Pat Carroll

Tag: art

  • 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.

  • Reading x like a text

    Something I’ve been interested in for a while is the ways that we interpret our inputs; the way we make sense of what we’re observing and experiencing. This is very connected to semiotics and representation. Perhaps my interest in it is a result of being educated in a creative arts institution like the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and tending to have a fairly ‘artistic’ lens. I don’t mean that as a brag — I’m merely pointing out that I have tended to see the world as, or in terms of, art and representation.

    Representation to me is the core of the arts. It’s the way that certain pieces of art and creative media represent certain meanings that we apply to our own lives and experiences. Certain characters within texts resonate with us differently than the next audience member, because we relate to them differently; we might have gone through similar experiences to what they’re going through, and we’re intuitively comparing what they’re doing to what we did or would do. For another audience member, that character’s experience might be completely foreign, and there’s far less of a way to relate to them. We see a tree in the world, but to some, a tree represents concepts like growth, branching, and lineage. A tree is really just a tree, but to the beholder, it can mean more. A painting of a tree is just a series of lines, shapes, textures and colours. But that painting represents a real-world tree, which in turn represents growth, branching, and lineage. This is the fundamental experience of experiencing art.

    The world and everything around it can similarly be read like a text. So-called ordinary things come to represent something for us. This is the domain of semiotics, where images, sounds, words, stand in for and link to other things, either real-world objects, or abstract concepts. For example, the word ‘dog’, consisting of the squiggles ‘d’, ‘o’, and ‘g’, represents to English-speaking people our furry little animal friends. But simultaneously, that furry friend can represent play, joy, vitality, curiosity, or companionship, depending on its behaviours. This is the same experience as above, of observing a piece of art. But the same processes exist outside of the world of art — we do them all day long, and it’s at the core of human creativity.

    We can apply this to broader phenomena. What does the gradual move towards isolating technologies such as noise-cancelling headphones say about us? That we don’t enjoy the company of strangers? What about the efforts of tech giants to build social media platforms that pit us against each other, causing massive engagement, increasing revenue from advertisements? That the powerful in our culture prioritise revenue over the wellbeing and cohesion of the social fabric?

    The same applies for reading historical artistic movements. In the late 40s, composer-engineer, Pierre Schaeffer pioneered Musique Concrète, a new compositional method based entirely on recorded sounds — fragments of everyday life, musical instruments — manipulated through tape editing and playback. Around the same period, in Cologne, German composers such as Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen developed Elektronische Musik, built exclusively from electronically generated tones. What do these approaches mean? The two schools represent contrasting philosophies of sound: the empirical and phenomenological (building from the concrete) versus the rational and synthetic (building from the abstract). In 1956, Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge united the two approaches, combining a boy’s recorded voice with electronic tones in a single composition. What does this mean? The fusion can be read as a collapse of mid-century dogmatism — an early sign of the move toward pluralism and post-modern openness in the arts, where boundaries between methods and materials were no longer seen as absolute.

    This process of drawing conclusions about events — of ‘reading’ history in particular ways, and using history as evidence for certain conclusions — is a difficult skill to develop. However, I believe it’s fundamentally creative work. Perhaps more precisely, it’s a combination of creativity and critical thinking. It entails making connections between disparate phenomena and justifying the conclusions critically. Reading historical events like a text and drawing creative conclusions, is a very similar — if not the same — process as drawing interpretations of pieces of art. It all involves considering what things mean; what can be made of them; what they represent.

    It’s the process for any interpretation of data. Researchers go through it when analysing interview responses or quantitative statistical data. It’s all ‘read’; it’s the researcher’s role to make meaning of these forms of data, in the same way that it’s the audience member’s task to make meaning of the art they observe. (Of course, I’m referring here to the more active approach to cultural consumption, rather than the passive ‘lean back’ consumption that is encouraged by streaming platforms.)

    ***

    This process is one I teach my students. Consider these two images that represent disabled people in our society. These are universal symbols these days, and you find them in most public settings. In my Cultural Studies class, I get the students to compare the two images, looking at what they mean.

    Figure 1 – the passive disability icon

    Figure 2 – the active disability icon

    In my Cultural Studies class, I get the students to compare the two images, looking at what they mean. Compared to the first image, the second is far more active; it pairs disabled people with a representation of agency. Once the meanings of the images have been established, I ask what it means that people in our society designed this second image. Perhaps it means that parts of our society value the wellbeing of disabled people, and would like to recognise their agency. Perhaps it means that parts of our society want to break the stigma of disabled people as entirely incapable. What does this mean? Perhaps it highlights that our society values inclusion and the wellbeing of members of society, representing a streak of altruism.

    ***

    Getting students to really see the world around them and think about what it all means, in my opinion, is a crucial part of their education. While the above example relates to social justice, these sorts of exercises develop the students’ capacity more broadly for creative and critical thinking. It really brings them to the question, ‘What does it all mean?’ I think the more we can strive to answer that question, the less confusion will be in society, and the more connection we will have with the world around us, and the people living within it.