I am here to help people refine the way they look at the world. It changes as we pull in new experiences, and also as the world pushes around us. The mechanics of music, whether its audio rate modulation or filter oscillation, is always in service to that worldview.
Gaining fluency in the mechanics lets us better articulate and pull into focus exactly how we look at the world. I want my students to be observant of what is coming in and out of their lens because, in many ways, that is really all there is to being an artist.
There is a story about some folks in Siberia attending a film screening around a century ago, just after film was invented. The audience was distraught when the film cut to a close-up of a young woman, thinking the woman was beheaded. It took time for film cuts to be comprehended as part of the language of the art form, and I always found that story to be so fascinating.
Our corner of music and technology sometimes suffers from a similar problem. But moments of change allow us to redefine musicianship in new ways, recalibrate our ears for undiscovered sounds, and develop deeper capacity for imagining the future—something we could always use a little more of.
