It's not natural

This week I attended a service at a church I have been to many times. Wonderful music goes on there that is inspiring to sing along with save for one onerous distraction. As is the case with many contemporarily oriented churches, they use Power Point projected on screens to display the lyrics. The problem in this case is synchronization where it should not be. The words go up on the screen in sync with when they need to be sung. If you first see the line of a lyric when it is to be sung, it's too late. You need to see it enough before to be ready to sing it at the appropriate time. You don't need to see the last line of the preceding screen as you're singing it. That would be a good time to be seeing the incoming line. One would think that after screen after screen of lyrics result in a whole room full of people not singing the first line, the operator would figure out what is going on. But, alas, every Sunday in that church, year after year, it goes on the same. Several times I tried to tactfully make suggestions through channels that I thought might make a difference without being obnoxious or hurting any body's feelings, but to no avail.

That made me think about the natural tendency for people who don't know any better to center the subject of a photograph in the center of the frame. When they see the resulting print or screen image of that photo they know it's not good, but usually have no idea why. When the first-day-of-photography-class rule of thirds is applied, the same photo is improved immensely. I have a theory of why the natural knee jerk reaction is against what is artistically pleasing composition, but I'll save that for another day. Or maybe I already wrote about it somewhere else.

Anyway, this is about seeing, hearing, feeling, and in general, perceiving on different levels. Presentation is about individual artistic expression, but to be any good it must be informed by understanding of the hard wiring of the human mind. I used to tell my students that the power of visual communication is that it is a language that everyone understands, but relatively few know how to speak. This could be said for any artistic genre. Certain presentations of certain types of elements in certain modes and combinations will normally yield a predictable emotional response. Minor keys are sad. Slo-mo video is an emotional amplifier. This is because of the said hard-wiring. (Where this came from and cross-cultural variance is a discussion for another day.) For one's art to effectively speak, the individual expression needs to be done with an understanding of how it will be received through this structure of acceptance. Some call this a filter. Each of us has individual filters based on experience and personal taste, etc. But we also have mega-filters that most of us have in common based on the hard wiring. Ex: a photo using the rule of thirds will almost always be judged to be better than the same image made without understanding of the compositional rule even if the viewer has never heard a thing about the rule of thirds.

Okay, so going further down this line I got to thinking about perception of quality by practitioners of various arts. Our ability to either appreciate or produce art is directly proportional to our ability to see it and it's context. It is said that a successful sculptor must possess the ability to see in three dimensions in his or her mind. An architect must have this ability as well. One of the finest musicians I know speaks of hearing music in three dimensions and of hearing an entire piece at once. The more one can take in and analyze, the more complexity and subtlety is possible. The work space may be a camera's frame, a lump of clay, 3-D depth, the color spectrum, the spectrum of audible frequencies, the spatial field of a stereo or surround mix, the intervals of notes in a scale, the temporal sequence of pictures or sounds over time, and all kinds of combinations of those and other things. Perception and understanding of the space gives the ability to place elements in it with precision, with meaning assigned to the position, and with meaningful relationships to other elements and their placement.

A kid who looks at a guitar chord chart and figures out how to strum three basic chords is rewarded for his or her hour or so of effort with the ability to strum along and “play” dozens or hundreds of songs, albeit in a very rudimentary way that is only identifiable as a specific song if the melody is provided by a voice or another instrument. But it is thrilling nonetheless. I remember that day well! If one progresses, one starts to be able to hear where different notes in chord structures change things up and add to the whole. And then adding various notes to or in between chords pushes the sound along. This is where multi-tonal instruments have a huge world to explore that mono tonal instruments, like woodwinds or horns, do not. But in the mono tonal world, there has always been the possibility for an arranger to hear the possibilities of multiple players combining notes. And now in the era of multi-track recording technology, a musician or producer has the additional pallet of multiple passes to combine elements from different points in time even from the same player, instrument, or voice. Along side of all of the above, there is the world of notation that allows music to be written down on paper or produced referring to it. Some genres of music are so complex that the ability to function in that domain is a requirement for admission to the club.

I've been playing with multi-track recording myself lately, thanks to the amazing drop in cost and increase in capability of the never ending technology revolution applied to audio. I've always been tempo challenged as a musician and nothing makes that stick out quite like trying to do overdub recording. I tend to play all around the beat, usually pushing it. Speeding up is another human tendency similar to placing the cross hairs in a viewfinder on a subject's nose. It's an artistic mistake that is natural and yet another example of why good art isn't. It's curious that parts interacting in time that are way out of sync are obviously unattractive. But then, parts that are dead-on in sync are to a lesser degree also looked down on as being to “mechanical.” Drum machines are disdained by many in favor of live drums because they are too perfect. So, how to judge exactly when parts wandering around the beat are an ugly mess or a fabulous wall of sound? Syncopation, which some find ugly if not sinful, is the cornerstone of contemporary music. But sometimes I syncopate the syncopation. Maybe someday someone will think that's cool.

As a guitar player, I am middle class. I fall in the huge middle ground between beginners and good players where most other guitar players live. Almost any time I play with another guitarist, I am made aware of the dynamic of the ability to hear. If the other player is of lesser ability, I find myself thinking inside my head, “Can't you hear that it should be like this?” Or, “Don't you understand that this little thing here would add so much?” And I also know the confusion or frustration of playing with someone way better than me while trying to figure out what they are doing and/or how they are doing it. And I'm sure there is much I don't perceive at all about it or about what I'm doing wrong that makes the other guy think the same thoughts about me that I expressed above.

Okay, so my point in this meander is that in order to exploit any of this artistically, one must be able to hear and/or see the possibilities in one or another kind of multi-dimensional space. Or as is the case of experimental art, to be able to dink around in that multidimensional space and recognize when a combination of elements happens in a valuable way and seize on it. At some point things get complex enough that this type of perceptive ability is not only required for producing the art but also for appreciating it. There have been many discussions about this relative to most classical music and why the masses don't like it. The undeniable fact is that it is just over our heads. There is just too much to take in. References to things unknown to the consumer yield confusion, boredom, or blankness to that person instead of the symbolic richness experienced by the one who knows of the reference. Consuming entertainment is leisure. Appreciating art may be that but also can be work and certainly requires experience.