Pat Carroll

Category: Blog

  • Stages of the Creative Process

    Something I believe isn’t discussed as much as it should be is how different composers think about the creative process. What do they actually do, or think to do, when they enter the studio with no idea and leave it with a finished piece?

    What happens in this gap?

    I remember talking about this with someone, discussing the case of a jazz trumpet improviser (I forgot who). He said something along the lines of: “we know what [so and so] ate for lunch before his show, and which trains he took to get there, but we have no idea about what he was thinking while playing—how he did what he did.” We know so little about their creative process, which I believe is a massive loss.

    An awareness of these stages of the creative process, I believe, allows for a particularly focused and oriented creative process, rather than more of a mindset of “I’ll just head in and see what happens” one. There’s nothing really wrong with these sorts of sessions, but I’ve found the former to be way more conducive to finishing works.

    I’d like to talk about how I consider mine: To me, it consists of four main stages or categories.

    1. Gathering Materials
    2. Organising/Arranging Materials
    3. Processing Materials
    4. Polishing Materials

    I’ve built this understanding by reading about composition workflows, talking with other composers, and of course doing composition myself. I’ll break them down.

    There may be sessions where I only carry out field recordings, sketch out ideas, play and experiment with instruments, and make recordings while I do. I think of this as gathering materials. Then, there are sessions where I only arrange these recordings into musical structures: organising/arranging materials. There are sessions where I focus on making the sounds more ‘interesting’ through applying effects: processing materials. There are sessions where I only edit and mix these resulting elements, or master the finished work: polishing materials.

    The way of using this understanding of the creative process is to have a clear idea of what stage I’m going to be working in at any given time in the studio. It’s common to feel stuck with a work or larger project. To remedy this, I’ve found it valuable to sit back and think: “OK, where am I at with this piece? Do I have materials? Yes. Are they arranged in structures? Yes. Are these structures interesting or logical? They could be better…”

    …and then away I go into the second stage of the process.

    During this session, I might think that the sounds need some more character, then I know I’ll need to move into the third stage. If I realise I have a section that could do with some contrasting material, I’ll move back to the first stage.

    This desire to build a mental model of the creative process came from me thinking about how modern DAW software facilitates a non-linear workflow, rather that coaxing the user through more of a linear one. At any given time you can jump between each of these stages of creation. This contrasts the more linear design of a piece of software like Da Vinci Resolve, which moves the user through the necessary workflow to create, edit, enhance, and export a piece of video through specific modules made for each stage of the workflows.

    This isn’t to say that non-linear workflows are bad—in fact, the freedom DAWs offer the composer in terms of workflow is their strength.

    But I do think that it’s beneficial to think—at least sometimes—in categorical terms when it comes to the creative process. Every composer has a toolkit they carry around in their heads and hard drives, and in their studios. It’s full of their techniques, materials and technologies they use to make their art. Knowing where in the workflow these are best used creates order, and answers, when it comes to the question of “What should I be doing right now?” Opening up a fresh DAW project, the composer can know which materials, technologies and techniques to use to begin gathering the materials for their work. At another point, they know which techniques and aspects of theory they need to apply when they are organising these materials into structures—what sorts of growth, decay or stability they lean towards, and how to portray these through editing or automation techniques, for example. And of course, wanting to make sounds interesting, the composer knows which tools and techniques to use to mould material into their desired shapes and textures. In other words, instead of knowing what their favourite tools are, it’s better to know what their favourite plugins and techniques are for specific stages of the creative process. This at least slims down the possible options for what the composer should open up to begin making materials, or apply to process existing materials.

    I don’t think it’s worthwhile though being dogmatic about sticking to the stages in sequence: the composer doesn’t need to move linearly from one to the next stage. If they want, they might create sounds and process them immediately afterwards, before organising them into a structure. In what order the composer moves through or around the stages is up to them.

    And of course every composer is going to have different stages in their understanding of the creative process.

    I just think it is worthwhile—and has been for me in the past—to have a form of mental representation of the creative process in mind, rather than considering it as a mystical, amorphous blob that we enter when we head into the studio.

  • Storytelling in song, research, listening and everywhere else

    This week marked the first week of teaching for the year. It was great to be back on campus and meeting a fresh batch of new students. One of the songwriting classes I’m teaching this trimester is about the relationship between music and storytelling—primarily through lyrics, but also how musical/compositional and production techniques all play a role in reinforcing a lyrical narrative.

    As a class we unpacked these lyrics of Pearl Jam’s Black:

    Sheets of empty canvas, untouched sheets of clay
    Were laid spread out before me, as her body once did
    All five horizons revolved around her soul as the Earth to the Sun
    Now, the air I tasted and breathe has taken a turn

    This unit especially comes at a useful time for me, as I’ve been working on a writing project that involves surprising similarities to this approach.

    I did quite a bit of research during my days at uni, but haven’t done heaps of it since, besides a couple of papers last year. This year however, I’m taking on a project that hopefully will eventuate in a published book. I’ve wanted to do this for a while, so it feels great to finally take the plunge. But doing this process has put me back in the mental spaces I enjoyed so much when I was studying and writing my research projects.

    I, like many others, have often seen ‘research’ as a bit of a dry exercise of reading charts (not sure why I always think of charts when thinking about researching the creative industries. I guess sometimes we look at listener statistics—sometimes). But this process is in fact a great, creative experience, with similarities to the storytelling methods in my songwriting class, and with my approach to composition in general.

    The process began with a question and some vague ideas. With these in mind, I read and listened and thought about the ideas of others, and links began to form. When you have a question in your mind, you often find answers in strange and unexpected places.

    It’s like the experience of bringing forth one aspect of what we see—honing in on it. I do this sometimes for fun: look around at your surroundings, and pick out a colour. Then tell your brain to find all things in your visual field in that colour. You get this interesting sensation of a filtering process going on.

    It’s been a great experience to have fragments of ideas and answers emerge in my day-to-day life, and in the things I’m actively reading.

    To me, this has always been the definition of creativity: of drawing links between things that are seemingly unrelated, allowing them to represent. We do this constantly in speech and writing—our fundamental semiotic sign systems—but also in others, like the musical and visual arts. Even in things that just surround us, not ‘captured’ in pieces of art. Trees come to mean something to us; the stars always mean something to us. This ability of the imagination is, to me, the engine of creative thinking and art itself—being a creator and an audience of it.

    It comes down to constructing meaning and narratives from things that often, at their essence, are unrelated. Or, they’re deeply related, but only through links we think up.

    This concept is central to the act of listening in music: not just hearing but the act of listening. A sound will mean something different from one person to another, based on what they bring to the experience, just as a quote or a picture will. It’s all part of the same process of building connections between things, and allowing them to represent an idea of something.

    One of my favourite exercises for students in the songwriting class is to give them a set of unrelated words, and ask them to arrange them in ways to allow connections to emerge. As they do this, the students are actively making these unrelated things come to mean something. I love this exercise, and I think it is one that exercises creativity on a fundamental level. It’s the same process as arranging sounds on a screen to make them connect and work to create some gestalt meaning. It’s the same process as having a question and seeing fragments out in the world be able to be captured, arranged and formed into something that tells a story, answers a question, or perhaps asks another more fundamental question. This sort of “rabbit-holing”—of finding answers that lead to questions that lead to answers that lead to more questions—is what can be fulfilling, enriching, overwhelming, devastating, exhausting, and entrancing. To me it’s what pushes a creative person onwards, and allows their curiosity to guide them, but also itself become more complex as they follow it.

    To me, it’s central.

  • Time Vials: Part 3 is coming out this Friday!

     

    Hey everyone, I hope you’re having a nice start to the year.

    On Friday the 16th of January, the third part of the Time Vials series will be released.

    It has three tracks — Purslane, Campion, and Abigail — which reference the book House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds.

    I was reading that book while I was finalising these pieces, and felt that the mood of the book really related to the music, so I ended up naming the tracks after three core characters of the story.

    If you haven’t read the book, definitely give it a go — I highly recommend it. It’s a work of far-future science fiction that looks into the nature of humanity and what could be considered ‘human’ in speculative scenarios involving cloning and the manipulation of the body with technology, in the spirit of transhumanism. It touches on core ideas of post-humanism — how has/does our concept of the ‘human’ change, and what can be considered human after technological additions and changes to the body. (The character of the ‘Spirit of the Air’ was mind-blowing.) But it’s also just a really cool story!

    The third part of Time Vials begins with the track Purslane, which was built using a modular synthesiser running through some guitar pedals. It was recorded as a single take and then further processed in the computer, with a few extra parallel layers added: The original recording was sent out into other pedals, processed in different ways, then brought back into the session and overlaid with the original. I’ve been experimenting with this approach to processing and working with hardware — making multiple layers from a single piece of material, blending them, fading them in and out, and allowing them to morph over time. These techniques come very much from the workflows of Max Cooper and Jon Hopkins I learnt about some years ago, as well as approaches to electroacoustic music composition.

    The second track, Campion, is a little simpler and came out of a jam I was doing one afternoon on the Prophet synth. It’s just a few chords looping and gradually building over time. Nothing too crazy with this one, but I felt it worked well between Purslane and Abigail, and I also used some of the same processing techniques on it.

    Abigail is a slower-paced piece, and it’s one I actually started in between teaching classes at SAE. I set myself up in one of the studios and explored a workflow using Granulator, a granular synthesiser in Ableton Live. I was listening to a bit of A Winged Victory for the Sullen at the time — if you haven’t heard them, definitely give them a listen. Their influence mostly comes through in the atmosphere and chords, but I went for more of a synthesised approach than they typically do. I also started playing around with really high-frequency ‘pings’, which I love hearing in experimental electronic music — particularly in some Japanese work. Those really digital, high-frequency bursts almost act like pinpricks of sound in the upper registers.

    Overall, this EP feels like it sits comfortably as a part three. It brings the energy down slightly (not that the Time Vials series could be considered heaps ‘energetic’) and focuses on sustained sounds rather than plucked elements or strong pulses; everything feels more fluid on this release. In contrast, I focused more on pieces with a clearer sense of rhythm and pulse in part four — not necessarily percussive, but with a clearer and stronger rhythmic grid.

    Part three is out on Friday, and you can pre-save it here. I’m really looking forward to hearing what you think.

    Much love!

    Pat

     

  • Reflecting on What I Read in 2025; Specialisation vs. Generalisation in Learning

    Reading List

    I read and learnt about some pretty cool things this year. Here’s the list!

    Non-Fiction

    • The Molecule of More — Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long
    • The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma — Mustafa Suleyman
    • Chip War — Chris Miller
    • Nexus — Yuval Noah Harari
    • The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains — Nicholas Carr
    • QAnon and On: A Short and Shocking History of Internet Conspiracy Cults — Van Badham
    • Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference — Rutger Bregman
    • The Soul: A History of the Human Mind — Paul Ham
    • War — Bob Woodward
    • Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir – Israel, Palestine and Beyond — John Lyons

    Fiction (this was my year of science fiction!)

    • Raft — Stephen Baxter
    • Annihilation (Southern Reach #1) — Jeff Vandermeer
    • House of Suns — Alastair Reynolds
    • Pandora’s Star (Commonwealth Saga #1) — Peter F. Hamilton
    • Exodus (Archimedes Engine #1) — Peter F. Hamilton
    • Grave Empire (The Great Silence, #1) — Richard Swan
    • Empire of Silence (The Sun Eater, #1) — Christopher Ruocchio
    • Deadhouse Gates (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #2) — Steven Erikson

    My favourite non-fiction was The Soul — Paul Ham, and my favourite fiction was Exodus — Peter F. Hamilton.

    I don’t usually like to think about my least favourite, but this year, it definitely goes to Moral Ambition — Rutger Bregman.

    Specialisation and Generalisation in Learning

    As the year comes to a close, I find myself reflecting on my approach to reading and learning. In particular, I keep returning to the idea of the “right way” to learn: specialisation versus generalisation.

    Specialisation is often presented as the superior path — and in many cases it is, but only for particular ends. If the goal is to become an expert in a narrowly defined field, or to qualify for a specific role, then deep specialisation makes sense. But I often wonder whether that comes at the cost of something else: the joy of following curiosity wherever it leads.

    I find myself drawn to a wide range of topic areas that, on the surface, can seem entirely unrelated. This year I’ve enjoyed exploring the topics of power and technology, history, the Chinese revolution, dopamine, AI, and more. Each of these threads brought its own excitement and reward. I know plenty of people are perfectly content to stay within a single domain, but my mind doesn’t seem to work that way. It jumps around — and often, I let it!

    Is this a “bad” way of reading and learning? I don’t think so. It’s certainly not the most efficient route to becoming an expert in any one of these areas, but that isn’t really the aim here. Learning, for me, isn’t an all-or-nothing process.

    There are areas where my knowledge runs deeper — areas of music, through my PhD, and areas of cultural studies that I’ve taught over the past few years. Alongside these sit other domains about which I’ve read and thought a great deal, but I’d never claim expertise. Taken together, this forms something like a T-shaped knowledge profile: depth in one area, with breadth across many others.

    What I actively try to do, though, is build connections between these different domains. This, to me is the overarching project of learning: the interesting mixing and connecting of domains. History, for example, offers countless cases that can be drawn upon to illuminate contemporary ideas. Films play out philosophical questions that appear in histories, but also literature and music; abstract theories unfold out in stories, technologies, and social systems, all explored through various media and domains. When viewed this way, seemingly separate fields begin to cohere around shared themes.

    For me, many of these interests ultimately converge on questions about the nature of knowledge and ideas, and how they shape the world. Reading Harari’s Sapiens and Homo Deus played a significant role in forming this theme, helping me see how domains of history, technology, culture, economics, and art are deeply so interrelated.

    In that sense, what looks like generalism from the outside can begin to resemble a kind of hyper-specialisation: an ongoing inquiry into a very broad theme, approached from as many angles as possible.

    It brings to mind a quote I heard from Robert Sapolsky:

    “…when you think in categories, you overestimate how different [two facts] are when there happens to be a boundary in between them. And when you pay attention to categorical boundaries, you don’t see big pictures.”

    I wish everyone a wonderful holiday period, and best wishes for the new year.

  • Building Alien Structures in The Grid

    Exploring a Single, Evolving Texture

    Last night I had a great time composing in Bitwig’s The Grid. I focused on building a single, really complex texture. The music felt like it was constructing solid, physical forms rather than telling a traditional, multi-part story. The processing gave it a huge amount of energy and tactility.

    Even within that singular focus, there was still growth. I built the piece through an improvised take, recording automation across a range of parameters inside The Grid. It made me think about how a “single sound” can actually evolve: filtering, gain boosts, spatial tweaks, envelope modulation changes, increases in noise, panning voices outward, and playing with stereo space.

    These choices became the “musical narrative.” Large, reverberant spaces made the sound feel huge and slightly washy, building tension, which then resolved as I pulled the reverb back—suddenly placing the sound right in front of the listener.

    Working in The Grid was simply fun. I love this kind of composition—building a complex modular system to generate sound. The Grid remains the most intuitive object-based programming environment I’ve used. It’s not as deep as MaxMSP, but it’s still incredibly powerful. Max might be something I eventually lean into, but for now, I’m loving The Grid.

    There’s a state I slip into while writing this music where I almost lose track of how the system is actually producing its sounds. I sit back and feel like I’ve “lost control” in a good way—as if the system has developed a mind of its own. That sense of collaboration between artist and instrument is something I treasure.

    Processing

    Processing was crucial. After listening to the music of emptyset, I wanted to explore smashing voices together to form a new gestalt sound. Toward the end of The Grid’s signal chain, I combined tonal and noise oscillators before running them through various colouring tools—mainly distortions.

    There was always a tricky line between not enough and too much, but when the voices were driven together, they fused in a way that felt like gluing on overdrive. The noise filling the top end was especially interesting. Outside of The Grid, placing a reverb before an overdrive added a subtle widening and sense of realism—along with a touch of muddiness and clutter. Those “negative” qualities actually helped create and resolve tension.

    Science Fiction, Discovery, and the Unknowable

    What draws me so deeply to this music? It feels linked to the science fiction I’ve been reading—an exploration of the unknowable, the alien, the never-before-encountered. I’ve always gravitated toward novel experiences, and I want the musical equivalent of that.

    The avant-garde often reaches for this territory, but so much of the music I heard studying at the Con lacked any sort of emotional resonance for me. The technique and attitude were definitely cool, and I appreciated the desire to push the envelope, but the music didn’t feel like much to me. It was innovative in the field of compositional process and techniques, but not in the sense of musical emotional conversation. What I want is discovery, wonder, and a slight sense of danger. The music I’ve been working on feels extreme, even a bit violent, but in a way that pushes boundaries of expression, not just compositional process. This approach to music isn’t written to attempt to ‘blow up’ as an artist; it’s about exploring sound in ways that haven’t been explored before, and sharing that experience.

    One of my students said the piece “sounds like I’m in a massive spaceship,” and (obviously) I loved that comparison. There’s no literal narrative being told, no clear meaning meaning, no love story unfolding—it instead attempts to place the listener inside a structure.

    I think of the scene at the end of the film adaptation of Annihilation, when Lena encounters that alien being/structure. She’s bewildered by it; it is unknowable. Is it conscious? Is it even alive? That feeling—of encountering something truly alien and new—is what I want while making the music, and what I hope the listener experiences too.

    That sense of stepping into the unknown is exactly what I’ve always loved about science fiction, research & education, and composition.

  • Thoughts on “Raft” — Stephen Baxter

     

    I finished Raft by Stephen Baxter last night. I bought Xeelee: An Omnibus last week because I want to give the series a proper go. Raft was the first book in the collection, only 162 pages long (though written in tiny text).

    The writing felt a little cold at times. The characters weren’t very deep, and a few of them even merged in my mind as I read—everyone felt a bit two-dimensional. The setting was also surprisingly difficult to visualise. It’s a super weird universe: the Belt as a ring of cabins tied together by ropes, orbiting a burnt-out star (basically a sphere of iron being mined) floating in a nebula, itself orbiting a core. Then there’s the Raft, which I pictured as a giant bowl-shaped structure in a higher orbit. But even with those mental images, I often struggled to picture the scenes he described.

    A lot of events just… happened, without much build-up or emotional fallout. At one point the protagonist straight up murders another young boy, and there are no real repercussions. It was jarring.

    I’d heard that character work isn’t Baxter’s thing—the ideas are. And the ideas were cool, all centred around gravity and this strange fusion of physics and chemistry. It’s definitely not your typical fun, adventure-style sci-fi. The whole experience was just a bit weird, tonally and conceptually.

    While I’ve painted this in a slightly negative light, I did actually enjoy it. I just think I would’ve struggled with another hundred pages of the same. It’s a neat story with some wild ideas, even if it never quite called to me throughout the day.

    3.5/5

  • The Spectrum of Authorship

    Authorship and Collaboration with AI

    I’ve been thinking a lot lately about authorship when it comes to making creative work through collaboration with AI. I’ve been particularly interested in how authorship changes once we start relying more heavily on technology to make our work.

    There’s a spectrum, I think, that runs from one extreme to the other. On one end is the composer who creates something entirely from themselves; literally just their body and their voice, no technology involved. They might sing, clap, and stomp in a purely improvised performance, creating an original work that is entirely ‘human’. As we move along the spectrum, we start introducing tools and technologies that extend what the body can do.

    At these early ends of the spectrum, that might be the human–machine collaborations of a violin or a cello. The performer still feels like the author of the work, but their authorship is now distributed across their body and the instrument. The music is only possible through their interaction with that tool.

    Then we move into the world of recording. Technologies like microphones, tape machines, and DAWs allow us not only to capture sound but to shape and reorganise it. Here, authorship starts to spread out a little further. You might record fragments from synthesisers, field recordings, speech, or existing works, rearrange them, sculpt them, and construct a piece that exists mostly through the editing and transformation of material. The composition becomes a kind of organisation of material — structuring sound to give it some aesthetic meaning. In these contexts, the composer’s work entirely relies on the capabilities of modern technologies.

    Tools, Systems, and Co-Creation

    Things become more interesting when we get to technologies that don’t just record or process sound but actually start generating or influencing the musical material. MIDI effects in a DAW are a perfect example of this. They operate not on the level of concrete audio (as synthesisers and audio effects do), but on the level of abstract musical content — notes, rhythms, and chords. It’s possible to send a single note into a rack of MIDI effects, automate a range of parameters, and end up with a sophisticated chord sequence using inversions, borrowed chords, and extensions. The composer here is engaging in complex approaches to technology. But who is making the chords?

    Or consider an arpeggiator, which transforms a single chord into a patterned melody. It’s not just amplifying the human input; it’s creating new abstract musical content (the notes rather than the sound of those notes).

    The technology suggests material, and the composer reacts to it in a form of collaboration — approving it (keeping it in the work) or rejecting it (trying another set of parameters). The composer can unexpectedly stumble upon highly sophisticated ideas through these sorts of processes. They’re relying on the technology to produce their complexity. Is this any different from a composer sitting at a piano, and importantly, relying on the piano to find their complex harmonic sequences?

    These sorts of systems blur the line between tool and collaborator. We’re still inclined to say that the resulting piece belongs to, and is authored by, the composer, even though the technology is now contributing directly to the creation of the material itself.

    Further along the spectrum, we get to a stage where we start working with technologies that behave more like agents — systems that can generate musical ideas on their own, improvise, or respond to us in real time. These could be algorithmic improvisers, generative systems, or AI collaborators.

    At this point, the question of authorship starts to unravel further. Who is the author here? Is it the composer, who initiated and guided the process? Is it shared with the coder or designer who built the system? What about the AI itself, which is now capable of producing new abstract and concrete material? We could say that it’s still the composer’s work — another case of using technology to extend creative capacity — but it does feel slightly different. There’s an agency to the process that pushes back, that seems to create with the composer-performer rather than for them.

    Sampling, Assembly, and the Role of the Composer

    Running parallel to these sorts of approaches is the culture of sampling. You can make a track entirely out of material from Splice — a drum loop from one person, a chord progression from another, and a melody from someone else. In these scenarios, almost every building block of the music comes from other creators — not to mention the technologies that went into creating and shaping those materials. Yet the sense of authorship still rests with the one who assembles it.

    This kind of authorship is about reorganisation: curating, reframing, and recomposing pre-existing materials. It’s not unlike crate-digging or collage. Sure, the composer is not inventing the raw materials, but they’re reorganising them into new configurations, giving them new contexts and meanings, often drastically different from their origins. Authorship here becomes less about creating from nothing and more about the composer’s methods of moving things around — how they impose structure, taste, and intention.

    In these settings, the composer engages with technologies or the processing of sourced material to create the core ideas and sounds. But their authorship comes from the assembly of these into musical structures.

    Harvesting Authorship in the Ecosystem of Creativity

    At the furthest end of the spectrum is the artist who types a prompt into an AI model, waits a few seconds, and receives a fully formed track — a finished .wav file that they can release immediately. Here, the idea of authorship becomes extremely fragile. Who made it?

    It doesn’t quite make sense to call the human the ‘composer’ of the work. The creative labour has been abstracted away; the AI is the one producing the abstract and concrete musical materials and organising them into a musical structure. The human is left as the initiator, prompter, or commissioner.

    But even here, it’s not completely clear-cut. If the AI outputs something editable — an entire DAW project, a SuperCollider patch, or even a .wav file that is then split into stems — the human can intervene, reshape it, and make it their own, potentially clawing back some authorship. In other words, the artist begins to harvest authorship back from the system. They inject themselves into the material, react to it, transform it, and in doing so, reclaim a sense of ownership. The process becomes a dialogue: a push and pull between automation and intention.

    How is this process different from getting a sketch or full piece sent over from a collaborator, which the composer then pulls apart, edits, remixes, and makes ‘their own’? (I’m referring here to the differences concerning authorship, not the morals of replacing human collaboration of this kind with AI-human collaboration.)

    Harvesting authorship describes the act of taking something that wasn’t entirely yours to begin with and imprinting yourself upon it through labour, curation, and interpretation. The more you interact, the more you reclaim.

    Across this whole spectrum, from singing with your body to collaborating with generative systems, the underlying question doesn’t really change. Modern techniques of music-making have pushed us further away from that human-only end of the spectrum. But composition is still about how much of yourself you put into the process, and how much the system gives back. What shifts is where the creativity sits, and what forms it takes — in the body, in the workflow, in the code, or in the back-and-forth between the composer and their technology.

    It’s also not just technology that we interact with in the creative process. Consider the interplay between the composer and the spaces they compose with in mind, or the audience members themselves. What about the composer drawing inspiration from biophonic and geophonic sources — birdsong, thunder, waves? Music-making is thus never a single-creator scenario. There is no single, individual author. Authorship, in the sense of ‘who made this?’, is a question of a vast ecosystem of culture, environment, and technology.

    Maybe authorship isn’t about who made what from scratch, but about how creative intentions move through systems. It’s less about purity or originality, and more about interaction, orientation, and the ways we steer complexity into coherence — how an author of a creative work takes a set of inputs as material and shapes them into something aesthetically valuable.

    In that sense, using AI in the creative process isn’t the ‘end of authorship’. It’s a change, for sure, but it’s really just another point on a spectrum that composition has always existed on.

  • The Desire for Ownership in Creative Work

    What is it about building things through sound, words or code, that I’m drawn to? As I mentioned recently, I don’t have much experience with writing code, but I’ve always felt drawn towards the ideas. I’ve felt some deep enjoyment when working in platforms like MaxMSP or Bitwig’s The Grid to make musical systems. Why do I like these things? I think it’s the creativity it offers — the ability to make something that didn’t exist before. It has felt great to build my website recently, tweaking it until it feels like my own. I find that it’s similar to my music making: There’s a satisfaction in seeing my ideas materialise, an aesthetic that feels personal, that reflects some combination of discipline and taste.

    But I’ve been wondering lately: is this feeling of desiring ownership, of uniqueness healthy? Where does it come from? And why is it so central to how I/we think about creativity and self-expression today?

    The Self as Property

    To answer this, it helps to go back a few centuries, to some origins of liberal thought. The 17th-century philosopher John Locke proposed that every person “owns” themselves: their body, labour, and by extension, whatever they create through that labour. This simple notion that selfhood and property are intertwined became the bedrock of modern liberalism and capitalism.

    When I write music, words, or build a website, I’m effectively performing a Lockean ritual: I’m mixing my labour with raw digital material, and the result feels mine. This logic is so deeply ingrained that it feels natural rather than cultural. The creative act becomes not just an act of making but of claiming. In a world that often leaves us feeling interchangeable (as users, customers, citizens), the ability to make something that bears our imprint is attractive.

    But this Lockean inheritance also shapes the morals, values and emotional register of creativity itself. In other words, it reshapes the purpose of creativity. It teaches us that to create is to possess, and that possession is the proof of individuality. Even in immaterial digital spaces, that same grammar of ownership persists: files, repositories of knowledge, music collections, usernames, intellectual property. The “I” and the “mine” are inseparable.

    The Romantic Individual Artist

    Locke gave us the legal language of ownership, but the Romantics provided the emotional one. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, artists and writers began to describe creativity not as skilled craft, but as a form of inner revelation. The artist, in this new perspective, was a solitary figure channelling something authentic from within. They became a genius rather than a tradesperson.

    I feel that this Romantic idea still haunts every creative field today, from music and painting to programming and design. When I make something which (I believe) “only I could have made,” I’m invoking this Romantic lineage. The thrill of creativity comes from the belief that I’ve distilled an ephemeral piece of self into form — that the work bears a trace of my personality that can’t be replicated.

    But it’s worth remembering that this somewhat egotistical, borderline narcissistic notion of the unique, ‘authentic’ creator is historically specific. It emerged alongside and in revolt against aspects of industrial capitalism, as standardised production began to threaten the very idea of the individual. The Romantic artist was, in some sense, a protest figure — a defence of human uniqueness against the machine.

    But doesn’t that same myth now fuel the culture of ‘personal brands’ and individual distinction that capitalism depends on?

    Marketing this Self

    In our time, creativity and ownership have fused into something subtler. We no longer merely own things; we curate and display them as expressions of identity. The personal website, playlist, or socials feed functions less as a possession and more as a performance of taste. Platforms promise self-expression, but within templates designed for comparison, data extraction, and profit.

    In these contexts, the language of “authenticity” that pervades social media is no longer opposed to capitalism: it’s one of its operating systems. To be “authentic” online is to express individuality through consumption and production. The result is a paradox: the more we try to assert our uniqueness, the more we participate in the machinery that standardises it.

    This is perhaps why the act of building a website has felt different to me. To build something that lives and functions outside the algorithmic feeds has felt like a reclaiming of agency. If I have to update a post because I spot an error, I don’t have to worry about being ‘downgraded’ by the algorithm. I don’t have to operate within the specified templates of socials platforms. Building the site itself brings the pleasure of building infrastructure for your own meaning, not just content within someone else’s frame. Sure, there are still some boundaries on a platform like WordPress, but nowhere near as much as on Instagram or TikTok.

    Yet even in the context of a personal website, the logic of ownership shadows the joy: the pride in saying “I made this,” the anxiety of imitation, the impulse to protect one’s creative space from dilution.

    The Commons

    There is, of course, another story: the open-source tradition, which treats things like code as a shared commons. In this world, creativity isn’t defined by possession but by contribution. The act of making is collaborative, cumulative, and porous. A line of code written by one person may become the seed for another’s idea halfway across the world.

    This model challenges the Lockean and Romantic assumptions that creativity belongs to the solitary individual. It reframes authorship as participation rather than expression. The concept of “Musicking” runs parallel, understanding music as a communal, social practice, rather than the product of the individual in their isolated studio.

    While the “commons” can become, paradoxically, another frontier of extraction (the language of community and sharing is often co-opted by tech companies that profit from collective labour without redistributing ownership) there’s something profoundly humane in the idea that creativity can be distributed. It suggests that meaning doesn’t have to originate from within a single self: it emerges between selves, through systems and interactions. In a way, this vision aligns more closely with how art, language, and culture have always worked: as collective enterprises, shaped by traditions, tools, and shared histories.

    Making, Being

    So when I find joy in making a piece of music, building a website, or creating a piece of generative art, what am I really responding to? Part of it is the tactile pleasure of shaping something from nothing, the same satisfaction that a potter might feel. But part of it, I think, is ideological: the sense that my creation is a declaration of selfhood in a world that constantly fragments it.

    That feeling of “this is mine” is both personal and political. It reassures me that I exist as a free individual, that I can leave a mark that’s not immediately absorbed into the collective stream. Yet it also ties me into a long historical chain of ideas about selfhood, property, and authenticity. These ideas are not neutral, but deeply shaped by the economic and cultural systems that produced them.

    Perhaps the healthiest relationship to creativity lies somewhere between possession and participation. Between the Lockean claim and the open-source contribution. To make something that feels truly yours without imagining that its meaning begins or ends with you.

    The Meaning of Making

    In the end, the act of creation, whether through sound, words, or code, returns to something that is perhaps pre-ideological: the quiet joy of bringing something into being. When I shape a sound, I’m engaged in dialogue with the material world. We deem this a powerful trait: the gods are the “creators”, and some of our deepest stories are creation myths. But that dialogue doesn’t have to serve ownership or identity. It can simply be a way of experiencing the world through making, by engaging in some of reality’s most fundamental features, like pressure, harmonics, logic, and structure.

    The modern myth of authenticity tells us that creativity reveals who we are. But perhaps it does something subtler: it shows us that we are — that existence can take form, that meaning can be assembled, however temporarily, from the raw materials of thought, bits, and sound.

    To create, then, is not only to proclaim “this is mine!”, but also to question, “what am I part of?”

  • AI Collaboration to Build an Album Art Generator

    I used AI in some interesting ways over the past couple of days to do two main tasks: edit writing I had done, and build a website for making generative graphics for album art. The former is probably not so interesting anymore (which is crazy to think, given how novel these workflows are), but the latter definitely was. Both of these collaborations have been interesting in exploring the spectrum between non-use and overuse of AI.

    Non-Use and Overuse of AI

    Non-use, to me, feels a little short-sighted in some settings, as it denies the possibility for augmenting my skill set to do new things. There are absolutely times for non-use, but I personally definitely want to avoid total Luddism. Overuse, on the other hand, is basically getting the AI to make the entire thing for you — the article, the image, the song, the code script. AI can be overused in these ways, and then you can pass the products off as your own. But even though the AI created the thing, isn’t it still ‘your own’? Or do you have to create the thing entirely yourself in order to say it is, in fact, ‘your own’? These sorts of questions relate to areas outside of AI, such as the use of audio samples from platforms like Splice, or stock images on Unsplash.

    I should say that this is not an exercise in proving overuse to be outright Bad — like most things, there’s nuance to be emphasised. Instead, I’m simply exploring my experience of different uses of the technology — what does it feel like to not use it at all? Is it still rewarding to use AI to entirely create the thing? How can there be a balance of getting the reward of creating something while still leveraging the capabilities of the AI?

    Collaborating with AI

    • Writing

    What I was exploring in my two uses of AI yesterday was using it in an assistive way. For the written work, I wrote the draft, and the AI went through it and pointed out possible ways of editing the writing, fixing errors, and identified wrong information (in my case, I got the author of a book wrong). In this instance, the AI was acting in the same way that a human editor acts. I went through a very similar process when I wrote my PhD: passing the draft I had written to the editor, waiting a month, and then receiving a document full of suggestions and fixes. The downsides of this process are that it took a long time, and there were some errors that the editor had made in their suggestions (something to do with the reference style, from memory). The pros, however, were that I gave someone a job — the work employed them, and gave them money for their labour. And, while I said it was a con before, I actually enjoyed that time off and away from the thesis to gather my thoughts about it, and to approach it again with fresh eyes and ideas. By using an AI to edit the document, I am effectively avoiding getting a human editor to do a job.

    If I were to get the AI to write the entire article myself, I would not develop any of my writing or thinking skills. Through using AI in more of an assistive way, I am engaging abilities through the act of writing the draft and editing it, constantly practising my writing and thinking skills.

    It comes down to this core question: do I want the thing done, or do I want to do the thing?

    In using AI, I am trading some work off to it, but, importantly, I’m able to manage how much of this outsourcing I am doing.

    • Programming

    The other way I was using AI was by building a small program for creating generative visual art pieces for album covers, using the traditional generative art concepts/techniques. In generative art, the artist creates a set of rules and processes which then execute to produce the final art piece, rather than creating the finished piece directly. Each run yields a unique piece, generated within the constraints of the rules laid out in the system. These sorts of systems can be built using code, but I have no experience writing code, so I decided to talk ChatGPT through my ideas for the program, and see how it went. The very first program it created worked very well, generating images exactly like what I was after. The program had a few sliders to adjust parameters like Density and Stroke Weight, and allowed me to select which types of shapes it would use. An element of randomness was implemented, and pressing the ‘Regenerate’ button produced a new image each time, under the same core rules. This allows me to generate a cohesive set of images that share similar characteristics but are individually unique:

    Two main issues arose from my minimal coding experience. Firstly, I could not easily edit or debug the generated program myself. When I prompted ChatGPT for fixes, its accuracy was sometimes inconsistent, often leaving me unable to add or alter elements. This collaborative process, however, became a learning experience. ChatGPT responded to me as if I was a beginner, rather than a completely clueless coder. This pushed me slightly beyond my capabilities, developing some of my understandings of how code works. I did, however, struggle at times to find where to paste the new code, so I asked ChatGPT to tell me what the old code looked like so that I could find it and replace it with the new code.

    I obviously didn’t feel like I had created the program myself. Sure — the artworks it produced felt sort of like mine, but the program itself didn’t. If I had coded that program, I would feel far more rewarded every time it produced an artwork.

    Reward in the Creative Process; Ownership

    But is this much different to, say, a person who works in woodworking, doing most things by hand, but then acquiring a particular machine that allows them to do so much more? It’s still creative work, but now the person is relying on a machine to do some of the work that they originally wouldn’t have been able to do themselves. Is there much of a difference here?

    (Something I did observe was that it did drive me to really want to learn to code. I’ve been interested in other forms of programming using objects in platforms like MaxMSP and Bitwig’s The Grid, but I’ve never fully taken the plunge with learning to code. That could be a side project I undertake this summer.)

    Again, it comes back to the core question: do I want to have the thing done, or do I want to do the thing?

    Do I want to learn the techniques, put them to use, fail, succeed, learn and feel ownership over my creations? For sure. But is there also a bit of joy in having this program in front of me that has been made specifically for me, based off my ideas? Absolutely.

    I don’t think it’s black or white. Having the AI simply produce the generative art images itself, and then calling them my own… that feels far more empty. In the same way, getting the AI to write the entire article, or getting it to produce an entire piece of music, seems like too much outsourcing to feel much reward in, and connection to, what has been created. There’s very little creative joy in those types of processes.

    There is something that feels good about being able to do things ourselves. Sure, we can store information in a personal knowledge management program like Obsidian or Notion, building a large collection of notes about our interest. Or we can just say, ‘Hey, it’s on the internet; what’s the need to remember these things?’. But it feels good to know the things yourself: to hold the ideas in your head, and be able to merge them and explore the connections yourself. There’s a self-sufficiency that comes from that. It feels good to learn new things, and be able to do new capabilities and skills. It feels good to be very good at something. As a software update for a phone makes it a more capable device, going through skill- or knowledge-development processes feels good and deeply rewarding. Gaining new capabilities is one of the things we praise in our culture: development, growth, maturity, advancement. Think of Neo in The Matrix gaining the capabilities of Kung Fu fighting. Think of the montages of characters in sports films, training hard, struggling, falling, getting up again, training, training, training, and eventually getting very good at what they struggled with before. These sorts of stories permeate in our culture because they align with a core element of modern experience: development and expanding capabilities.

    AI Augmenting Capabilities

    A major part of this is that I can use AI to help me do things I can’t do on my own, rather than getting it to do things that I can and want to do, such as writing out my ideas. It’s important to be aware that whatever I get ChatGPT to do, I won’t get practice in. If I get it to write out my ideas (for example, brainstorm something, or write out an entire article), then I won’t get practice in thinking and converting ideas to written words, which I see as an extremely valuable ability. If I get it to edit my writing, however, I will get practice in writing the ideas and some editing, but I won’t get practice in the proper fine-toothed-comb editing of writing. But this would be the same case as if I worked with an editor. If I get it to write code for programs based on my ideas, I won’t get practice coding. However, I do feel like I learnt a bit about code yesterday by working alongside the AI, copying and pasting chunks of code and looking around the script. I didn’t learn anywhere near the amount I would have if I had written the script myself, but that would take me a very long time to be able to do so. This isn’t a bad thing — learning is supposed that takes time. But this was a different experience to traditional approaches to learning: I could immediately create things of higher complexity, while learning how code works in the process.

    But the counter to all of this hyper-optimism is that these positive outcomes will only occur if users are aware of AI’s potential to do the exact opposite: to limit our capabilities, expressive capacities and creativity, to cut us off from opportunities, and to raise new barriers. Over-reliance on the technology will stop us from doing the things that allow for these positive outcomes, and will stunt our growth in developing our own skills and capabilities. Over-reliance will reduce users’ knowledge and mental capabilities, causing all sorts of issues in navigating the world due to under-education.

    Just like many past tools and technologies, AI is both a gift and a burden; it can both extend us, and hinder us. Which one of these it falls towards depends on the users’ modes of use.

  • Patience and Long Projects

    Last year, I read Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. It is a wonderful, realistic perspective on time and time management. One thing that resonated with me was his chapter on patience and the loss of the ability to carry out longer projects — to really stick with them for the time they need to come into being.

    I have personally found it difficult at times to sustain a project, or to continue feeling engaged with what I am doing if it is a longer commitment. Part of this difficulty is that my primary motivation for being in the studio has been to transform a work in progress into a completed track, rather than solely focusing on the process of writing music. In other words, the purpose of being in the studio is to attain something in the future, as opposed to finding a fulfilling experience in the present moment.

    This relates to notions of mindfulness, internal motivation, flow states, and delayed gratification, and I believe the ability to carry out fulfilling work lies in finding a balance between these factors. This would entail doing creative work that is still working towards a future goal, but is also engaging in the present moment, and ticks all the boxes for facilitating states of flow.

    I remember a while back seeing a post somewhere on social media of yet another piece of software being hailed as the thing that will give producers the ability to pump out full tracks in minutes, or something along the lines of this. What I do remember clearly, though, is the top comment on it: “What’s the rush?” I found this perfectly summed up an issue with how music production is marketed, but also how creativity itself is marketed or valued. There is such a focus on the quantity of work, rather than the quality of work.

    I believe that what is more important is for composers, producers, and anyone else involved in creative work to cultivate the patience required to allow projects to come into fruition. Sometimes pieces of music need to be sat with or shelved for weeks, months, or even years before their issues and potential ways to elevate them reveal themselves. If producers only aim to create many, many tracks as fast as possible, they lose sight of the importance of the ability to slowly chip away at a project.

    I have felt this with my own creative work, but I have also seen it in the context of my education. Sometimes it has taken me weeks to fully grasp a concept I have been studying. I always feel that there is no way that the process could have been sped up: it often simply needs to take weeks or months. The idea that I could learn something and it will immediately click is unrealistic — it needs to circulate in my thoughts, my subconscious, and coalesce with my prior knowledge before reaching the point when it locks in and I understand it. It simply needs to take time and cannot be rushed. This is why I’ve always been against book summaries and ‘gists’; ideas require time and immersion to properly take root, something a book can provide, but a quick summary cannot.

    This points to two perspectives of the goals of studio work: should the goal be to spend 3 hours in the studio, or to complete a project? Of course, it should be something in between these: probably to spend 3 hours on the project. The point is to consider whether there is too much of an emphasis on leaving the studio with a finished product, or simply to have spent the time on creative work.

    The results of these considerations concern the deadlines imposed on a piece. “Spend three hours on the project” is a goal that doesn’t yet set an arbitrary deadline. If the goal is to come out of the studio with a full track, this sets a deadline of 3 hours on the piece. This will inevitably limit the scope of the piece. I believe that deadlines are extremely useful, but should not be applied to a project until its possible end shape is clear to the composer. In this way, the composer knows what the product could look like as a finished product, judges how long it might take to get it to that level, then creates the deadline.

    I have tried various creative challenges aimed at these two approaches: write for 3 hours every day for two weeks, and write a piece of music a day for two weeks. Personally, I enjoyed the former the most, as the required goal was a fixed time commitment. I couldn’t make those three hours shorter or longer—it was just a three-hour block that I worked within. On the other hand, ‘a piece of music’ could be anything, and I found myself a few days just getting in the studio, recording a little improvisation on the synth, and calling it a day. In the three-hour block, that improvisation would have gotten more layers added to it, been edited, further processed; more work was required due to the nature of the challenge. On some days, the three hours flew by, but on others, it felt like a slog, but I did find it easier to get interested in what I was doing, as I had no choice but to keep writing for the three-hour block, whereas on the track-oriented challenge, I could make the day’s session finish anytime I wanted by calling the track I was working on ‘done’.

    I personally get much of my creative inspiration from authors who create giant series of books — especially fantasy and science fiction epics. The writer’s ability to sit down and chip away at a book is something I find admirable, as it demands the author to acknowledge the fact that this thing they’re working on isn’t going to be finished until well into the future, which means that the gratification from writing “The End” isn’t coming anytime soon.

    So where do they get the gratification from? The act of writing itself—the time spent on the creative task, in the creative process. This highlights internal motivation, a key theme in Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, where motivation is derived from doing the act itself, as opposed to an external reward such as a salary or, say, income from the sales of a book.

    In the field of music, I feel that we see this less often today. There are definitely still plenty of artists who spend a lot of time on longer projects, slowly inching towards a finished record of intricate music. But there tends to be a focus on immediacy of output — of staying relevant on people’s feeds.

    We see the ‘long game’ approach to creative works in classical music. The best example is Wagner’s Ring Cycle — a massive cycle of operas spanning 15 hours of music, which took the composer 26 years to write.

    To me, this type of prolonged creative process requires patience, internal motivation, and regular creative work, while also keeping an eye on the broader picture: working on the trees (the daily work in the studio) without losing sight of the forest (the broader body of work you’re creating, and the reason why you’re creating the work). I often wonder if relevance worth sacrificing in order to create truly creative work? And I often lean towards yes.