“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You've just gotta fight your way through.”
Ira Glass
^^ THIS ^^
]]>OP, I've asked myself that question for a long time. It comes down to if you love doing it, like doing it, and where you see yourself in relation to the given culture. You know, I've had my own site for almost four years, I pay my monthly fee to keep my domain, I then give away all of my music such as it is for free. Even in all that time, nobody knows me, I know I'm not particularly talented, and yet I still press on. Why? Because it makes me feel good. What else matters? Would it break your spirit if someone tells you that they listened to your tunes, and found them simple, boring, poor for x number of reasons, etc? If so, that's a good time to consider yourself and the reason you wanted to create music in the first place. It's just my opinion that if the central focus of making music is for praise and recognition, you are not in the best place. If on the other hand you genuinely love electronic and chip music, in particular making your own creation just because you can, then why not? If there's little consideration to gains and losses, it then comes down to self satisfaction. Take me, I don't care if nobody ever knows me, I make chiptune, and am proud to be an active part of that culture. I can look at my tunes at any point and just feel awesome that I did something, created something that I can see and hear that nobody else has.
I'm sorry for the rambling, but basically, if you derive any satisfaction from making your own music, that's all that should really matter. You said you don't much like your own tunes. Based on what metric really? How about using none, make your tune, enjoy the process, and leave it right there? Besides, if you listen to your own tunes and are not satisfied, this is part of the fun. Make it satisfactory enough that you don't mind jamming it in your own car. If you truly find you don't enjoy making your own music, then no, I suppose it makes no more sense than say crafting furniture out of wood but in the end find that you hate using tools or smelling sawdust. I would just urge you that if you love chip music and can in any way enjoy simply making it, don't fret so hard on perceptions of good or not good, just keep doing it. Creation of anything does wonders for the soul.
/end ramble
its hard to see what possible motive a music critic on a music critics website might have for writing a massive piece about why music criticism is super important and vital shit that you have to be really clever to do
come on that's a little reductionist
like tinymixtapes is one of the better sites re: music writing and self-awareness
and the piece reads to me more like a call to action for other websites to step it up, as opposed to attempting to elevate music criticism's social capital
that doesn't really matter though, the point is that both objectivity and subjectivity have their place when evaluating music, and it's important to examine where each fits in
that's all
so all of you are correct
]]>spacetownsavior wrote:http://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/20 … -criticism
You are all correct in the wrong ways always and never
its hard to see what possible motive a music critic on a music critics website might have for writing a massive piece about why music criticism is super important and vital shit that you have to be really clever to do
u sandneil. That Owen Pallett article linked in there is pretty good though.
http://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/20 … -criticism
You are all correct in the wrong ways always and never
its hard to see what possible motive a music critic on a music critics website might have for writing a massive piece about why music criticism is super important and vital shit that you have to be really clever to do
]]>boomlinde wrote:Even if you think that the point of expressing an opinion or reviewing music is to establish or maintain some sort of objective means to judge things, you still have to agree that these things fail horribly at that.
Why do I have to agree to that? I often find music reviews to be decently helpful in judging what I should or should not spend my time checking out. Obviously, you'd look for specific things which can be measured objectively, like 1) how repetitive is the album? 2) is there anything particularly interesting or creative about it compared to most other albums of its kind?
How can those thing be measured objectively. I mean, you can definitely measure repetition, but not in the sense that a person will find something repetitive or not. Interesting or creative? Just not objective qualities at all.
That's another thing I'd like to stress... even if (as we haven't agreed, it seems) one song is objectively better-composed than another, than doesn't mean the listener has conditioned himself to enjoy that kind of song (which you can do, by the way... the more you listen to a song or genre, the more you find yourself enjoying it).
Now, the way I understand it, most of you seem to think that music cannot be approached objectively because (in part) its purpose is only to satisfy the different subjective tastes that people have, which are often wildly different from one another.
I agree that music can be approached objectively to some extent, but the objective qualities which we are able to measure say very little about the inherent beauty or praiseworthiness of the music. Even if we come to terms with an objective definition of what it means for music to be interesting, that won't say anything about whether we enjoy it in any other terms.
As far as perception goes, of course everything we know is filtered through our individual beliefs, thoughts, and experiences (since we are ourselves); but does that preclude the notion of objective truth / reality existing on its own, as something we can choose to see or not to see?
It doesn't preclude the notion of objective truth, but more importantly for the sake of this discussion, it makes your apparently strongly held belief that some music is objectively worse than others seem unreasonable and almost religious. That is a fair basis for a personal belief, but as a basis for telling other people that they are wrong it seems both arrogant and ignorant to me. The non-precluded notion that objective truth might exist adds about as much to your argument as the non-precluded notion that there might be an almighty god that decides what is beautiful.
You have only experienced a tiny fraction of what could possibly be experienced in the tiny fraction of time in the tiny fraction of locations that you have visited in this tiny fraction of the universe, and from this limited view you talk about universal beauty as if it is something that you could even comprehend if it existed. You don't have to travel very far to experience cultures where the notion of beauty is utterly incompatible with the one developed in western musical tradition.
]]>As far as perception goes, of course everything we know is filtered through our individual beliefs, thoughts, and experiences (since we are ourselves); but does that preclude the notion of objective truth / reality existing on its own, as something we can choose to see or not to see?
According to a certain belief system I'm familiar with, by the time everyone accepts the same objective truth about reality, all living souls will be devoid of bodies and transcending to a higher state of being, away from the cycle of reincarnations. And it also has something to do with the Buddha of future times or something.
it all might be a funny way to say "it's not gonna happen".
]]>You are all correct in the wrong ways always and never
]]>boomlinde wrote:Did you read the post you responded to? I can't see where it mentions you at all. It does not make any assumptions about you.
Huh? "Look, I used to be like you. I thought I was pretty good at arguing [...] as smart as you think you sound [...] you're going to sound like an asshole [...] be nice to people [...] there's a lot you could be missing"
I'm sorry, that does make a lot of assumptions about you. For some reason I thought that you responded to the post below yours.
I'm talking about things like "in things so subjective like the quality of [...] music, there's no wrong or right" and "quality is in the ear of the beholder [...] to think otherwise is to succumb to sophistry." If one musical taste is never objectively worse than another, then how could all songs be anything but equally praiseworthy, if their worth is completely defined by the listener's subjective experience?
A song could be worse than another on a subjective basis. Do you imagine that people judge music objectively? There are things that we can know objectively about pieces of music based on how we define the terminology, but these knowable qualities, like "how many notes are there", "what scale is it", "how many beats are there per bar" etc. are not the qualities we judge music by in terms of how much praise it deserves. I have no idea how acknowledging that is to succumb to sophistry, but I'm sure that there is a rational basis for that suggestion.
What I meant was that our perception alone cannot alter reality as such. For example, claiming that Call Me Maybe is a masterfully complex piece of songwriting cannot make it so.
Good, we both agree on that. If you establish a definition of musical complexity, I'm sure that you can find songs that are more or less complex, but there exists many such definitions.
But we do have a means to judge certain qualities of music (as sugar explained) as better or worse than others, don't we, using intelligence and objective factors of quality, like technical expertise, complex songwriting, and intelligent structure? Otherwise, what's the point of expressing opinions or writing reviews?
Even if you think that the point of expressing an opinion or reviewing music is to establish or maintain some sort of objective means to judge things, you still have to agree that these things fail horribly at that. People often express opinions because it's nice to have them acknowledged by your peers. As for reviews, in a good review the judgement is usually given some context in terms of the basis of that judgement. If there was an objective basis for judging music, why would reviews be more than a score? The score itself would be indicative of whether you will like it or not.
Technical expertise, complex songwriting and intelligent structure are neither objective qualities nor necessarily part of the definition of "good" or praiseworthy music. Let me explain where I come from. The way I see it, objectivity only exists in theoretical and and limited systems for which we define the rules in such a way that truth is inferable by means of the definition of the system. The prime example is of course something like mathematics. Math can be used to model things, but you can't really use it to prove anything outside its own system. You can create a mathematical model of a real world thing, but you can't know your model to be true or consistent. Whenever you observe something that is consistent with your model, you can only know it to be true for the instance that you observed. More importantly, there isn't much basis for the idea that we can observe reality objectively, so even in the instances we observe something, we can't know our observation to be true. From this point of view, the idea that music is somehow objective is ridiculous.
You're correct in that example, but what I'm trying to say is that these things seem to indicate some objective standard of beauty that the human person is normally able to see and respond to (as in the sunrise example).
Unless you agree that the notion that they indicate some objective standard of beauty is another non-argument that doesn't support anything you've said, I think that you'll have to explain how they indicate that. I mean, is there any more to indicate that these are even universal to more than the small fraction of humans in your cultural vicinity that share your opinion? There are a lot of interesting theories on why some things seem beautiful to humans in general in fields like evolutionary biology.
]]>