intentionally sitting and listening to it without doing any other tasks, talking about it, thinking about it, learning about it, having it blasted into my face at a show, hearing someone else describe it, all are valid candidates for increasing my general contentedness with being alive.

That in mind, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to heavily lean into doing all those things as much as I possibly can, and maybe someday, somehow it ends up being a professional habit and not just a recreational one. This, obviously, is the home for my writing about music – Words About Sound. There will be many of them. Over 500 in this post, and I’m just getting started! I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I will enjoy writing it.