Music: An Invisible Mosaic
Exploring its influence on artistic making, perception, and erudition
The top floor of the dorm was stuffy; its stairs a challenge to climb. Everyone around me embodied a literal "I'm too old for this shit" vibe towards the absurd circus that is academia. If I wanted to, I could reach out and grasp the palpable distress radiating from my fellow comrades.
My friendship with... um, Richard — Richard Hendricks, yeah — was a lifeline for me in college. In retrospect, I doubt he knew how grounded he kept me. It was partly due to his unrelenting sense of humor, and partly due to his pseudo-nihilistic attitude towards everything: from living in a dingy dorm to life itself.
In the few hours we spent together every night, we established a simple routine that became second nature. We'd play COD Modern Warfare on his laptop, head out for dinner at Coke Village, or retreat back to my room, in another hostel, where I'd make tea and noodles and we'd watch pirated movies. Other nights, we would study for tests or compile technical reports.
Of all our nightly rituals, listening to Richard's music was my favorite. It was such a treat having a musician as my personal concierge. Putting on the over-the-ear headphones, I would listen to him explain the technical terms behind the build-up and the drop and some faint instrument he planted in the deeper layers. Years later, I'd be in a meeting with a big shot music director. As he hovered over me dissecting Childish Gambino's This is America, along with the multitude of parodies it inspired, a sense of déjà vu would wash over me.
In any case, Richard's ramblings would fumble over my head, even as I frantically nodded, wearing a hostage's smile. Eventually, he'd tap on the spacebar. And the music would begin.
I thought long and hard about music and how it fits into my life. After taking my sweet, sweet time, however, I realize that to write about music, championing my nights with Richard as the lens through which I seek catharsis not only makes sense, but is necessary. Prior to discovering the artists whose work I now revisit and admire, Richard had been my first.
I'd let my mind swim in that rippling, shimmering vortex of digital sound. I would nod in parallel to the carefully patterned beats, reluctant at first, before giving in to the music’s fluidity — to the entrancing rhythm that enveloped me — behaving as one would under the spell of an evil fairy.
Most times I listen to the latest Richard's creation, my first reaction is disbelief. The pure talent demonstrated in the two minutes of tuneful escape seems too remarkable to exist, let alone casually made by some dude studying engineering in a third-world country with some Lenovo laptop on the demo version of FL Studio. Next, I became excited. Really excited. The experience became one of the key constants I looked forward to. I could always count on Richard's music to provide me with fresh vocabulary with which to relate inexplicable abstractions to… well, myself. It's like having a richer language to think in.
Over the years, I have come to acknowledge how heavily music plays a part in the artworks I am drawn to. I have never been much of a genre typa person, despite what my Spotify Wrapped might say. Still, how much I was influenced by an artist depends on how they incorporated melodic elements into their work: From Nerdwriter's ability to precisely accompany each frame of his video with the right score, to Melodysheep's talent for capturing the brashness of my existential crisis through perfectly chosen vocals. Filmmakers like Christopher Nolan have since been collaborating with composers like Hans Zimmer to create movies like Interstellar — that symphony of light and sound worth feasting on.
Musicality, however, extends to other forms of art beyond cinema, where sound is rarely a factor. Writers use punctuation and word choice to control the cadence and tempo of their narrative, with precision, a great tool for building suspense or relaying other emotions. Painters like Wassily Kandinsky used colors to represent different sounds, with black for silence, for instance, and yellow for loud trumpets or fanfares. In photography, there is Schlieren: a technique employed to create stunning images by showing the shape and intensity of sound waves in a setting. With acoustic design, architects can create spaces with a distinct sonic identity and character, reflecting the culture and values of the people who inhabit them. On and on it goes.
Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
- William Congreve, Dramatist (1670-1729)
Long before Richard tapped on that spacebar — before I ever heard of Coke Village, before the nights of noodles and tea and report compilations — I would bond with my mother over the voice and kalangu of Mamman Shata playing on our old radio.
She'd sing along, hypnotically, engrossed in her knitting. I'd watch her and marvel at how she never missed a beat. Now, although she cares not whether I listen to Rudy's Black and White, Milky Chance's Flashed Junk Mind, or Empire of the Sun's We Are The People, the moments I shared with her over traditional folk music remain dear to me; as do the nights I spent with Richard.
Music does more than fuel nostalgia. It transcends language barriers and cultural differences, creating a shared bond among people who might not even understand or relate to each other otherwise. It captured the angst and rebellion of my college years, thankfully so — the struggle of expressing, exploring, or discovering who I was or who I wanted to be. Yet, music's true significance, I want to believe, lies in the way it enhances other forms of art, accentuating an artist's intended sentiment without being intrusive. What a wondrous human ingenuity.