Pat Carroll

Tag: creativity

  • 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.

  • 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?”

  • Lessons I’ve learnt from learning about, creating and teaching music for 10 years

    I wrote this in July of 2023, when I hit a decade of being a musician. They’re rules I return to often.

    1. You cannot quantify the value of art with stream counts.
    2. Steer clear people who rob you of your enthusiasm.
    3. Create consistently, share (release) consistently.
    4. There is no one more important to a music project than the artist making it.
    5. Protect your creative time like it is time spent with your child.
    6. Choose wisely whose feedback you take onboard.
    7. Do not ever think that you know all you need to know.
    8. Your goal is not to share your best art, but to share your journey towards creating your best art1.
    9. Shamelessly identify as an artist who thinks in artistic ways.
    10. Build connections with likeminded artists, and always give AND receive help.
    11. If you were happy with a creation at the start of the day, but not so much at the end, trust that listeners will feel as you did at the start of the day.
    12. Know that what you are doing is valuable, and find ways to create even more value through other means (teaching, mentoring, giving advice, building community).

    notes:

    1. I heard this one from an interview with Chet Faker. ↩︎