Finding the Big Question

What question are you really asking?

Last Monday, I was testing out some technology stuff in one of the dance studios on campus. A couple students helped me, and they were very generous with their time (thanks, BTW).

I'm working on using the Wii Fit Balance Board as a music controller. The Balance Board is a little bit bigger than a bathroom scale and made of a similar white plastic. Each of its corners has a pressure sensor, and those four sensors send pressure information over a Bluetooth connection to whatever it's paired with. When it's paired with a Wii console, it lets you know what your body mass index is, or if you're holding a particular yoga posture correctly. If you pair it with a computer running the OSCulator program, you can change the pressure information to Open Source Control or MIDI messages, and that information can affect parameters of music programs running on the same computer. Cool.

The question that I asked at the beginning of that process was, "Can I make the Balance Board control sound in predictable, reliable, and useful ways?"

While OSCulator converts the raw data into MIDI messages, it can only send messages along five channels (four individual sensors, and their sum), so if I want to control more than five parameters in any given setup, I need something else. Max/MSP, here I come. Max also lets me adjust the "sensitivity" of the board (I can decide whether light or heavy pressure maxes out the MIDI control value) and route the incoming data channels to any controller numbers I like. Cool. Ableton Live can house the sounds and synths, and will accept MIDI control for tons of parameters. Cool cool.

The answer to the first question is yes. But it's not a very interesting or useful question. What question am I really asking?

YOU WILL SPEND A GREAT DEAL OF YOUR TIME ANSWERING QUESTIONS THAT ARE CONTINGENT, SITUATIONAL, AND LIMITED IN SCOPE AND USEFULNESS. These questions are necessary to answer-- we wouldn't spend our time on them if they were not. But every one of these little questions is connected, like branch to trunk, to a Big Question. You need the know the Big Question from which your question sprouts.

Big Questions have the following traits:

• They breed many little questions.

• They have many answers.

• Thinking about them generates little sparks in your head.

Interrogating the little question points you toward the Big Question. Why the Balance Board? The world is full of boxes that spit out numbers. Why this box?

It's a box that's perfectly suited not for musicians, but dancers. Put a couple of those boards on stage, and choreography will generate data streams that can be used to influence the sound environment. No wires. This is not cool. This is COOL.

The Big Question here is: "What interesting things would happen if dancers were able to directly affect their sound environment in performance?"

• It generates little questions. (What other tools could I use to gather data from movement? Piezo-amplified objects? Photoresistors? Theremin-style capacitive antennas? Do dancers want this responsibility on top of all their other performance obligations? How am I going to avoid a Mickey-Mouse relationship between the sound and movement? Has anyone else done this? Etc.)

• It has many answers. (I would have an new layer of technology to assemble and debug. I would be able to compose accompaniments that didn't require me or the dancers to synchronize events by rote. I would become much more deeply involved in the creation of the choreography. Many things I haven't thought of yet.)

•It generated sparks. I want to explore this.

Knowing your Big Question(s), and interrogating them effectively, will generate new material. Knowing your Big Questions will also help you remember why you do what you do when you get tired of dealing with piles of little questions.

What question are you really asking?

KSU Dance 08 Open Thread

Please consider this an open thread for comments about the Dance 08 performances.

(Modern I/Improv students: comments to this thread do not count as your comment requirement.)

A little more Cory

Cory Doctorow (a portion of whose speech appeared in the last post) has a new article up at Locus Magazine, entitled "Why I Copyfight." The main thrust of the article is a bit tangent to recent posts, but it's a good jumping-off point for a discussion on the nature of culture.

Failure is now cheaper...

...and that is excellent news.

The more I listen to creative people discuss their work, one common thread that emerges is that you have to do lots and lots of work before the quality of the work begins to approach the quality of your taste, i.e., a lot of the stuff you do at the beginning will not be so good, and you'll know it's not so good, and you have two options: you can stop working (as many people do), or you can push through and keep working, pushing each piece of work closer and closer to excellence, closing the quality/taste gap more and more. In an earlier post, Ira Glass discussed this at length.

(Personal moment #1: my father is a very bright and honest man with a quiver of aphorisms which he takes up when a teachable moment arrives. A favorite was:

A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?

Saddish news #1: the gap will always be there-- all of us are working to shrinkshrinkshrink it as best we can.)

So, to get where you want to go, you're going to have to generate a certain amount of material that's not up to your own snuff. (Saddish news #2: for a while, most of what you generate will fall into this category. If you immediately begin pleasing yourself greatly, you'll want to investigate the possibility that a) you are gifted on the level of a Daniel Tammet or Willie Mosconi, or b) your means of self-evaluation are not sufficiently incisive.)

(Personal moment #2: my father spent (and continues to spend) most of his working time in finance. The fact that I knew what EBITDA* stood for when I was TWELVE YEARS OLD may have some impact on the following analysis of the situation.)

You should minimize the cost of this failure, because you're about to buy a lot of it. You're spending your time and energy, which are finite resources, to get this failure. Get it as cheap as you can.

Happy news: here are two helpful things that will radically lower the cost of your failure, and they're both within reach.

Aid to Cheap Failure #1: The Internet. The cheapest collaboration/
publication/research tool ever invented by human beings. Say you wrote an article. Want to publish it?

1a) Reproduce that article on paper many times over (hello Kinko's), mail it to as many appropriate magazines/journals/periodicals you can think of, wait around for a while, and receive tons of rejections. (high financial/personal costs) x (failure/success ratio) = pretty darn high.

1b) Register a domain on Blogger.com or similar service, start typing, tell all your friends and colleagues, and see what happens. (very low financial/personal costs) x (failure/success ratio [same as before]) = much much lower. I'm still buying about as much failure (I'm still not selling books at Borders), and it's still not much fun, but I can afford to keep buying it long enough for it to start paying off in terms of better-quality work. (I picked this option, as you can tell.)

The transaction cost works the same from the research side-- you can hope that the article you're looking for appears somewhere in a $6 magazine or $45 journal, or you can hope it's at your local library, or wait for inter-library loan-- or you can search for the topics that interest you online. Neither is perfect, but one is way cheaper.

Cory Doctorow talks about this at length in a lecture he gave at Cambridge. The whole thing is worth a read, but YouTube has a pertinent excerpt up:

Aid to Cheap Failure #2: Higher education (of whatever flavor: community college, junior college, university, grad school, etc.)

I don't know about you, but if I'm going to spend most of my beginning creative time failing, I'd really like to do it somewhere where I'm not also relying on my creative work to pay the rent. Not that higher education is necessarily inexpensive (I'm not done with my doctorate yet, so we can wax rhapsodic about college costs together sometime), but it provides you with an environment where you don't *need* to nail it the first time. It also provides you with a small army of people (aka faculty) who will give you information that will save you from having to learn some things by trial and error. TRIAL AND ERROR IS AN EFFECTIVE BUT PAINFUL AND EXPENSIVE WAY TO LEARN.

College can't come close to teaching you everything you need to know. But it does allow you to work out the kinks/fall on your face/make your mistakes so that when failure becomes expensive, you'll need to buy only small amounts of it to get your success. I wonder if this could be expanded into...

A Theory on the Macroeconomics of Creativity

In the beginning phases of the learning process, large amounts of my time/energy/intelligence/resources are used to purchase large amounts of failure as cheaply as possible. My failure is then used to purchase creative success. Like any monetary system, large supplies of currency (here, failure) create inflationary pressures, i.e., rising prices. Hence, lots of failure in the equation means that the price of success per unit of failure is quite high, and I need to acquire and spend large amounts of failure to get a decent amount of success.

Later on (say, after graduating), I'm still pouring in large amounts of t/e/i/r, but I'm getting less failure for my efforts. This is because failure is more expensive and I can afford less of it-- if I fail now, instead of just being frustrated, I get frustrated AND lose money from low ticket sales AND renting the hall AND paying the musicians, say. But, because the supply of failure currency has tightened up, the price of success per unit failure has gone way down. Same t/e/i/r input with less failure and more success. This is good because a) I'm learning and improving, and b) who wants a lot of failure hanging around? I'm going to buy it all up ASAP so I can sell it all off as soon as I can. (Incidentally, this is also why starting new careers or new large projects in adulthood can be as scary as it is-- you're going back to purchasing large amounts of failure in your new venture at a point in life when failure is very expensive. Lots of adults make it cheaper by...you guessed it...going back to school.)

Throw yourself in the deep end. Go out and fail. Interrogate the failure. Go out and fail again. Get a hug when you need one. Go out and fail again. Keep doing work. Enjoy the success. Go out and fail. Stay warm.

And thanks, Dad.

*EBITDA = Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization

Trolling for ideas

Splashing works a lot of the time. However, splashing is pretty inefficient, especially if you think that the great idea you're looking for is one that someone else might have thought of already. In such instances, you'll want to put yourself in a place where there's a high probability of encountering an Already-Formed Awesome Idea. You'll be trolling instead of splashing. (Or trawling-- apparently, both spellings are acceptable.) Let's talk about some places to find AFAIs.

PostSecret is one place to go to get condensed, concentrated peeks into the emotional lives of other people. It's run by a guy in Germantown, Maryland, who started soliciting people to write their secrets on postcards and mail them to him (anonymously) for publication. Entries can be happy, confessional, tragic, elated, shy, and everything in between. The site updates every Sunday; previous installments aren't easily available because the postcards are also copied, compiled, and published in PostSecret books for purchase. If nothing else, it's a shining example of how a executing a simple idea can grow into wonderful complexity.  There are also PostSecret tours and college campus events.  Go check it out.  (One small caution: some of this stuff gets pretty personal/intense; I have yet to see a PostSecret update that didn't contain a postcard that made me at least a little uncomfortable.)

UbuWeb contains a huge huge huge collection of avant-garde writings, recordings, images, video, you name it. A lot of it is centered around intensely experimental artists and projects like Fluxus and the like. UbuWeb is also the Internet home of one of my favorite AFAI-hunting spots: the 365 Days Project. One totally weird mp3 file for each day of the year, twice over. (Again, some of the stuff here isn't safe for little kids or net-surfing at work. On the other hand, it's also not a bad spot to go for a quick laugh. Or for unlikely cross-cultural hybrids. Or for stuff that's so badly conceived and executed that you'll immediately want to create something good to cancel it out.)

Links to these sites also live in the blogroll in the right-hand column of this page.

There are tons of places like these on the Internet; I'll occasionally re-post on this topic with new sites to check out (probably when I'm having trouble thinking of other topics to post about).  Most friends I know have one or two favorites of their own-- if you know of a site like these, feel free to leave a comment about it.

These are nine important principles for the practice of craft

Originally from Guitar Craft, found in an article about software development, applicable to just about everything, I put these up on my office door at Kent State on, like, day 2.

These are nine important principles for the practice of craft:

•Act from principle.
•Begin where you are.
•Define your aim simply, clearly, briefly.
•Establish the possible and move gradually towards the impossible.
•Exercise commitment, and all the rules change.
•Honor necessity. Honor sufficiency.
•Offer no violence.
•Suffer cheerfully.
•Take our work seriously, but not solemnly.

(Originally, there were ten; I removed the one that mentioned music specifically, partly because these aren't music-specific principles, and partly because I didn't like it nearly as much as the other nine.)

(Similar crafty nuggets of thought can be found here.  Yeah, only one appears at a time, but keep clicking on "Aphorisms"and you'll get fresh ones.)

The Importance of Abandoning Crap/Clarification

Ira Glass (host and producer of NPR's This American Life) has some excellent videos up on YouTube discussing what to do once you've been splashing around for a while, generating your raw material. He's discussing video/radio production, but it applies to any creative venture.  The title of this post is taken from something he says in one of the videos; it's blunt, but he's pretty much right.  Here they are:

Also, a clarification regarding the GAWRs: notions of "old" and "new" vary pretty dramatically by discipline.  Perhaps the field of modern dance is by its nature skewed toward relatively recent developments, but it is worth noting that a piece such as Appalachian Spring might be a solidly-placed canonical milestone in one discipline (modern dance), while being thought of as more recent and outside-the-canon (though probably not terribly "edgy") in another discipline (music). I'm reminded of a dear friend from graduate school who proposed programming Arnold Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht on a contemporary music program.   (The piece was composed in 1899; Schoenberg died in 1951.)

So when I talked about re-creating the works of masters as a primary mission of some academic arts pursuits, I was speaking from the vantage point of a university music department.  Compared to a representative university music department, there is a markedly greater amount of new work created in a dance department, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of total effort.  Imagine a music program where each faculty member was charged with being a composer, and about three-quarters of each concert performance consisted of works less than five years old.  It happens in a few places, but not many.  In fact, the revival of an older work for dance is usually a noteworthy event-- I'm reminded of the special-occasion-ness of Sabatino and Barbara Verlezza's re-creations of May O'Donnell's Dance Energies (1959) and Suspension (1943) at Kent State.

Sources of Raw Material

Yesterday's post about KSU's dance improvisation classes got me thinking more about creative processes, and about how I especially enjoy throwing several different things "in the pool" (so to speak) and just splashing around for a while.  Obviously, the refinement process can begin once a pool has generated a piece of promising germinal material, but splashsplashsplash is VERY IMPORTANT.  You've got to splash long enough so that you can momentarily forget what you're comfortable with and what you've done before, and that's when cool new things happen.  SPLASHING IS YOUR BEST SOURCE OF NEW RAW MATERIAL.

Great artists who are "constantly reinventing themselves" (could we please never hear that phrase again?) are doing so via lots of behind-the-scenes splashing, throwing out 70-90% of what's generated, and keeping the awesome bits.  They look like geniuses because we don't see them splashing and getting frustrated and wondering WHEN IS THE NEXT AWESOME BIT COMING FOR PETE'S SAKE.  We see the result, and it's all awesome bits.

Studying the history of your discipline might lead you to believe that GREAT ARTISTS WORTH REMEMBERING generate nothing but awesome bits while TINY TINY YOU sits there splashing around (wasting time and resources that could be applied to re-creating the works of the aforementioned GAWRs).  Don't believe it for a second.

Two really fun pools I've splashed around in: the one that generated Easy Worship Operator (that pool was in the spare room of a house in Tempe, AZ where Josh Carro was teaching me to use Ableton Live, and then Josh Bennett joined us because he was a cool guy), and the one with me, Jason Little, Tracy Pattison, Jenita McGowan, and Sabatino Verlezza. That pool lived in one of the Phys Ed buildings at the University of Akron in 2004, and it generated the movement piece Points on a Curve and my accompanying score Katharnae.  It was the first time I was asked to perform movement onstage, with dancers, in a dancerly fashion (in foot-high platform boots, no less). Totally scared.  Totally worth it.

Verlezza Dance continues to do wonderful work.  I'll be going to see their winter concert in a few weeks.

Why This Is Here

I like to think about art.  Sometimes the discussion in my head can get a little circular, so sending the (filtered, somewhat refined) contents to something like this can help focus things a bit.

But that's not the bigger reason.

The bigger reason is that I like having conversations about art with people EVEN MORE.  And this should be a good way to facilitate that.

Do you like contemplating art?

I recently moved to northeast Ohio from Tempe, AZ, accepting a position as the Dance Music Director at Kent State University.  In that capacity, I accompany ballet and modern dance classes for dance majors and minors, and otherwise generally serve as the go-to person for musical questions, logistics, etc. etc., within the dance division.

On Friday mornings, the Modern I technique class becomes an improvisation class, and while I've only played two of these since coming back east, they're great fun and I want to do more of them NOW NOW NOW.  While most of the music I play for dance classes is improvisatory in nature, the Friday morning sessions are closest to some of my favorite sound improvisation experiences (i.e. Easy Worship Operator, aka EWO) with the added bonus that I'm getting massive amounts of visual and kinesthetic information from the giant sea of movement happening in front of me.  It's a big triple-channel sensory exchange, with decisions presented and made and flying by in a swift stream.  It's easily one of my favorite parts of the week.

Now I miss Josh and Josh.  Time to write a grant and get them up here.

So here it is

Like blogging.  Growing to hate MySpace.  Here it is.