Music By Design

In several previous posts to the Critical Noise Aural Intelligence Blog, I suggested that previously disparate if related skill sets respectively belonging to composers, engineers, musicians and sound designers were merging –had merged in many instances, especially in commercial audio production– producing a new kind of unified creative professional I labeled a Music Designer.

More recently I suggested that Music Designers consider trends and recommendations identified by AIGA, 'the oldest and largest membership association for design professionals', with the purpose that such information is applicable to our own craft.

Commercial music production and commercial design have always shared similarities, but perhaps more so now than ever.

In the past separate artistic pursuits (illustrator, painter, pianist, engineer, et al) required widely diverse tools and skill sets. Today all parties increasingly share the common method of applying mouse clicks to a similarly conceived Graphical User Interface (GUI) canvas.

The medium, be it light or sound, has become almost incidental. Meanwhile, Art and Artist, bound by a common digital ancestor, and sharing the same design language, have evolved into a single medium.

It may even be an error to continue to think of a GUI as only an interface, when it too may have evolved, from a mere desktop metaphor into a medium itself (GUM).

Certainly there are still illustrators and there are still composers, but others from both groups –sharing the same or similarly conceived tool kits– increasingly identify themselves as simply Digital Artisans without necessarily feeling it too important to distinguish or limit the exact nature their craft, lest they imply any self imposed sensory boundary to the array of communication abilities they potentially wield.

So of course the process has changed the way I think about music. For one, when discussing a modern score I think I probably use the word 'construction' now, more often than I do the word 'composition'.

It sounds a bit like a B-Horror flick, but it's really not too far from the truth when I claim Computers Have Changed My Brain!!!

Ha.

Whether or not it's because I myself come from a design oriented family (both parents were photographers and painters, my father an engineer, and my sister a commercial artist), or because I began using computers for my own creative pursuits back in the early eighties, I have long applied graphic design protocols to music as a regular matter of course. Even limited use of digital tools, let alone mastery, give one with the feeling that the difference between sound and light (as application mediums) is minimal.

Thirty years after first programming my first musical scores and twenty since I first began experimenting with digital imagery, I experience little difference using a Digital Audio Workstation to manipulate audio –and a graphic program, such as the Adobe Photoshop, to process images. And I'm not alone in this experience. In recent years, say, in the last decade or so, I've met more and more musicians and composers who share my perspective.

It's not simply that all the music programs warrant the use of a graphic interface, but rather that they force us to think about about making music as at least a partly visual experience –changing the way we think– even in comparison to the notation of scores by hand with pencil and paper. So, that even when we do compose with pencil and paper, our experience with GUI enabled composition continues to influence our perspective, our methodology, the way we see and hear things.

Creating images and creating music has never been so much alike as it is today. No, I don't (yet) use my ears when modifying images, but (especially when I sit down in front of a computer) I certainly use my eyes in support of design projects, whether visual or sonic in nature.

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Click on any link below to read all the articles in the six-part series detailing the changing relationship between Traditional Music Composition and Modern Music Production:

EVOLUTION OF THE MUSIC DESIGNER

Part 1: Top Down, Center Out and Bottoms Up
Part 2: Top Down Music Composition
Part 3: Bottom Up Audio Production
Part 4: Film Composer, Sound Maker or Music Designer?
Part 5: Songwriter Vs. Song Designer
Part 6: Music By Design

Like this topic? Related Articles from the Critical Noise Archive:

It's a Cut and Paste World (October 07, 2007)
Six Requirements for Sonic Logos (August 10, 2007)
When Marketers HEAR Double (December 01, 2006)

Evolution of the Music Designer

Click on any link below to read all the articles in the six-part series detailing the changing relationship between Traditional Music Composition and Modern Music Production:

EVOLUTION OF THE MUSIC DESIGNER

Part 1: Top Down, Center Out and Bottoms Up
Part 2: Top Down Music Composition
Part 3: Bottom Up Audio Production
Part 4: Film Composer, Sound Maker or Music Designer?
Part 5: Songwriter Vs. Song Designer
Part 6: Music By Design

Songwriter Vs. Song Designer

A bit of cursory observation and experience has left me with the impression that in the last ten or fifteen years or so, we’ve heard more ‘Bottom Up’ construction from Music Designers producing non-scored works, than we might have realized, and by that I mean the songwriting process has given way to the Song Designing process.

If you're unfamiliar with the Top Down Bottom Up MUSIC DESIGN processes I've described in earlier posts, click on any of the links that follow this article for the necessary background.

In brief:

Bottom up constructions are marked by the establishment of TIME and RHYTHM before melody.

Likewise, any time a riff, incomplete melodic information ('complete' implies an entire phrase), or a pitch based sample is used as the conceptual seed from which a music production will evolve, we can say the work is being designed Center Out.

In contrast, Top Down composition is marked by melody (combined with lyrics, in the case of songwriting) first. In the Top Down process melody is defined first, after which all the other musical components are conceived in so far as melody defines their natural selection and direction.

Additionally, when music is conceived in the studio, and built from a loop up, with melody and lyric being afterthoughts to production, it strikes me that this music hasn't been composed at all. Rather, it's been designed.

Multiple points in case: Simpy consider the method by which much modern popular music –electronic, hiphop, dance, commercial pop, contemporary rock, etc– is created:

Fire up a graphic interface. Begin with a beat. Layer loops. Add a pad. Slice, dice and connect samples whose origin may be sourced from anything. The melody might not even become cohesive element until the moment the lyrics are written, sung and pitch corrected. –Or until the ‘right’ sample has been found, licensed and dropped into a the perfectly beat matched production. In fact, melody might be an after thought, or even an accident. You might even forgo the license. In fact, you probably will.

Anytime you're building a song up from a GRID, you're engaged in the act of design.

Of course, it’s not as simple as all that, –as both Top Forty Hit makers and Garage Band aficionados will rush to tell you. But I still think there is some truth to the suggestion that the described process may as well be the paradigm, and I wonder how long it will serve us? –Or when will a new technology come along that suggests yet another way of working?

There are still those who sit down with their musical instrument and create new musical works, performing melody and harmony –and even original lyrics, too– all at once, as though born whole from divine ether.

But in my daily professional experience –working with ad agencies, game developers, theme parks and other special venues, etc– most commissioned music today is designed rather than composed. That is to say, in the same manner a sound designer collages audio –layering sound bytes on top of other sound bytes, and from the bottom up and center out. How can it be otherwise when –on top of everything else– so much of it is also now informed by a Brand message or mandate; reviewed during its development by a collaborative hierarchy of other creative professionals; filtered through focus groups; and created for intended release to a target demographic?

Which brings to mind another defining point contrasting designed audio from composed music: Notwithstanding the licensing of non-designed compositions, Music Design –including Song Designs, generally imply conception for a functional or Utilitarian purpose. Whether conceived as part of an entertainment or marketing strategy –Use or User centered– is of little difference.

Of course, art springs from many sources and no judgment regarding any given process is implied. The author draws inspiration from all the techniques discussed here.

* * *
Click on any link below to read all the articles in the six-part series detailing the changing relationship between Traditional Music Composition and Modern Music Production:

EVOLUTION OF THE MUSIC DESIGNER

Part 1: Top Down, Center Out and Bottoms Up
Part 2: Top Down Music Composition
Part 3: Bottom Up Audio Production
Part 4: Film Composer, Sound Maker or Music Designer?
Part 5: Songwriter Vs. Song Designer
Part 6: Music By Design

Film Composer, Sound Maker or Music Designer?

Some musical creators will naturally identify themselves as either Top Down composers or Bottom Up constructionists –both are terms I've introduced in previous posts (Click on the links at the bottom of this entry if you require background). The latter, it seems to me, must think more like sound designers than traditional composers.

In fact, the more I think about it, the fewer differences I notice between the modern compositional process and Sound Design (or sound EFX work).

I would like to suggest that this points to an as of yet unidentified trend:

A new kind of sonic artisan has evolved among us. It's as though the lizard has sprouted wings, and its scales turned to beautiful feathers, and we have only now realized that a transformation has taken place because instead of crawling in the muck, something new soars above us along the horizon, and the thing has taken flight.

So what is this new creature, anyway?

This newly emerged commercial sound artist is neither music composer nor EFX artist, but both those things and much more.

There is but a shade of difference here, nevertheless I think important to take note of it: I do not mean that he or she simply possesses a combined skill set, or that they are adept at mixing music and noise together in mix. That in and of itself would be unremarkable.

What I mean is that this newly formed modern audio professional approaches music and noise (and speech for that matter) as equally available sound sources and viable tonal information colors for any given audio work. There is no differentiation in kinds of sound, simply a palette whose spectrum extends to ranges of human hearing.

Sure, there have been composers before, and tape manipulators, and location recordists, and sound EFX artists, and beat makers, and engineers –but we've been looking at those respective skill sets as separate from one another. Fast Forward to the present and we noticed that these unique specialties, have become combined into a more or less unified, well informed, competent, new breed of audio professional.

I call this person by the hybrid label: 'MUSIC DESIGNER'.

A cursory web search will turn up several individuals who already embrace this nomenclature. For instance: Brian Williams, Robert Rich and Dhrubajit Gogoi.

I believe the term itself, 'Music Design', must have been coined sometime in the first part of the twentieth century, and from someone within the film community. In his book 'Film Music: A Neglected Art', first published in 1972, and with a 2nd edition in 1991, Roy M. Prendergast mentions technological advances in sound production initiated by music editing company that called itself 'The Music Design Group'. And then there is, of course, Soundelux Design Music Group, founded in 1985, meaning the appellation is at the very least now a quarter century old.

But today, as of this writing, the term 'AUDIO DESIGNER' appears to be much more common, especially as a designation in the Game industry.

I understand how 'Audio' might be chosen instead of 'Music'. It suggests a neutral term which embraces both music and sound design. However, there's nothing in the label Audio Designer to suggest musicianship. A job description listed on the THQ job site even assures applicants: "Understanding of Music and composition is an advantage but is not required".

Personally I think 'Audio Designer' is a fancy name for 'engineer', and otherwise misses the evolutionary mark. That's why I prefer the Music Designer designation over Audio Designer, given the context which I use it: My intent is to define a multifaceted musician who composes musical experiences using all sound, not describe an engineer who assembles the disparate sonic elements of a media production into a final mix.

You're welcome to come up with a niftier name, or to argue the practice is old hat in Hollywood. My point is not to create a new job title for you, but simply to identify and codify elements of an emerging trend. And this trend may be defined as the acceptance of a range of post production skills and techniques by even the conventional composer.

You already know people like this. Perhaps you are one of them. I'm inclined to think that if you read this blog with any regularity, you probably are. If you produce sound using raw code, MAX, soft synths and a Digital Audio Workstation, consider yourself enlisted. If you think of an electric guitar as less a musical instrument and more of a sound design tool, you absolutely fall into this category. Likewise, if you're one of those sound explorers who run a traditional instrument through a series of dynamic software filters –the way Robin Eubanks often does using Native Instruments Guitar Rig– in order expand tonal range well beyond the natural limitations of his trombone.

For a Music Designer, the actual instrument of tonal or sonic manipulation is considered incidental. That's because any instrument may be transformed by the addition of technology into an interface capable of sonic colors beyond its traditional or intended use, with the result being that any instrument can sound like any other instrument (and a whole lot more).

The distinction between musician and sound designer is blurring –has blurred–, while at the same time the distinction between composer and engineer, not to mention Graphic designer (which I'll discuss in a future article (MUSIC BY DESIGN)), also appears to be merging.

The final result of a Music Designer's work maybe but doesn't have to be described as audio collage or merely an interesting organization of sound. Rather, it works in such a way that it begs an informed audience to simply accept what they hear as MUSIC, whatever its components or sonic origins.

* * *

Click on any link below to read all the articles in the six-part series detailing the changing relationship between Traditional Music Composition and Modern Music Production:

EVOLUTION OF THE MUSIC DESIGNER

Part 1: Top Down, Center Out and Bottoms Up
Part 2: Top Down Music Composition
Part 3: Bottom Up Audio Production
Part 4: Film Composer, Sound Maker or Music Designer?
Part 5: Songwriter Vs. Song Designer
Part 6: Music By Design

Bottom Up Audio Production

In a previous article I proposed that Top-down and Bottom-up Design approaches common to software development might also be applied to modern music composition and production.

This article expands on the concept of Bottom up Music Design.

If you're not familiar with the term, Wikipedia defines Bottom-up Design as follows:

"A bottom-up approach is piecing together systems to give rise to grander systems, thus making the original systems sub-systems of the emergent system. In a bottom-up approach the individual base elements of the system are first specified in great detail. These elements are then linked together to form larger subsystems, which then in turn are linked, sometimes in many levels, until a complete top-level system is formed".

In my experience as a producer of music, sound design and sonic branding for a variety of media:

Scoring to moving picture, whether to video or game, often requires a ‘Bottom Up’ construction rather than the Top Down process I've previously described as typical of traditional composition.

A final score may feel as though it in fact drives picture, or one may feel runs a perfect aural parallel with picture, but let us return to its inception. Scored music is created as reaction to events on screen –i.e. the pacing of the edit, and then the content itself, be it visible action or simmering emotion.

Setting pre-scores aside, many composers (when presented with moving picture) begin composing a score by finding a click track that works with the edit. That is, edits will thereafter occur on a click. To a uniformed eye, it looks as though the cuts or edits react to the click. If the editor cut to a temp track, then the composer will almost always match their click to the temp track. in any case, the natural result is a PULSE.

Bottom Up Design and Production is marked by a process whereby TIME and RHYTHM are established before MELODY and HARMONY.

Thus once a click has been created, the Bottom Up designer will as often as not, start by adding and layering RHYTHM parts. In my experience many contemporary video and game composers begin with one or more loops, all beat matched so as to move in sync with each other, the click and the picture.

Some composers might add a bass ‘line’ at this juncture, but most will first jump up the pitch range and indicate a simple harmony, usually in the way of a string pad or guitar rhythm. Only after sketching out the harmony, will they then drop back down the staff in order to add an appropriate bass part.

Only then, when the resulting rhythm bed and accompaniment are in place, will our Bottom Up Constructionist composer consider the melodic needs of the work.

Therefore, in Bottom Up Design, Melody is born out of Harmony and locked to Groove, which is not so unusual when one considers improvisation of any sort, but generally alien to the Top Down Composition process described in a previously.

In an improvised work, a melodic idea might kick off a jam, but new and alternate themes may soon enough evolve based on tonal information delivered via harmony, with the potential of spinning off in every direction.

Without melody, our improvisational jam is simply an extended groove or vamp, a musical bed but arguably not a wholly conceived composition. Add melody and we essentially introduce or enhance story or possibly provide (nonverbal) commentary. We can think of small sound bytes that deliver musical memes as Ear Candy, bursting with potential and exciting our senses with the promise of something else to come.

Ear Candy events are often created as musical cues to visual information, and a series of such events can give form to an apparent theme. And really, unless we are producing main titles or end credits, that might be all we need to satisfy the task of scoring a given scene or cut.

Once a Bottom Design has been established, a composer/designer can use the results as a sort of audio graph paper, a grid, upon which he may know change his process to layer Top Down (or even Center Out) information on it, further enhancing the material or modifying accompaniment to accommodate thematic development, if it’s warranted.

So when I describe ‘Bottom Up’ Audio Design or Construction, I mean a musical work composed in the following manner: Pulse, Beat, Rhythm as the first frame of reference followed by a layering of sonic assets, usually in the following order: Harmony, Musical cues, Theme.

Top Down composition, in direct contrast, evolves in the opposite direction. In Top Down Composition our conceptual seed is the establishment of a complete melody, which then implies harmony and rhythm –i.e., Melody maps out everything.

Practically speaking, I tend to compose Top Down, improvise Center Out and produce from the Bottom Up. Sounds hilarious out of context, I know, but that's how I orient the analysis of musical information for the described creative tasks.

Future Digital Artisans would do well to form an integrated Top-Down Bottom-Up approach to music development, though perhaps by doing so they would then better be described as Music Designers than composers or sound designers, an idea I'll explore further in the next article of this series.


* * *

Click on any link below to read all the articles in the six-part series detailing the changing relationship between Traditional Music Composition and Modern Music Production:

EVOLUTION OF THE MUSIC DESIGNER

Part 1: Top Down, Center Out and Bottoms Up
Part 2: Top Down Music Composition
Part 3: Bottom Up Audio Production
Part 4: Film Composer, Sound Maker or Music Designer?
Part 5: Songwriter Vs. Song Designer
Part 6: Music By Design

Top Down Music Composition

In a previous article I proposed that Top-down and Bottom-up Design approaches common to software development might also be applied to modern music composition and production.

This article expands on the concept of Top-Down composition.

If you're not familiar with the term, Wikipedia defines Top-down as follows:

"...essentially breaking down a system to gain insight into its compositional sub-systems. In a top-down approach an overview of the system is first formulated, specifying but not detailing any first-level subsystems. Each subsystem is then refined in yet greater detail, sometimes in many additional subsystem levels, until the entire specification is reduced to base elements".

Traditional music composition is, by and large, a 'Top Down' process. Let me explain by first beginning with a postulation:

Melody is a series of pitches that relate to one another in a sequential and linear fashion. In traditional composition a composer is first inspired by a melody, or that melody is the result of inspiration resulting from impressionable thought, enlightenment or experience.

This initial melodic information may be small, a motif perhaps, or it may be a fully developed musical statement, comprised of several variations upon a single motif and include a series of phrases in its development and eventual conclusion.

Any melody –in fact, every melody– will by itself imply a suitable harmony, a result we intuit based on intervallic relationships we experience as we step through the series of tones.

Typically, melodic information is sounded using tonal information performed with higher pitches relative to the accompanying harmony. In fact, we perceive the tonal information that makes up the harmony as supportive of the melody and we call its specific arrangement an accompaniment.

Think of a singer, especially a soprano, delivering a vocal expression seemingly 'above' an orchestra or band. Beneath the singer we can hear the bass at the very bottom of the register. In between we have 'inner voices' inhabiting a mid range.

Whether you look at a notated score or use only your ears to judge, it is natural to sense melody as positioned ‘on top' of all other sonic information.

Clever composers, improvisers and songwriters will suggest or play around with chord substitutions, but for the purposes of this entry, let's stick with basic implied harmony.

However a work of music is arranged, a basic harmony part (or parts) is usually performed using tonal information below the register inhabited by the melody. We say harmony supports melody, and therefore think of harmony as beneath melody even though up and down is really just a construct of our own making.

So when I describe ‘Top Down’ Composition, I mean a musical work composed in the following manner: Melody as the first frame of reference followed by harmony made manifest in so far as it may be implied by the melody (albeit arranged into an accompaniment of the composer's choosing).

Bottom Up music construction, which I'll describe further in the next article, shares more in common with sound design than with traditional composition.

Center Out, meanwhile, is marked by organic meandering common in processes that expand outward from an undeveloped idea. Whenever the germ of the idea is less than a complete melody, the process is Center Out (or a combination of Center Out and Bottom Up if Time and Rhythm have been established).

* * *

Click on any link below to read all the articles in the six-part series detailing the changing relationship between Traditional Music Composition and Modern Music Production:

EVOLUTION OF THE MUSIC DESIGNER

Part 1: Top Down, Center Out and Bottoms Up
Part 2: Top Down Music Composition
Part 3: Bottom Up Audio Production
Part 4: Film Composer, Sound Maker or Music Designer?
Part 5: Songwriter Vs. Song Designer
Part 6: Music By Design

Top Down, Center Out and Bottoms Up

This article identifies Top-down and Bottom-up design approaches in modern music design, production and composition.

Persons engaged with the software development are no doubt familiar with the related, albeit contrasting, concepts of Top-down and Bottom-up development.

If you've never heard these terms before, Wikipedia combines the contrasting approaches as a single philosophy, described as follows:

Top-down and Bottom-up Design: "Strategies of information processing and knowledge ordering, mostly involving software, but also other humanistic and scientific theories...In practice, they can be seen as a style of thinking and teaching. In many cases top-down is used as a synonym of analysis or decomposition, and bottom-up of synthesis.".

As a producer of music, sound design and sonic branding for various media, it occurred to me that these two contrasting approaches could also be applied to the music composition process.

In this regard, I think of traditional composition as Top Down Composition, and contemporary composition using digital tools as Bottom Up Audio Design

I arrived at this concept as soon as I realized that my own process for music composition changed depending on whether I was beginning with a melody and writing a song (Top Down), or starting with a pulse and scoring picture (Bottom Up).

For songs, I generally do begin with melody –usually words married to a linear series of pitches. With melody in place, I can easily rock out a rhythmic accompaniment using the natural harmony implied by the melodic information.

My song (Top Down) composition process develops in the following order:

Resulting from Inspiration: Melody (with or without Lyric), Rhythm/Harmony, Drums/Bass, Ear Candy (and inner voices, if any), –ending with a performance (and possibly recording and mix thereof).

The other approach –Bottom Up Design– is born of the evolved combination of electronic studio shortcuts, sound design, pop production and film scoring, all of which seem to dovetail each other when I sit down with the intent of providing moving picture with a music treatment.

For scores, I typically begin with a pulse or a loop, lay down a ‘pad’ and then build musical content upon this foundation, ending eventually with a theme (if any).

My Bottom Up Audio Design process typically looks like this:

Reacting to Visual Cues: Click, Loop, Pad, Bass, Inner Voices/Ear Candy, Licks/Riffs/Motif, Thematic Melody, Mix.

Of course, you can use either methodology to create music of any genre. And practically speaking, in a given production both methods are oft combined (and in no particular order).

If I begin with a riff, a lick or otherwise ornamental gesture and then expand outward from there, it may help me to think of the process as 'Center Out'. But Center Out is more dabble and experiment than focused, planned design or composition.

Center Out might also be conceived as those activities one generally associates with orchestration.

Anytime I get stuck I often discover it's because I'm writing Center Out, that is, orchestrating before the essential musical idea is fully fleshed out. Center Out is like a conceptual seed that can sprout in any direction, and as a result can cause creative paralysis by virtue of the number of choices available to the writer.

For instance, say you start with a series of chords. If the the act of conceiving those chords arrives as a result of an inspired pulse, then the chords are born of a Bottom Up process. Alternatively, if the act of conceiving those chords arrives as a result of supporting a melody, then their creation is more closely aligned with a Top Down process. However, once once begins substituting block chords and their associated voicing with passing tones, counter melodies, rests, runs, ostinatos and arpeggios, or riffs and hooks in popular music, then one is clearly in the domain of Center Out composition.

Still speaking theoretically, I find Top Down a more natural approach for composing music that is meant to be performed in real time by human beings and experienced live. Although, in practice we often hear improvisational musicians reworking a Top Down composition from the Bottom Up.

Bottom Up Design is experienced best as a recorded statement, media composition, and often synchronized to picture or movement in the service of enhancing a story, third party content, a brand message, ride experience or game play. Any time TIME is organized before MELODY,  and voices are first born from a primordial pulse, the process is Bottom Up.

Which method to pursue if creating an audio experience for a specific ENVIRONMENT? My guess is it would have to do with whether one was reacting to visual information or navigational concerns (Bottom Up), or branding a volume of space (Top Down, Center Out –or just hire a smart DJ with curatorial sensibilities).

Of course, all of us who straddle both traditional composition and contemporary music design should strive for an integrated Bottom-up and Top-down skill set.

* * *

Click on any link below to read all the articles in the six-part series detailing the changing relationship between Traditional Music Composition and Modern Music Production:

EVOLUTION OF THE MUSIC DESIGNER

Part 1: Top Down, Center Out and Bottoms Up
Part 2: Top Down Music Composition
Part 3: Bottom Up Audio Production
Part 4: Film Composer, Sound Maker or Music Designer?
Part 5: Songwriter Vs. Song Designer
Part 6: Music By Design