On The Road: Insights from Dogs, Babies, and Hard Drive Crashes

I've been on the road for over a week now, travelling around California for business and pleasure. The business: the museum test of the interactive exhibit technology that I've been working on with Inquirium, a learning sciences and design firm I've worked with in the past. The pleasure: celebrating the 40th birthday of high school buddy and former co-conspirator Mark Kern.

The problem: Mark's chocolate lab Chloe, a bouncy 4-month old puppy with an admirable enthusiasm for visitors.

On the very first day in California, Chloe joyfully knocked my Macbook Pro out of my lap and onto Mark's lovely hardware floor. It didn't seem to land that hard, so I thought nothing of it. But I noticed that the machine had started to act very sluggish. After killing some processes and determining it wasn't some weird network-related thing, it turned out that the operating system was locking up because the hard drive was unable to read data from the hard drive reliably. In other words, the computer was hosed, along with all my work applications and data. The dog was not blamed or punished, as it wasn't her (or anyone's fault), but it did mean that I was doomed to enjoy my time in Southern California without doing a lick of work. In a way it is a good real-world test of my mobile development setup. This is the first time I've lost a hard drive to an accident like this; better it happen while I'm in California than, say, Costa Rica. I would have preferred that this didn't happen before travelling to San Jose for 10 days of intensive development work. I was also pretty much offline until Tuesday night.

AppleCare Not

When I got to San Jose, my cousin Ben arranged for an appointment at the Apple Store Genius Bar, but ultimately they could not do what I wanted: give me rapid hard drive replacement and allow me to keep my old hard drive to recover my data. Apple Store policy, apparently, is to exchange hard drives; someone told me that Apple refurbs the returned drives and uses them again, but I can't confirm this personally. Plan B was a visit to Mac Pro, an independent Apple Macintosh store that's been around since 1988. I'd visited them for the first time a few months ago, because they just happened to be the exclusive North American distributor for those nifty Levertigo 17" MacBook Pro Bags I was eying, and were conveniently nearby. Mac Pro's staff were friendly and pretty helpful, and they possessed that fine balance between critical geeky competency and a desire to help their customers without making a lot of excuses. I had them take care of the laptop for me over the next two days while I was on-site at the museum. Though I could have waited until I got home and done an AppleCare exchange, I decided to just bite the bullet and get a new hard drive, upping the capacity to 320GB in the process. I used a SATA-to-USB drive interface to recover my data from the old disk, and restored a Windows XP bootable partition--yes, I'm running Windows XP on my MBP through Boot Camp. Although all my creative apps await restoration when I return home, all my source code and assets are on my Subversion server, and I was able to re-install Visual Studio 2005 without mishap.

One other good thing came out of this experience: the discovery of Portable Thunderbird for my email needs. I was without my own computer for a week, but I did have a 4GB USB thumb drive. With Portable Thunderbird, you can install your entire email program on a USB drive and carry your account profiles with you. While it's a little sluggish compared to having the app installed on your hard drive, it's very usable for day-to-day email checking. You can get a lot more open source apps from PortableApps website, such as Open Office Portable, Pidgin (formally Gaim) Portable, Firefox Portable, and The Gimp Portable. I'm pretty excited about Pidgin, the multi-protocol Instant Messaging client, because I can now have one master instant messenger setup that I can use on whatever computer I happen to be on. And even better: when I upgrade my computer, I won't have to lose all my logs and re-setup. That's a pain in the ass.

Hanging Out at the San Jose Tech Innovation Museum

As I'd mentioned in past posts, I've been working with Inquirium to create an interactive museum exhibit technology platform based on 3D motion tracking cameras and a high-end graphics PC. One of Inquirium's contacts got us into an unused part of the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation, complete with a small video projector and screen, which is just right for our test. The museum staff has also been super-friendly and accomodating despite all the other stuff they have to do, providing us with some space and running cables for us.

On the technology itself: we have been able to use the infrared illuminators we got from Fry's Electronics to improve the 3D camera tracking accuracy without washing out the projector screen, though it's still prone to jittering and false positives. We think we can tune the interaction and jump detection further, but our greatest challenge is the small size of the interaction area. To accomodate dozens of kids flowing through the space, we'll have to make some adjustments to our expectations of how to best manage traffic through adaptive interaction while retaining our commitment to delivering our core message in a non-superficial way. That's what the rest of this week will be about. We've also learned a lot about the kind of code development we need to tackle next to support the next phase of interactive prototyping. I'm looking forward to writing that up.

The San Jose Tech Museum, AKA "The Tech", is itself very cool; it's been a while since I've visited any science and technology museum, the Boston Museum of Science nearby. I haven't been to the MOS in quite some time, but I remember it being a somewhat cramped and dark space. The Tech, by comparison, has a very light and open hub by the entrance, with each floor running its own warren of technology-based activities. I haven't really had a chance to spend much time with the exhibits there yet, though in my quick run through I saw several things I wanted to try, like a video-feed controlled submersible ROV in an enormous fish tank, a simulated space walk chair that uses jets of compressed air position yourself under a satellite, and a whack a spam machine situated in the informative yet festive Internet exhibit. There are also permanent exhibits on Invention and Innovation, which are subjects close to my heart; in particular, there are some life-size pictures of actual inventors photographed against white backgrounds with some words about what they do. I found the presentation to be striking while humanizing the invention process. I don't know if kids would be as moved, but I certainly was. Next time I'm out on the west coast I should also check out The Exploratorium up in San Francisco, now that I actually have met someone that works there.

Insights Away from Home

Five years ago I would have said that the part of New England I'm from suits my temperament best:

• people are naturally reserved and keep their distance
• we have real contrast in our seasons
• the likelihood of earthquakes, tidal waves, poisonous snakes, tornados, tarantulas, scorpions is very low

Surprisingly, I find the San Jose area growing on me. It might be the combination of Fry's Electronics, plentiful quality asian food, nearby relatives, and the mildly warm weather in comparison to the long winter. The ethnic diversity is also refreshing. There are also a lot more people here, and I'm finding that the relaxed atmosphere coupled with the high density of geek culture in Sillicon Valley rather attractive. I am missing home, though, because I have the nagging feeling that I've my life back home is "on-hold" while I'm out here working. While it's only been two weeks, this is the longest amount of time I've been away since 2000, when I flew to Taiwan for my grandfather's funeral. My friend Erin and I have a theory about "experiencing the true nature of a place" that relates to this: it takes at least two weeks to feel like you're "there", so you need to commit to at least four weeks before you'll know what it's like to live there. On this trip, I'm also finding it takes about ten days for me to start really missing home, and I think this helps corroborate the theory for my own use. I'd like to experience more places over longer periods of time. I think this might help reveal who I really am, whatever that means.

Also, while having the day-to-day continuity with real live people is really important to me, this trip has made me aware that there are "anchoring activities" that I can bring with me wherever I go and still feel pretty good:

• I can write to people: Without a working computer, I realized that of all the things I do the most, it's writing to people. It's impulsive and obsessive and a source of feeling connected. Being without a computer has been tough, but mostly because I have been out of touch with people. Because I've been so busy also, I haven't maintained the regular dialog with whoever is out there listening. The urge to communicate is, I believe, my passion. It doesn't matter what I'm communicating, so long as some connection is made and ideas are conveyed across it authentically.

• I can take pictures: Taking pictures helps me remember places, and relate my experience when I email them later. I need to add video to the mix. As I edit and arrange the imagery at night, I find myself reliving the experience. This is kind of relaxing...it might be the closest thing I have to a hobby. Digital photography combines my enthusiasm for instant results while providing the raw resources for later reflection. It also gets me out of the house to look for new experiences.

So if there's a remote job I could do, it might be as a journalist for my own publication (this blog) and so long I had regular contact with the important people in my life, I might have a good time.

Resuming Life

There are a bunch of projects I left dangling at home that I want to pick up again: the gospel music project, for example, has been on my mind quite a bit as I've been listening to different kinds of music on the road. A couple realizations---that gospel music needs to be singable by a church congregation imposes a certain structure, and that you can get away with some pretty simple verses---has me itching to get back to it. I also miss my cats and my regular routine at the coffee shop and the gym; there's a certain "cat energy" and "friend energy" that I guess helps power me through the day. Weird. Lastly, I saw myself in some photographs and I realized that despite improved cardiovascular endurance, I'm still way too fat. Certainly, my mental body image does not match what I see in photographs, and I am finding this extremely annoying and somewhat depressing. So I'm thinking of initiating some kind of intensive regimen to see what I can get done in a month, just to see what it's like.

I'm still going to be on the road for a while, so all this will have to wait for a week.

The Art of Not Finishing

I've been preoccupied with how unproductive I've been lately...until recently, when I realized that the road to productivity isn't the same road that I'm on. The road to productivity is paved with clear steps leading to an act of completion; essentialy, it's finish what you start. However, as I sit here contemplating the rather large list of difficult-to-break-down tasks I've given myself, I'm thinking that there might be another approach. That is to relax and not worry about finishing. Or, perhaps, restart constantly. This is a way of not worrying about the result you want, and focusing on what you are doing right now. When practiced with honest intent, it's possible that this approach will lead to the same destination: a sense of accomplishment. It may not be so important that it is a specific accomplishment that I intended. I'm reminded of what I've read about agile software development, and more personally it reminds me of mastering my fighting style against best friend / arch nemesis Alen in the martial arts fighting game Tekken.

That Feeling of Accomplishment

The model of productivity I have for myself is not unlike the software development process I'm familiar with. The particular hacks I've applied to it are designed to ameliorate my particular foibles when it comes to motivation, definition, maintaining momentum, and reaping that feeling of fulfillment.

• Motivation: A lot of my Printable CEO forms are designed around the idea creating tangible progress when it is otherwise intangible. For example, a lot of the forms count chunks of time, equating chunks accrued with actual accomplishment. The reason I did this is because long projects defer the sense of reward, and without some kind of sign that we're actually making progress, our efforts will falter unless there is an overriding principle (e.g. duty, honor, love). Personally, I like to get feedback pretty instantly, because I'm an impatient person. Since I also work at home, I don't get the low-level but constant stream of feedback that a team environment provides. People without managers (or with out-of-touch managers) are also in the same boat.

• Definition: There are two kinds of projects that I have: projects with well-defined deliverables and expectations and those that, well, require definition. Project that require definition are almost always trouble, so when one of these bombs lands in your lap you actually need to spend a lot of time establishing assumptions and creating definitions that serve as the foundation of the project's ultimate deliverable. If you know the deliverable and the desired result, so the reasoning goes, you can work backwards and figure out what to do to get there. This is a whole series of posts in itself because it's not as straightforward as it sounds, but I think it's safe to say that we never question the main supposition: there is a deliverable and an expected result. Otherwise, you're just screwing around.

• Momentum: In other words, getting it done. I was just scanning the Wikipedia entry on Agile Development and saw reference to the so-called Waterfall Model of software development, which on the surface is exactly what Management asked for: a sequential design-deploy-deliver process that is nice and tidy. I'm experienced enough to know that it's difficult to predict exactly how it will come out or how long it will take. I make the best estimates I can, and discipline myself to push through the milestones so steady progress is made. If I'm smart, I also break down the steps into small-enough chunks so that a few can be done to completion every day, so theoretically I also have some way of measuring the rate of progress.

• Fulfillment: This is what comes at the end of the process. You're done! All that planning, working, slogging away every day to get to this point pays off. Or if it doesn't, at least you're no longer stuck doing it. You can count your chickens, collect your remaining marbles, and head home feeling like you've done something.

My education and work training has pretty much imprinted this approach on my brain, and it is second nature to me. However, I also have to admit that I really hate working this way. As I've mentioned, I'm a pretty impatient person, and for many years I suppressed this because the process works. Until I started blogging, I didn't know that there was really another way of doing it.

I enjoy free creation, which is probably why I like blogging and the ad-hoc projects that I come up with so much. It's productive, but only in hindsight. Until now, this seemed acceptable to me only because I wasn't doing "real work"; when the stakes are higher, productivity is supposed to produce results in the future. Actions are taken step-by-step, their results measured, assessed, and iterated through. While iteration is a built-in to the process, I think that there is still the stench of Waterfall embedded into it: we seek to optimize for minimum production time for maximum quality. This is a challenge, a burden, and a source of stress.

What really matters to me is having that sense of fulfillment; in practical terms, it doesn't matter how I get there. That's what's on my mind right now.

Walking The Path To an Unspecified Somewhere

Now, I'm not suggesting that we abandon professional conduct, especially while working within the bounds of established business expectations. Nevertheless, it's occurring to me that for my personal business goals, I don't need to adhere to the same standards. This is particularly true for me now, because I am open to all possibilities and am purposefully being vague about committing to any given path. Yes, I could very easily define a number of arbitrary business goals that would make perfect business sense given my demonstrated strengths and areas of expertise, but this is a trick that I don't think will work without some kind of external moral commitment. In the absence of this, my natural values shape my activities:

• I'm not driven by money, scale, or status.
• I do, however, want respect, trust, a place in the community, and to be a contributor.

How to do this while retaining my independence (very important) and having enough money to create that situation is the challenge, and here's where I get impatient again. The deliverable in this case is a state of being, not something tangible, concrete, or measurable. That's because I'm measuring human values, and it's hard to predict humans. Therefore, it's difficult to optimize. Having said this, I've argued myself back into the corner: to achieve what I want, I do need to put in the effort to acquire money, scale, and status. Otherwise, it's difficult to attract and to fund the situations where you can spend all your time meeting the right sort of people. The trick is to do it in a way that does not, as Tim Ferriss might say, make me a "life deferrer", putting off the reward of being alive by trying to optimize for the future.

Is there a way out?

Restart. A Lot. Maybe.

I am feeling a lot of internal resistance to this idea: don't plan, do. I know I've seen this before. A lot. It bothers me. A lot. I don't like not knowing what I'm going to do, but I have to admit that I don't really know what I'm doing or exactly where I'm going. Therefore, there probably is no wrong way to do it. In a sense, my random path is already optimal :-)

When Alen and I used to play Tekken back in the 90s, we noted that we had different approaches to learning the game. Tekken is a martial arts fighting game for the Playstation that has a lot of different attacks, defenses, and throws for each of 8 or more characters. There were over 50 distinct moves per character, and each character had strengths and weaknesses relative to each other, which means that mastering the game required a lot of practice. There are hundreds, of not thousands, of gameplay variables that could potentially affect the victory of one player over another.

The main attraction of playing a game like Tekken is to beat your opponents like a drum so you can have bragging rights. It's even better when you're playing against your friend...unless you're me. I tend not to play to "win" games. I'd rather understand them first. Alen had the opposite approach: he was in it to win. The way that this manifested in our playing styles was that Alen would find some button he could press over and over again as fast as possible--usually, this was the shin kick move--and he'd win the first 20 or 30 rounds. He would win because I would walk right into that shin kick, trying to find the counter to it, or find the hole in the timing of the move. It would take about 20-30 losses until I found it, and then the situation would reverse because by then I'd have formed a partial understanding of my character's dynamics. Then I would win a bunch of games, until Alen adapted and found the next quick move. By then I'd have learned that there is a time for understanding how a game works, and then there's a time when you just want to wipe the smug expression off Alen's face, and then it was on. By the end of it all, hundreds of hours of play later, we'd both have arrived at something of the same level of play, having absorbed the lessons of the other's playing styles by incorporating them into our own.

The moral of this story is that there is the fast way and the slow way to learning, and that ultimately they may lead to the same level of mastery. However, if all you are counting are the first 20 rounds of play, then the lesson is play fast and cheap to kick the other guy down. Have no shame! It will get the job done. If you have time and can afford to lose a lot at first, then you can build toward a complete style of play by mastering the nuances of all game mechanics; indeed, this is the only way to reach the greatest heights of achievement. However, you're going to get your ass beat a lot at first. Do you have the time?

Applying These Lessons

Let me paraphrase myself.

• I want to wander into an interesting life where I achieve in hindsight. I think this might suit my impatient, spur-of-the-moment creative nature.
• However, I'm worried that I'm being dumb, because I know that there's a "right way" to start and finish a project. I also know that progress is made only by completing what you've started, and doing that over again.
• So how can I complete things, but not on purpose?

Let me also consider those things that I'd like to create, which I think will help bring about the means by which I can create an interesting life:

• Create the e-commerce side of the website, selling fancy productivity stationery.
• Redesign the website to provide focused yet diverse categories of interest.
• Create software products for time tracking.
• Write some stories and some books.

Each one of those lines looks like a lot of work. There are dozens and dozens of smaller steps to plan, and it makes me sleepy just thinking about it. But that's me thinking in terms of the distant future, when the work has been completed. I need to start enjoying the process now, shin-kicking my way to cheap victories while buying myself some time to learn what does and does not work. I think that the processes behind e-commerce, design, and creating software are deep enough that I should just focus on those quick moves; I will forced to learn how to counter the challenges I encounter by the nature of the challenge. I can structure my productive approach to ensure variety in the interaction, and perhaps that will make it more varied and therefore fun. It has just struck me that if Alen and I hadn't had such different approaches to mastering Tekken, it would not have been nearly as interesting. If we had both played as shin-kickers, we'd have ended up being button-mashers and would not have mastered the game at all. If we had both been equally analytical, the game would have turned into work and would have ceased to be fun. That suggests that a good strategy for approaching one of those "big tasks" that you've just kept putting off is to take the opposite approach:

• A big serious task, with lots of complexity, is going to make you want to curl up and take a nap. You'll procrastinate. Instead, run up to the thing and give it a swift kick in the shin and run away. Then run back, and do it again for as long as you can get away with it. Who knows, you might just start to win.

• A very simple task may become interesting if you put a lot of energy into making it complex. Or maybe the better way to think of this is by being mindful of what you're doing, drawing that moment of simplicity out as long as possible. Through this, hidden meanings may be revealed. The example that comes to mind is the act of shooting a target with a handgun. Theoretically you just point the gun at the target and pull the trigger, but in reality there are dozens of interrelated micro-movements across the body that affect the accuracy of the shot. That moment of pulling the trigger can be an instant, which means you'll shoot terribly. Or it will be a kind of timeless moment that fully occupies your mind and your body until the bullet leaves the barrel of the gun and marks that bull's eye.

My next step is to incorporate more shin-kicking into my to-do list, and not think about the finished projects down the road. That will take care of itself as they come together. What I would like to focus on now is winning and being short-sighted about it. I'm pretty sure this is not the best way for every project, but it might be what I need right now to just get moving.

Splitting up the Blog by Topic?

I've been contemplating one of my Groundhog Day Resolutions today: "figuring out how to be a full-time writer and content creator". I like the idea more and more. I'll still get to make things so what I've learned up to now will not go to waste. However, it means establishing myself in a new niche. I could just jump on in and flounder around for a while, but I have a preexisting commitment to a personally important project. Therefore, it makes sense that I establish the new niche while maintaining my old one.

Serving the Audience

There have been a few new topics that I've been interested in writing about: motivation, relationships, and real-life stories. Motivation probably can fit in with the Productivity writing, as it is one of the assumed prerequisites for wanting to be productive in the first place. I already blog about this topic indirectly under Introspection too. The two new topics, relationships and real-life stories, are a little different because they are not about me or my direct experiences, but are about other people. Much of what I write about now uses myself as the reference point for discussion, because the only person who might get embarrassed is me; no one else is likely to get hurt or feel under the spotlight. I also can safely use my experiences as the basis for drawing whatever conclusions I have, so long as I am clear that this is where they're coming from.

There's a voice in my head that is telling me that when I start to write about other people, I need to keep this content separate from what you're reading right now here in the main site and feed. There are several assumptions that I'm making:

• Assumption 1: People are subscribed because of the productivity and process investigation, and skim through the occasional article on whatever crazy thing is on my mind.

• Assumption 2: Adding content outside of this is somehow not desirable, because it further clouds the nature of the content on the website.

These assumptions have constrained my writing in the past several months, as I've struggled both with my own identity as a creator and freelancer. I also know that I get a lot of traffic from productivity-oriented websites. More recently, however, I've come to the conclusion that I should just write about whatever happens to be on my mind, just like the old days, and just try to entertain and inform as I indulge my whims. The reason behind this conclusion is pretty simple: writing something is better than writing nothing. But even that statement requires contextualization; my value system tends to emphasize the production of anything interesting over the production of the right things. And from a marketing and branding perspective, writing about a multitude of topics just clouds "my online identity", which is bad when it comes to helping consumers make the decision whether they are interested in reading or not. Ideally, my writing would convey a clear message with an identified need, focus, dream, and vision of the future. Therefore, it makes some sense to metaphorically create a new product line for stories and reporting, a spin-off if you will, to neatly contain my journalistic intentions. This keeps the main niche "safe" by not muddling with it, allowing the new niche to develop its own following while drawing on the existing associations of the parent brand.

Serving Myself

The other approach is to not worry about "packaging content for the efficient consumption by market segments" and just assume one thing: continuity trumps categorization. That continuity is me, my voice, and my perspective. This presumes--and I feel kind of embarrassed to even suggest this--that the reason people are here is because they just like reading about what's on my mind, and that is enough. If that's the case, I could write about anything I want, so long as I maintain the continuity in whatever way makes sense. For me, I think that comes down to the core beliefs that I have: sharing inspiration where I find it, documenting what I've learned, and being supportive of anyone who is trying to make a go of it. I really don't write about productivity at all: I write about people who happen to be trying to be productive. What's interesting to me is the motivation behind the productive urge, which is one reason why I want to start collecting more stories. Creating the tools that allow people to be more productive, myself included, is really an exercise in creating our own life stories.

However, not all stories have any relevance to anything. For example, today I heard a good one while hanging out at Starbucks, where someone was complaining about how she hates it when someone doesn't leave the towel in the bathroom after taking a shower. I nodded in agreement, but then I realized that there was an variation in domestic household operations at work here: some families share one towel. You're clean coming out of the shower after all. This was news to me, as my family has always had separate towels for each individual in the house. We took an impromptu poll, and apparently the "One Household, One Towel" rule was not uncommon in the very small set that we were able to sample. The very idea of a single-towel bathroom seems incredible to me, as I personally like my towel to be my own. My sister would probably agree, because she goes to great lengths to ensure her own towel is fluffy and maximally dry; she would become very upset if someone else used it "by accident". But I digress...the point I'm trying to make is that this little side trip into communal toweling has nothing to do with what I topically write about. It's just interesting to me. The "gracious host" in me imagines people who are patiently waiting for that software update to the Emergent Task Timer Online going out of their gourd every time they read a detailed article about how sharing towels is OK, but sharing facecloths is not (FYI: I am just taking a stand here on that issue). If he's got the time to write about stupid towels, he certainly could be updating something USEFUL instead...

Taking a Poll

So I'm torn. I'm leaning toward NOT worrying about branding as the motivating force for a redesign, but nevertheless creating a separate content blog (accessible through this site, of course) for story collecting, random encounters, road food, and visits to new places. Some existing categories would also move, such as the Encounters category. If anyone has any strong opinions or insights into what the best approach would be, I'm all ears. The issues boil down to this:

• Will moving non-productivity, non-design, and non-business content out of the main blog create a more optimal experience for both readers and myself?
• Is "managing my personal brand" really so important that it dictates how I organize the content on this site?
• Is it more important to write for myself or write for the audience?
• What is the more worthy goal: creating a focused blog experience which can serve as a content platform for more commercial activities, or just creating what's on my mind? This issue is really which is more important to me: success/commercialization (freedom) or writing for the sake of creating "good" content (recognition). Both are important, so maybe I am actually looking for a means to do both.

Mission Improbable Gospel Music 2: Chiseling out a Chord Progression

As I wrote a few days ago, I had decided that I would try to write a Gospel song despite my inability to credibly play an instrument and lack of experience with music composition. The reason: it seemed like an interesting challenge at the time, and I was quite ready to be a clueless novice in the process.

Despite my inability to perform, I do have a history of having been exposed to music environmentally, and it seems to have wedged certain patterns into the part of my brain. Yesterday's comments were heartening, as some of the decisions I made about chord progression--acquired by mashing keys on the digital piano until they sounded right--were on the mark. Woot!

I spent a few hours over the past couple of days figuring out how to actually get from my scribbled notes into something I could actually share. Geeky notes follow :-)

What I Have Noticed about Music Structure

I've noticed that the popular music I listen to has a definite pattern to the combination of notes that are played in each temporal group. What I'm calling "pattern to the combination of notes" corresponds, I think, to the chords selected from the major or minor scale in a particular "temporal group"; this group is called a bar or measure. Part of the joy of music seems to come from the ((combination of predictability of the pattern balanced with surprise**; a lot of popular songs follow a formula of some kind where there are certain number of bars with certain combinations of chords, but the way the notes are expressed is quite infinitely varied.

There are 12 notes in western music, and all of our songs are made of those combinations. From a graphic designer's perspective, one could think of them as the available named colors. As with colors, certain notes just seem to go well together, while others don't. I once tried to figure out why this was by looking at the relationships between pure sinusoidal tones, as I know from Electrical Engineering that sine waves are the fundamental building blocks of all more complex waveforms. As it turns out, the waves that sound good together tend to share harmonics in interesting whole-numbered multiples, but I don't know if this really what creates the impression of harmony.

I came up with a progression of chords (each of which consists of 3 notes) that sounded "right" to me. I could have started with any good-sounding chord, but I found that for the next chord to sound right, only certain notes were available otherwise it would sound weird. The pattern I was aware of reminds me a lot of a good episode of The A-Team, the formulaic-yet-enjoyable 80s television hit featuring Mr. T:

1. 4 bars of introduction, which sets the style of the song. Like when the A-Team gets contacted by the help-seeker of the week.
2. 4 more bars of "character building", fleshing out where this song is going to go emotionally. Very similar to Hannibal working out how to handle the problem with Face, Murdock, and B.A.
3. 4 more bars of "conflict setup", which feels like an intermediate mystery to be solved. The Team is dealing with the operational challenges of the mission, but before the final conflict has arisen.
4. 4 more bards of "conflict resolution", a plot point that is closed (for now). The Team is finally at the place where they need to take action to prepare for the final act.
5. 16 more bars of "whooping it up", which is when the show features the "Let's build something kickass and shoot up the place" montage.
6. Repeat as necessary.

I found I couldn't break certain expectations outside of certain intervals, or it sounded wrong. I couldn't change a chord in the middle of a bar, because...well, I didn't like it. I couldn't change the key until at least 16 bars of that setup had occurred...key changes are like changing the lighting in a room in a movie. And even then, it seems like the keys need to share at least some notes immediately before the break so there is some commonality. The chords within a series of bars had to relate to each other in some way too, in some manner I can't quite grasp. It might be pure familiarity at work here, hundreds of years of the same structures informing thousands and thousands of songs. Maybe some of them just were easier to play on certain instruments. Others just are good sounding; not all chords are created equally when it comes to harmonic bliss. My friend Lee pointed me toward equal temperament as a concept; it turns out that all these various "official notes" western music are a hack so a piano can have a fairly decent go at playing different scales "equally well". Which really means "equally bad"...they're close, but not exact.

I was dimly aware that chords and chord progressions describe a song pretty well; it's like using a grid in graphic design to pre-solve certain spatial relationships and create proportional harmony in the division of space. If I could just pick a chord progression that sounded OK to me, that would solve a lot of problems automatically. This presumes that I could actually tell if the notes I was picking were in the progression or not. This is something I seem to be able to do, but I sometimes wonder if all musicians actually can tell. I have lost count of the number of college band guitar solos that seem to be connected to a different song than the one they were playing.

Picking a Progression of Chords

And then...I was stuck. I couldn't pick the progression because I couldn't hear the rhythm in my head to further constrain the problem sense. I tried humming a few things to myself, trying to match the keys on the keyboard, but this felt like spinning my wheels. I eventually realized that I could impose some additional structure by creating a fake lyric that just had the right number of syllables in it. I basically picked cliche phrases from half-remembered gospel songs and piled 'em up to create a few verses, then hummed how I thought a singer might deliver them.

To find the right keys, the technique I used was to just play all the keys until I found the one I wanted. The process was very similar to sketching very loosely with lots of overlapping lines to outline rough shapes: our eyes pick the line we want, and then we ink it. In a similar way I thrashed keys that were in the direction I wanted the song to go, and ignored any note that didn't sound right. Once I identified something that sounded good, I wrote down the name of the note based on the one thing I remember from piano lessons: how to find C. I scribbled these notes down on my paper, and used them to play the chords over and over again while humming my fake lyrics. This was a laborious process because I had trouble matching my chord notes to the actual keys on the keyboard, and my dexterity was poor. However, I did manage to come up with this chord progression in the key of C major for the first 8 bars:

GCE - BEG - ACE - GBD  
ACE - CFA - GBF - GCE

Each group of notes is one measure, and they are all played simultaneously to "fill the space". When I played it out, using an organ sound, it sounded "right" but it was also very filling. These are the big meaty-sounding chords, with lots of harmonic shared relationships. I believe Lee called these "major triads", but I'm not sure if that's what I ended up with. It did sound familiar and somewhat churchy, though as I mentioned in yesterday's comments that that last group (GCE) seemed to "end" the song rather abruptly, leaving me "no where to go". I was fascinated to learn from a commenter that this phenomenon actually has a name: cadence, which is the "punctuation" of music. Some progressions just sound more "final" than others. Neat.

Note Transcription

While I had some chords down, I wasn't able to really experience them. I can't play the keyboard well enough to get a real sense of the song. Fortunately, I have a tendency to buy music gear whenever I think I might actually have the drive to learn something musical "for real". I also have some digital sound editing software that I use for audio storyboarding, editing, and digital media asset production. What I needed to do was enter the notes into a music sequencer software package, then render the sound to an MP3 file.

My MacBook Pro is running Windows XP natively, and into this is plugged an M-Audio Axiom 25 USB Keyboard Controller that I picked up 2 years ago with the idea that I might actually use it to learn how to use Reason, one of the first really cool virtual studio products that not only looked pretty, but actually didn't crash every few minutes. I unpacked the Axiom for the first time about 3 hours ago, and I'm happy to see that it actually works. :-)

I happpened to already have Sony Acid Pro 6.0, a multi-track music creation and sound synthesis package that I use for creating audio soundtracks from multiple sources, though it's been years since I've had to do this kind of work. This is the companion software to Sound Forge, the sound editing package that I've been using for quite some time for tweaking audio at the sample level. You can think of Sound Forge as the audio equivalent to Photoshop because it creates assets, while Acid is more akin to something like InDesign because it combines and layers assets you've created elsewhere.

Acid Pro 6 has a lot of music synthesis stuff built into it, and after some fussing with it I got it to recognize the Axiom 25 and input notes directly. Then I discovered I could actually draw the notes directly in with a pencil tool.

After entering my chord progression, I heard it played back to me for the first time at a measured pace, and realized I didn't like the second group. It sounded kind of awkward, so I tweaked it in the program until it sounded more interesting and less like a "full-stop". Commenter Steve had written to suggest another approach in his earlier comment, but I didn't refer to it because I wanted to see what I would come up with. You download the zip archive of GospelTest01 and listen to 0410-GospelTest00.mp3 to hear the progression, or scroll to the end of this post and click the audio player button to hear GospelTest00 and GospelTest01.

Churchiness and Sonic Space

As I listened to my chord progression, I felt a bit of despair: it sounded very boring and, well, predictable and lame. It reminded me of a graphic design faux-pas I see a lot from non-designers: the gradient fill. What happens is that the non-designer sees a great big white space, and they are overcome by the urge to "put something pretty" there. Rather than compose something tasteful, the gradient fill comes to the rescue to add some "style". It almost always looks terrible unless applied with some subtlety. I'd just done the same thing, musically. Oh dear.

Then I remembered: the chord progression just provides structure so other elements can play on top of it. Since I had the chords entered into Acid, I told it to loop continuously while I noodled around on the keyboard and tried to imagine someone singing on top of it. The chords then became less dominant, and suddenly the flatness went away. It opened up. The name of this file is GospelTest01.mp3 if you want to hear the difference.

A few notes:

• I did take the "gradient fill" metaphor farther in this file by using the 80s pop music equivalent: the synthesizer string fill to add moodiness and depth. It actually is starting to sound like something, despite my shameful use of synthesizer cheese. At least I am not adding orchestra stabs to "punch it up" or gating my drums.

• There's an interesting thing that I noticed in the 2nd-to-last chord I chose, which is its disharmonious quality relative to the other chords. It also sounds like there is a hole in the middle of it, which creates a slight anxious feeling. The last chord somehow "seals the hole" and eliminates that anxiety. I think I've heard this before in other hymns.

• Because I'm entering in the notes by hand, there is no live performance feel to the vocal part. It all sounds very robotic, because the notes are "quantized" to strict note boundaries. I applied Acid's Groove tool, which attempts to introduce some liveliness by slightly offsetting the timing. I think it did something, but my sensitivity to this kind of note spacing is fairly poor. It reminds me of kerning, which is the art of spacing letterforms so they look "even". Some people have the knack for it, able to see subtleties that I can't detect. And so it might be with musical timing. I left everything quantized here as a guide; I imagine a singer would know what to do to make this sound much cooler..it sounds pretty broken and clunky to me right now, especially listening to it "cold" without my imagination filling in the blanks.

Next Steps: Lyrics and Emotional Progression

As I was laying down the vocal part in 0410-GospelTest01.mp3, I had certain aspects of the yet-to-be-written lyric in mind:

• The singer starts by lamenting the difficulty of living
• The singer starts to realize that he's already half saved, he just needs to let something go
• The singer bursts into joyful celebration of salvation of some kind, hallelujah

The first 8 bars I have are that first part: lamentation. It's heavy-sounding and doesn't kind lift off except for one single note that rises optimistically before sinking again. Listening to it again I realized that there aren't enough notes in the vocal part to really make it work, but I'll hit that again when the entire structure is fleshed out.

The second 8 parts will lift up somehow, but repeat a few times. It takes a while for the singer to realize he's "saved", so I'm thinking that a repeating rising and dropping might impart that sense emotionally. Maybe an upward key change?

The last part, the joyful refrain, should soar. I think this will happen through longer notes and a very energetic playful sequence of notes, like you're on some kind of awesome theme park ride that gives you a huge boost. Or something.

So that will be the next focus; any refinement will wait to see what I have at the end of the next stage. I think it will be actually rather difficult because I'll need to keep the big picture in mind of progression, and it takes me a long time to figure out how the notes fit together. The awesome part, though, is that it doesn't take a lot of time to try things, and the feedback is immediate. When I'm doing graphics work or development, it takes a lot longer to get to the point where I can really immerse myself into what I'm making.

You should be able to hear what the progressions sound like by clicking the player button below. You can also download the general midi file or the entire archive.

Click the Play Button! It should play 24 seconds of GospelTest00 (just church chords) and then GospelTest01 (a first pass at trying to create something over the chord structure):

Mission Improbable: Making Some Gospel Music

It's been a pretty good week so far, thanks to some recent insights I've had about my so-called "work life balance". I've been continuing to take notes on Tom Hodgkinson's The Freedom Manifesto, and I've been feeling better about making choices that will allow me to relax and be happier with my pace. Up to now, I've always labored under the assumption that I needed to work faster, work harder and be optimally competent because I attributed these qualities with "professionalism" and "success". I also suspect there is some subtle cultural conditioning going on too; even though my parents didn't force me to study hard or strive to be successful for its own sake, I nevertheless picked up this value through sheer osmosis. It went without saying. My parents and the extended families all have a very highly-developed sense of mission as well, being involved with the Christian community in Taiwan and other academic pursuits. Although I didn't follow in their footsteps, the idea that there was a higher authority to which I needed to report to. God? Standards? Ideals? Philosophy? I kept seeking it out, craving some kind of closure, until sometime this past Monday. I have come to the conclusion that I will actually be pretty happy seeking things out, because I have been happy doing this. The rest will take care of itself. This is just one of those life lessons, I think, that every person has to learn for themselves. I've been told this over and over by people I love and respect, but you know how it goes: it's just not the same unless the apple falls on your head.

Having come to a kind of inner peace, my daily routine is starting to come back together after having fallen to frequent travel and a veritable parade of wheezy winter coughs. I have started going to the gym again too; I was happy to see that while my muscles are noticeably flabby, cardiovascular endurance is not as degraded. But something else was missing: with my reacquired sense of personal stability, I felt the need to do something non-routine. Something impossible, or at least relatively unexpected. My sense of creative adventure has returned.

I mentioned this to one of my coffee buddies this morning at Starbucks, looking for a suggestion of something that would be IMPOSSIBLE to do. I like impossible tasks because it's fun to think of ways to whittle 'em down to the realm of probability, winning the no-win scenario, and so forth. Unfortunately, the first thing she said was "GO TO THE MOON", and though I instantly started thinking about ways to get there, all of them took a lot of years and a lot of money; visiting the moon will have to wait until I make a bazillion dollars or Southwest starts flying there out of Las Vegas (all my "frequent flyer" miles are with them, you see). So that kind of took the wind out of it. However, on the way out I heard some gospel music playing over the cafe loudspeaker, and thought, "Hey, I should write a gospel song! How hard could that be?" Sure, I can't play an instrument worth beans, can't read sheet music, and my experience creating music has been limited to editing stock sources for use in "online webinars" for IBM...but why not?

And so, this will be my amateur project. This should be fun.

The Approach

There's a favorite line I have from the television show The Unit, which is about a team of special forces operatives. What I like about the show is that it's about the characters and their mental attitude toward getting things done, not about shooting stuff or knifing people in the dark (though they do that pretty well too). In one episode, the wife of one of the officers is trying to work out a moral dilemma, and another member of The Unit relays some advice that the commander had told him in the past:

If you knew the answer, what would it be?

I like that line a LOT, because it's tricky and if you can master it, it probably is the way to at least get going on finding the solution. In a lot of cases, there is no wrong way to start, and the solution presents itself only after you start looking for it.

In the case of writing Gospel music, I'm in a similar situation. I have an idea what Gospel music is from movies like The Blues Brothers, the occasional episode of American Idol and Ally McBeal. I once saw a volunteer Gospel group perform at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, trying in vain to raise the roof with a pretty introverted crowd. And because I was raised first as a Presbyterian minister's son, then later grew up on the campus of a theological seminary with a very LOUD music building, I've been exposed to a LOT of hymns. On the seminary, walking to and from the school bus stop I'd hear vocalist singing scales over and over again. And when Grandpa (himself also an ordained minister) gave me a full-sized harmonica that I started to play with, I eventually discovered that it could ONLY play nursery school songs and hymns. Every time I would try to toot out something funky or popular, I would find that I was missing some notes. It turns out that my harmonica was made for the key of C Major, which is the key of practically every hymn played in mainline protestant churches. So that's what I could play. After a while, I sort of gave it up when I started to crave "bluesy notes" and didn't know that's what it was. A few times since then I'd tried to figure out how music "worked", reading up on harmonic relationships between notes and driving my Mom nuts with questions like, "but where do the notes come from?" Mom liked her notes just the way they were printed on the sheet, she did; my continual questions about the theory and the underlying principles of why some chords sounded "good" and other "ech" didn't get too far with her. This mystery continued into college, when I asked some guitar players some questions about chords, and they started happily tossing around terms like "Minor 7th" and "Diminished 9th". When I asked them what the numbers meant, they really couldn't tell me; they just knew how to look up the fingerings and believed such chords were "cool" in some musical aesthetic sense. I eventually figured out that in common use, these terms are largely descriptive of a certain pattern of notes and are used to reference characteristic features of certain genres of music (jazz, for example). The connection I was looking for was technical and emotional: I wanted to map chords to emotions, transitions, and progressions, because that's how I hear music.

So that's what I have to work with: an emphasis "feeling" and the ability to "hear" when something sounds right to me. I have a keyboard and the imprint of 18 years of classical church music shaping my idea of what music sounds like, with more recent exposure to mainstream blues, jazz, and popular music.

The elements of my Gospel song, as far as I can figure them, are something like this:

• Words There's usually something about Jesus, The Lord, Praising Him, Sweetness, Grace, Salvation, Mercy, Forgiveness, Having Journeyed, Now Seeing, Getting Shown the Way, Being Led, Seeing the Light, Feeling the Love, and the occasional acknowledgment to Joyful Noisemaking. There's a little story that goes along with it; the classic progression is being a sinner, down and out, or otherwise depressed, but then POW, Jesus or The Lord steps in and the choir has something to get excited about.

• Music This is where I'm a little shaky on what to do. Ordinarily I would want to make something original but it's quite probably that anything I come up with is going to sound like something I've heard. Compounding the problem is the fact that I can't actually play the piano. What I can do, however, is press down keys on the keyboard and work out what the progression might be, mapping my notion of how the song progresses emotionally to choose what I want. Then I can work out the interconnects between each chord later. I know, I know...I am such an engineer. I guess this is a good opportunity to learn how to transcribe notes. When I was a kid I did take some piano lessons, but never could really read sheet music as I just pretended to read, relying instead on memorized finger positions.

• Vocals I can't sing either, but I guess if I'm writing a song I'll have to try. I'll worry about that later.

• Song Structure I don't have one in mind, but what usually seems to happen is that you have a verse that goes on for a while, which leads into a refrain that sets the common theme, and then the song repeats. In popular music, there's usually some kind of change-up (I think this is called "the bridge") that is in a different key, but I'll not worry about that.

So that's the idea. I think I'll start with Music first, because I just plugged in the keyboard.

Expectations

I expect this to be fun, and to be educational, that's it. It will probably result in something that's very derivative and not very "good", but it's an experiment; maybe I'll luck out. I'm also NOT looking for proper instruction or a methodology to learn "the right way" to do this, which is part of the fun. I have a tendency to get stuck in the "optimal instruction" mindset in the first place, so deliberately approaching music in an ad-hoc fashion might help banish my stiff and unfunky mannerisms. May the Good Lord have mercy on me and show me the way! :-)

» On to Part 2