Outlining Books for Learning

Every once in a while I come across a book that excites me so much that I want to absorb it in a structured manner so I can properly test the ideas in the field. The first book I outlined in such a fashion was an advance copy of Tim Ferriss' The Four Hour Work Week; the concepts in it were so novel and plentiful that I needed some way of keeping them straight in my head. Unfortunately, I have a poor memory and a somewhat ad-hod note taking process. So today, I'm taking a break from my Groundhog Day Resolutions definition to figure out what I can do to improve it.

Past Learning Challenges

When I was a student, I was a terrible note-taker because I didn't have a clear idea of what the key goals were. I had the vague idea that I was supposed to memorize and reproduce facts on demand, a task that I found so tedious that I became rather resistant to everything that smacked of rote learning. The first problem was that I always skeptical of facts presented without a context I could intuitively and/or viscerally grasp; this was a great barrier to memorization, because my mind wasn't receptive. Nevertheless, I took notes in a somewhat-futile attempt to learn in the classroom. My recollections of classroom instruction and homework all the way through my first four years of college are ones of hazy concepts and unclear goals. It was only in coursework for which I had innate curiosity that engaged, and then I would hit the second challenge: figuring out exactly what the lecturer/reading material was trying to say. I suppose partly this was my fault, as I was often not being up-to-speed on the supporting lessons of the distant past.

The problem for me has always been ambiguity of purpose in the material; the context for understanding key concepts and mapping the relationship between concepts and procedure were often lacking in a form that I could use. Of course I didn't know back then that this was the problem in my learning process, but I think the kind of work I do now is a reaction to those years of confusing immersion in poorly-designed and presented instructional experiences. I hate that feeling of not understanding something that someone is trying to teach me by repeating the same recipes over and over again.

When I realized that it was just my way of understanding the world and not stupidity, my learning process became one largely of translating existing material into a form that I could be manipulated more easily by my type of brain. The book outlining is one of those translation processes.

The Purpose of Outlines

What I like about outlines is that they present an overarching view of the subject material. For example, when I'm at the bookstore looking for new programming books, I evaluate each book by reading the Table of Contents. The Table of Contents (TOC) of a book is a 10,000 foot view of the author's understanding of the subject, and you can infer a lot from the title of the chapters and the order of their presentation. A great TOC will actually teach you something about the subject, because the chapter titles will give away information and supply contextual information about what is important to the author. A crappy TOC will read like the ingredient list of a food product you've never tasted; you can see that there's stuff in there you recognize, but you have no idea what it might be like. You just know there's a bunch of stuff in it. That's a sign that the author has approved the book as an exercise in taking inventory of his/her knowledge of the subject. This seems to be a typical approach. When the Table of Contents reads like a poem, that's an indicator that a curious and engaged mind is eager to tell me how it all flows together; that book is more likely to be useful in teaching me new concepts.

When it comes to advanced topics, I assess the TOC for its ability to break the subject down into useful conceptual areas, the subsystems that together comprise a greater interconnected system of understanding. In TOCs that also provide subchapter listings, I look for identification of key objects and conceptual landmarks; every field seems to have from 3-7 key pieces that, once identified, help me carve the material into meaty fillets of understanding. Every field has a subfield, and so complexity grows with increasing detail. If one can maintain clarity of identity, relationship, and scope of applicability for each item of understanding presented, you end up with a great working roadmap of the field; when I see this in a Table of Contents, I get very excited.

My Purposes

In outlining a book, I'm essentially trying to create a detailed mental table of contents that will act as the framework for accurate understanding. The purpose behind this, however, is to augment my own evolving framework of self-knowledge, which goes beyond the contents of a single book and encompasses the sum total of my life experiences. That would be a pretty interesting diagram to create, now that I think about it, but for the purposes of this discussion I'll limit the outlining process to what applies to my current obsession with Mihali Csikszentmihalyi's 1990 book Flow:

• Accurate capture of the overarching key concepts as I understand them, with page numbers and quotes, so I can reference them accurately in future writing.
• Create a thematic roadmap of each chapter, because each chapter appears to be a hub to an entire different world of exploration.
• Collect the interesting stories and citations.
• Develop a personal understanding of how the book is relevant to what I'm doing now.
• Be able to convey key bits of the book to associates who would find them interesting, with supporting citation.

Behind these goals are two basic desires:

• To create a useful, well-designed reference. Not because I'm so good, but because there's so much bad stuff out there. It's one of my moral imperatives.
• To make that reference available to people. Because I don't like the feeling of being frustrated in finding good reference, I don't want other people to go through the same feeling.

I'm pretty intrigued by Flow right now because it is answering a bunch of questions that I've tried to answer for years. I had found the book difficult to get into before because it takes its time introducing the subject and direction of inquiry, and stylistically the personable-yet-distant tone of the writing lulls me to sleep. Ironically, one of Csikzentmihalyi's main observations is that many people have lost the ability to "order consciousness" and "psychic energy" to achieve greater levels of fulfillment; so my snooziness makes me a prime example of this trend. Damn!

Anyway, there is quite a lot of material here to sort through, and I perceive that all of it is important. It's already very well structured, but if I want to internalize it I need to create my own structure that is compatible with my needs. Creating a good outline is my first pass.

My Outlining Experiences

I've outlined only a few books to date, having been content with half-remembering good ideas in the past. The only one I distilled into my own mental framework was my review on The 4 Hour Work Week. It's a pretty long, tedious process, and I'm wondering what I can do to make it more efficient. Or if I'm being really honest with myself, just how to make it faster and easier without compromising my purposes or standards. I think this means adopting a multi-pass approach to reading, using the purposes I outlined (accurate capture, thematic roadmap, etc.) to set different reading goals. It's like being a human multi-pass compiler, creating useful object code from each pass to compile a more optimal executable of understanding.

When I outlined T4HWW, I actually sat in my bed typing the important passages into a word processor over a couple of nights. Then, I used that transcription as the outline for the blog post, going back and forth between the book to fill in gaps of my understanding as I tried to explain it. The result was that I learned the material on-the-fly, and became aware that certain attitudes and approaches were possible, but I didn't commit any of the material to memory. That was probably enough at the time, as I mainly found the book exciting because it opened my eyes to new possibilities in "independent lifestyle design"--a lot of my current plans have been seeded with the ideas from this book. One nice side effect of the blog as outline approach was the ensuing high level of discussion in the blog comments. That's always nice to have.

The second book I outlined was The Freedom Manifesto, which was recommended by my sister after it had cheered her up on a particularly grim day of commuting from Boston's South Station. The book is essentially a manifesto against accepting that current society's highly-commercialized and materialistic nature has our best interests at heart, choosing instead to live free of soul-destroying automation . It's a fabulous book, filled with stories and calls to action, and is rather thicker book than The Four Hour Work Week, so the outlining process I had used was taking quite a bit longer. One day at Starbucks I was complaining to my BFF Erin about the tedium of the entire note-taking process, and she glibly asked why the hell I didn't just use a highlighter. I stared blankly at her for several long seconds as the sheer practicality of this sunk in, wondering why I had never thought of it. There is part of me that thinks of books as sacred, and it used to really annoy me when I checked out a library book that had been "personalized" by the previous reader. And I used to hate writing in blank notebooks, which I realized undermined the purpose of having them. However, in that moment I realized I could think of books as working copies for mining understanding, a kind of pre-printed note paper. Thus freed of my preconceptions, I got as far as distilling each chapter into a brief set of master chapter descriptions. They're handwritten in one of my notebooks, but now the process of transcription awaits me. I haven't yet mustered the energy to do so.

The third book I outlined was Stumbling On Happiness, which I'd picked up after hearing an interview with the author on National Public Radio. However, I didn't read it for a long time because I kept giving away my copy to people. I'd started it multiple times, but like Flow I found that it took its time to establish its premise, the narrative wended its leisurely way through numerous side stories, citations, and interesting tidbits. Like Flow, it's actually quite an enjoyable book once I reset my expectations of pacing to one compatible with, say, Sense and Sensibility. Anyway, after finally getting going I again found that there were innumerable useful insights scattered throughout it, each of them applicable to multiple aspects of my working and personal life; it's essentially a treatise of how the innate processes of our brain make our pursuit of happiness fraught with self-delusion and fallacious understanding. It's quite remarkable. Armed with the highlighter tip, I dove in and started marking passages that I found particularly pivotal. And that's as far as I got. One cool thing about using the highlighter is that I can pick up the book and skim it rapidly for interesting insights. What is missing, however, is the overarching structure that transforms those insights into a set of working principles that can be applied in practice. So the book sits, highlighted, but not yet reduced even to the chapter descriptions I'd done for The Freedom Manifesto.

The fourth book is Flow, and I have actually stopped outlining it because the very act of outlining was preventing me from getting into the book. And this is why I'm writing this process post now.

The Multi-Pass Approach Under Consideration

What I'm thinking of doing is reading in several stages. As a reader, I tend to skim very rapidly because I enjoy reading for ideas and events. It's the rare book that will force me to slow down and enjoy the passages as they are literally transcribed. For The Freedom Manifesto and Stumbling On Happiness, I attempted to force myself to read more slowly to better absorb the material in a studious manner, but as I've intimated before this approach just doesn't work for me. What I think what will actually work is committing to reading the book multiple times for different purposes. Is this a trick I didn't learn as a young'un? Anyway, here's what I'm thinking:

PASS 1: FRAMING - Skim very rapidly to figure out what the book is trying to say. Where is it starting? What are the underlying premises? What are the key claims? How is it supporting the claims? What does the book conclude? Use highlighter to put a dot in the margin, and use bookmarks to tag the critical pages. There usually aren't that many of them; the insight-mapping pass will come later. The result of Pass 1 is a loose framework of the book's major ideas and how they link together. You would think that the synopsis printed on the back of the book should accomplish this, but there's an annoying tendency for the back-of-the-book claim it's interesting without giving anything away. At the end of this pass, write a synopsis and try to figure out the author's own perspective, background, and training based on the book, by chapter. This is invaluable when trying to understand the key arguments later, and to infer what the missing assumptions are (if any).

PASS 2: FRAMEWORK BUILDING - The second pass through the book is more leisurely, and now that I have some idea of what the book is trying to say and how it's saying it I can spend more time considering the arguments in each chapter. Now I can use the highlighter to mark actual passages that I think are relevant to understanding the supporting mechanics behind each claim and conclusion. How is the author making each point? What is the reasoning and justification behind each point? Are the links clear to me? The result from this pass is, ideally, a transcribed list of citations that fills in the framing I did in PASS 1 as a Word document, which will later become critical source material for synthesizing my own thoughts on the material. It's helpful to have it all in one place.

PASS 3: NARRATIVE CAPTURE - Every book has some good anecdotes in them, and I find that in day-to-day conversation I like to pass them on to people I'm talking to. This pass is another fast scanning of the material, by now familiar territory from the first two passes, to find the good stories. This is something I haven't done before, but I would probably use a different color highlighter to mark them for later citation or transcription.

At this point, I have marked everything I need to convert what I've gotten from the book into new source material for my own work. However, I've only conceptually solved the problem: the bottleneck is getting the marked passages into digital form. Some solutions I've tried or am considering:

• Use my voice transcription software to capture the passages I read aloud. I've used Dragon Dictate 7, and have been surprised at how effective it is in understanding me. Recognition speed is vastly better than I remember, and being able to say "Page 4: passage quote blah blah blah New Paragraph" is pretty neat, because using the dictation software with a headset leaves your hands free to hold the book and maintain eye contact with it. On the down side, tricky passages with odd vocabulary require a lot of manual correction, and doing it through voice command leaves something to be desired. Plus, to ensure accurate transcription I end up shifting my attention to the screen and back to the book to confirm accuracy, which ends up being the major loss of efficiency.

• I could get one of those portable digital recorders and then use a foot pedal control / video logging product (shameless plug: like buddy company Inquirium's InqScribe software) to capture what I've read aloud. Advantages of this approach is that with a foot pedal, my hands are free to focus on typing and my eyes stay on the screen. My feet handle replaying the audio, and my ears can concentrate on listening.

• I could also find a transcription service and email them the audio file, and hope that the transcription is accurate.

• I could photocopy each page and cut the results up into snippets I paste up on a big piece of cardboard. But that is pretty old-school. Would be fun for smaller books or individual chapters, though.

• I've seen ads for portable OCR scanners that look like giant pens, so you can theoretically grab lines of text as easily as "highlighting" them straight from the book. OCR products tend to give me the willies because they seem to not be very reliable, but it has been ten years since I have last played with it. Perhaps there has been some improvement in the reliability and ease of use. Not that I am very hopeful; I saw some business card scanning software recently and it looked like it was 10 years old. Clunky, clunky, clunky.

• I could possibly buy or illicitly acquire an e-text version of the book, but then I would have to reread it to find all my highlight marks. The advantage of paper is that it's much easier to index through physical means.

I don't want to do this for every book I read, of course. The point of all this activity is to create a working set of ideas that I can re-purpose and restructure into a new set of design principles. I find that I work well if I can have everything in one manipulation space. For ideas that have no direct visual analog, that space (for me) is a Word or Adobe InDesign document. InDesign is a great idea space because it allows me to visually organize the text more easily than Word. Plus, I can use the typographic controls to make them look nice, which is one of my personal aesthetic requirements.

Then, after all of this is done, I can do this:

PASS 4: LEISURELY READ - After some time has passed, it's nice to read the book again and see what different insights flicker across my mind.

So that's what I'm thinking right now. How do y'all do it?

Realistically High Expectations, Part I

Last week I made the connection between how I "drive" myself poorly with how unskilled drivers run terrible laps at the local Go Kart track. My expectation was that the vehicle--myself--is infinitely fast, instantaneous in response, and indestructible, so I mash the pedals and jerk the steering wheel expecting to excel at what I do just because I'm doing it aggressively. So I hit the barriers on the curves, skid out, am ultimately disappointed with my performance because I've not learned to recognize the limits of the vehicle. However, I know that a skilled driver can exact a thrilling experience with the same cart and track, because he/she knows how to drive to the limit: they've studied the dynamics of the track and know the parameters of the cart; their performance appears unworldly to us noobs. Our expectations, as drivers both of go-karts and our own lives, are out of whack with reality.

So how did our unrealistic expectations come to exist? I blame the instant-fix mentality that pervades our daily lives, catering to our appetite for gratification now. I suppose it's not really our fault, as instant gratification is wired into our primitive brains; the idea that things can and should be powerful and easy has been a long-standing technological trend. We love the idea of wielding magic wands, guns, and iPhones; we just need genies in bottles, infinite rounds of ammunition, and server-side programming to complete the fantasy. In the case of the iPhone and thousands of other amazing products, that fantasy is our reality.

The Industrial Revolution taught us that hard work can yield to the efficiencies of mechanical mass-production, and in the subsequent shift to the consumer-driven economy we've been conditioned by advertising that we should benefit from this. The emphasis has shifted to granting us incredible powers over our lives, so long as we constrain our actions to that which technology and commerce has been able monetize. And advertising reinforces this message of push-button, wipe-on wipe-off ease. We have a plentiful supply of magic bullets supplied to us by hucksters, and we're all too willing to believe that we're capable of directing our fire with competence.

Redirecting Expectations

I've been noticing over the past couple of years just how impatient I am, and I had adjusted my productivity strategy to include more instantaneous feedback to help maintain motivation and interest in longer-term tasks I treated my lack of patience as character flaw inherent to me, and figured it was easier to just work around it. "I'm not great at being mindful and being focused", I told myself.

I thought I had an intellectual understanding of what that was, but in reality I didn't; I confused the results of mindfulness and focus with knowing what it was. My attempts to be mindful consisted of removing distractions, simplifying and shortening task lists, and telling myself that it was OK to do so. I attempted to work within what I thought I could muster, and to some extent it did work in that I felt better because I'd lowered my standards. But this is not elevated consciousness; it's working within what I thought I could do. And although this has led to an increased sense of well-being, lowering my standards is a cop-out no matter how I spin it. If I'm not making the changes I desire, I am really just coping with my lack of fulfillment, telling myself that it doesn't matter as much as I thought. On the race track, this is the equivalent of driving very conservatively and slowly, making sure that I do not exceed the safe speed and stay within the boundaries. As a result, I can finish the lap instead of wiping out, and I'm alive to tell the tale. Don't get me wrong...finishing anything is awesome. It just isn't as awesome as going fast and looking good while doing it. I don't think anyone who has a dream really wants to settle for doing things half-way, except in a world where expectations are kept low. Bah!

I want to be able to set my expectations high.

I assumed that maybe my goals were unrealistic, and scaled them back. But perhaps that view is too simplistic. A more satisfying model of productivity would incorporate realistic expectations with constant feedback as the high-performing vehicle that we want to be. To deny this desire is to just lie to ourselves. The secret to getting there is to consider what it takes to become a master driver, the mind that guides the actions that extract the pleasure in performance. The limits exist, but perhaps I can make better use of them. So I am redefining mindfulness to mean responding well to the sensory inputs related to whatever task is at hand. And I am redefining focus to being able to consistently detect the conditions of the environment such that I can anticipate what needs to be done. These are skills that I know can be trained in an environment where the number of sensory inputs are high and tangibly-effective process is available; there is no helping it. It comes down, I suspect, to the ability to perceive the inputs in the first place, and then having the guts to push them to see how the next set of inputs will change.

I suspect a lot of our productivity challenges are related to the difficulty in learning how to see.

More tomorrow.

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

Any C# Game Developers North of Boston?

I've been slugging it out with C# and Managed DirectX for the past couple of months, and haven't made as much progress as I'd like. My conclusion: I need people to jam with to develop momentum. I am pretty much building my development process up from scratch, as it's been years since I've done this full time, and I miss having other people to talk to about technology, game design, and interactive ass-kicking.

There possibly is a group already meeting that does this; I should check out the long-running Boston Post Mortem again, our local area game developer social group to see what's going on. I figure there's got to be a few people in Southern New Hampshire / Metro Boston North--and it only really takes a few--who are motivated and skilled enough to tackle some game development topics and develop best practices. The ideal candidate already knows one of the following so they can bring some skill to the table:

• C# / Microsoft Programming Environments
• Game Development, especially tool chains and workflow
• Object Oriented Programming
• DirectX 9 / Win32 Programming

I used to work in the game industry, so I know something of the second topic though it's pretty out of date. I'm a decent-though-workmanlike programmer, something of a architectural purist that's learned to make concessions to just getting things done. I love documenting APIs for some reason. And I dig algorithms, version control tools, debugging, and Joel on Software.

If you're interested in forming a local study group, let me know and let's get together. If long distance is workable through online collaboration tools, then we can try that too. This is related to my main project for 2008 to develop a large-scale museum exhibit, so I will be working on this full time. I'm not out to create the next cutting-edge graphics demo; I just want to have a decent architecture built on some good tools.

Drop me an email via my contact form or leave a comment here. To maintain high signal-to-noise, I will classify interested parties as either a contributor or a subscriber:

• Contributors are developers with experience in one of those three areas I mentioned, and are genuinely interested in understanding the technology to apply it to their active projects. We expect results from each other, in other words, though we are all working on our own projects.

• Subscribers are people who are interested in what we're doing, but may not have the requisite time or experience to contribute knowledge and code. Nevertheless, they want to know what's possible, and maybe learn something about how they could start doing what we're doing. 3D and 2D Artists, interactive developers who use Flash/scripted environments, museum exhibit designers, advertising technologists, and experience designers would probably fall into this category. The input from this group of people is a necessary part of developing anything that has life in it, and communicating how this stuff is technically achieved will provide valuable insight. Or so I hope.

Of course, this presumes that people are actually reading this and care :-) At least I tried :-)