I noticed one of the limiting factors in producing my own original electronic music tracks was my lack of the ability to generate a real melody.
So, I did an experiment where I took an existing Mozart Sonata, ripped out a simple progression, and created a simple track around that progression. The result is pretty interesting: Download MP3.
In addition to this, I read up a bit on chord progressions, and came up with a simple note progression and then build on top of that in a fractal fashion, and came up with this result: Download MP3.
It is interesting how fractal in nature music really is. From synthesizing sounds, to creating a melody, to creating a song with transpositions on that melody, to generating a mix of various songs — the principles remain very similar.
* Update: I was pretty hooked on this fractal concept, so I went ahead and created another track: Download MP3.
caustik's blog 
this may sound paradoxical but to improve productivity with music its a good idea to downgrade your mental level… atm your brain works at a high level… u have good memory… a good logical sense… a clear thinking environment… and your brain is defragmented, scandisked and for the most time quite errorfree… (cxbx is a proof that your brain works that well!)
ive been that way too…
back then i had no talent whatsoever in creating music… everything i created sounded so logical no matter if i composed simple or advanced tracks and all productions i did was a result from thinking clearly: “how can i make music and make it sound good”……….. clear thinking was the problem…
nowadays, many years later, ive been through several disaeases that have affected how im thinking now… its probably a virus infection or something like that cause it started after eating insufficiently cooked meat… ive been suffering a huge degradation of the brain since then… losing memories… and corrupted/distorted memories… hallucinations… and also i cant think clearly anymore… logical thinking have become very difficult now since i cant hold on to one thougt for more than seconds… theres always noise and distortion, and its common that i forget what im thinking/speaking about while im thinking/saying it…
from having a brain in order, i now have a brain in chaos…
…one of the flipsides of this is that ive grown a mysteriously impressive talent at composing music/melodies…
lets say for example… if i hear a new melodic techno/trance song in the morning of a day… when i later at the day try to recollect what ive heard i will hear a new song (due to memory distortion)… a new beat… new tones and melody… and the result will be a song in the same category and style but a completly new track (maybe 10-25% will be comparable to the real track)…
another example… if im sleeping/dreaming and suddenly realize that its just a dream, i can take control of the dream… then i can decide (in the dream) that i want to go to a club and listen to good music… it may sound unimaginable, but when i get to the club in the dream i will hear awesome multitrack music, rich both athmospherewise and melodywise… and when i wake up i can use that material if im quick enough to write down what ive “heard”, before forgetting it…
…anyways… i just wanted to comment this subject when i saw it here… also i can say that u produce surprisingly good music for not suffering from this kind of distortions…
…also… perhaps u can use this info to your advantage somehow… perhaps u can extract your creations from logical chaos rather than logical logic… 🙂
p.s. btw, i hope that u continue developing cxbx one day (unless ure already doing so)
kind regards / lastninja (kista4022 at gmail)
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Wow. Great feedback.
I understand what you’re saying. I find it difficult to slip out of my normal obsessively objective mode of thinking, and into a more organic and creative mode. I’ve been striving for a while to become better at controlling my mind to see the world in a more subjective manner.
When listening to or authoring mixes, my brain is drawn more into this way of thought, and it feels good. This is probably the main reason why I’ve been so obsessed with music the past few years. It gives my brain the ability to see the world in a different light.
You referred to this mode swap as a ‘downgrade’ — I actually do not believe that to be the case. When the brain stops constantly choosing the most likely answer to it’s questions — during it’s thought process — it becomes more likely to find creative solutions to problems. Your sudden mysterious musical talent is a perfect example of this. Some people use drugs to get into that type of state — you get to live in it 🙂
If you picture problem solving as a network of knowledge, with concepts tied together by their statistical relevance, then creativity is the frequency at which you choose the less-likely solution. Is this any less valuable? Maybe if you’re solving problems in objective science, where all solutions are strict and structured. But, on the other hand, if you are solving any problem relating to the fuzziness of the real world — then this creativity will inevitably benefit you in a big way.
I won’t babble more about this theory — but I have given it a lot of thought, and it’s the foundation of some development I have been doing off and on for the past year, relating to artificial intelligence. Maybe some time over the next year I will have a site up describing that in more detail 🙂
— anyway, thanks for the constructive criticism. I couldn’t agree with you more, and I’m always looking for ways to stop my brain from being so logical. It’s funny you should mention lucid dreaming, because I also believe that to be a powerful creative catalyst.
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its true as u say about finding interresting illogical solutions that can broaden perspectives (and stuff like that)…
however, i would personally choose to revert to how i was before if i had the chance… i didnt tell u so much about the downsides from this illness… like… the inner thinking environment has shrinked… lets say that i want to imagine going downhill a mountain snowboarding/skiing or traveling through space… i can still think these things… but not in the same immersivness and detail as i could before… i lose concentration very easily… its like pressing the reset button suddenly on a computer and all windows close and i have to recollect everything as quickly as possible before it “dissappears” if i want to keep thinking about it, and it sometimes happens with just a few seconds intervals…
i can remember being intelligent, having structured thoughts… and to compare with computers i can also say that the FSB was very fast and i was good at multitasking… keeping lots of stuff in the head at the same time… i could easily and quickly come up with solutions to new situations/problems without any straining on the brain…… i could easily distinguish relationships with family and (different) friends and could adjust to different types of communicationstyles depending on the prefference of who i talked to………. u could say that i had a bigger internal universe and almost everything was under control and in order in that universe…
i can take a good example…
when i was 10 years old and we learned about circles and Pi (in math) in school we learned the formula that:
RADIUS x RADIUS x 3.14(Pi) = AREA
…back then, i immeadiatly started thinking “why is that?”… i started thinking “why is Pi=3.14?”… i couldnt accept this rule without knowing and understanding the idea behind it… so within myinternal universe i started creating different graphical experiments… i thought… what if i pretend that the circle is a square and use the diameter of the circle as the “side” of the square (cube)… (and i knew how to calculate the area of a square)… so lets say that the circles diameter was 10cm, i imagined a square which sides was 10cm… so i calculated:
10cm x 10cm = 100cm2
and i tried to fit it in the square which sides was the same as the diameter…
…suddenly i realized why Pi was used the way it was…
i divided Pi by 4 and got the value of 0.785… or as i thought of it: “78.5%”… i realized that i just as well could calculate the circle with a diamater of 10cm by this formula:
(10cm x 10cm) x 78.5% = 78.5cm2
i then understood that Pi was used to cut out the percentage of a calculated square that isnt covered by the circle (that would fit in the square) with the same diameter as the square… (…what i still dont understand though is why the school teaches that Pi is 3.14 which is really confusing to understand when they instead could have thaught us that 78.5% of the square with the same side as the circles diameter is the area of the circle and redefine Pi to 78.5%…
…phew… long example… but its a good example of what i cant do anymore right now… i cant hold on to a thougt for very long… and like i said before facts get distorted so while im thinking i have to redefine alot of stuff because or the end result will get wrong…
another example is that i cant adjust how i behave to different kinds of company anymore because i dont remember how to act to different people… i dont remember how they behave, and i dont remember how i behave…
the consequences for example is that i may joke with ppl in inappropriate ways… the relationships r blending togheter internally, so i make misjudgements all the time…
a good example here is that i can behave the same to grandma (~90 years old) like i behave to ~25 year old friends…
all the distortions also have an effect on speaking and writing correctly as well…
after writing a reply like this here, i have to do alot of vocabullary and grammatic/structural errorcorrection… if u would read the first revision it looks like a 7 year olds vocabullary (which was much better before even if im swedish)… alot of additions is needed to clarify what i mean and so on… it may take 30-45 mins writing a msg like this just because i have to make sure i make clear statements and include all info…
its very depressing to think in such a distorted way…
before getting ill i thought: “no matter what chaos i may encounter during life i can always count on miself”… that isnt true anymore and i have to rely on other ppl’s judgements alot of the time…
i miss that rich athmosphere of having these big contrasts in life, having different kind of relationships with ppl instead of acting the same way to everyone and becoming more and more like a zombie… i miss being able to ponder on “intelligent” stuff for hours while travelling and having nothing else to do, and still remember the end result/conclusions of the pondering for a long time to come… not just a distorted version of it… actually, i want to remember everything that have happened during life, and i did a good job of it until i got ill… i remembered almost everything in more or less detail before (even some totally irrevelant conversations ive had with ppl at 5 years of age or less)…
im sorry to hog your comment section with stuff like this but i just wanted to add that this state of mind is nothing to strive to get permanently… atm its so depressing being this dumb (relieved of IQ)… of course… if it would be possible to achieve this state momentarily without any sideeffects it could be useful but as it is now i wander around feeling ill and confused all the time…
back when i still was intelligent i often thought that most ppl i meet was excessivly dumb and that it was their own fault because they didnt try to be smart or have good memory… i mean… if even i could remember exactly what specs every friends computer system have (incl brand and version of almost all components) they should atleast know how many mhz or ram their own computer have… today im ashamed to say that im not sure of the exact specs of any computer i have… and this would have been unimaginable just 5 years ago…
im sorry again to hog up this commentsection but like i said this illness have destroyed how i want to live life, and also the future plans i had that looked so bright and now starts to vanish more and more, and like many things else leaves an uncomfortable emptyness or distorted noise that is always straining the mind and dont leave room for any mental rest…
p.s. even if im much more talented in creating music nowadays, lots of “material” gets lost due to that ive lost the intelligence/competence i previously had in working with creational music software so the “inspiration” still gets wasted before getting reconstructed on the computer most of the time
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Pi is 3.14. Even that thought is illogical because you are saying Pi should be changed to 0.785, but if it were not for Pi you never would have been able to get 0.785 or the area of the circle. Correct me if I’m wrong and no offense.
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And fractal music is great, it’s been around for ages and poeple are only now starting to wise up to the REAL methods of classical composition. The methods that were used by all the greats, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc…
Math is a large foundation to how almost everything works in the physical world, music included.
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