When I write music, I am always trying to think of all of the different things it can be. Sometimes, music can be very fancy and difficult, and sometimes, it can be very, very simple. Either kind can be exciting good music, or boring bad music. I believe that music can also be both simple and fancy at once, and still be good music (or, bad music).

It's important to remember that just having a good idea about music doesn't mean you have good music, it just means you have a good idea. And just because you can say in very few words what a piece of music is or does, this doesn't mean you have boring music, you just have boring music to talk about. And talking about music is not like listening to music. Both can be good, but some people like doing one more than another. The bad part is when people forget which one they're doing, or which one they like more.

I think writing music that uses every key on the piano is like driving a car that uses all of the gas in the tank. Why do that, unless you really need to? I think that writing music that uses less of the possible notes, and is still good music, is like riding your bike to work.

If you can't think of what that would sound like, in your head, just from reading words about it, just think of any song you could hear on the radio. The song you're thinking of probably uses very few of the possible different notes, and probably there are many people who like it a lot. Usually, these songs are fun to listen to, but boring to talk about. The songs might make people feel strong feelings or want to dance, but there are not a lot of words to be said about the songs. This is partly because people usually like to talk about notes a lot, so we have lots and lots of words to talk about notes. But we have fewer words for the textures of sounds and their rhythms— and so it is harder to talk about them. This is where I want to do new things in my music, in the textures of sounds especially.

If new, interesting music is also going to be easy for people to understand, it has to be in some ways like the music people hear every day. But it can't try to be just like that music, it has to be its own type of music, and be interesting. It can take some of the best ideas from that music, to use for new and different music.

I try to do this by using a computer to help a person playing an instrument make more types of sounds than they could before. I think of it as a new space, made by the computer, that the person is playing music in. If a real space changes the sound of an instrument a little, an imaginary space could change the sound a lot. And the change could be in different, new, exciting ways that are hard to think of if you just think of a normal space that a person could really stand in and play.

Still, it is important that the computer not get in the way of the person making the music. They've spent a lot of time learning their instrument, and I don't want them to have to spend a lot of time learning computers, too. That's my job.

(Inspired by xkcd #547, and Douglas Hofstadter's Einstein essays and, of course, Simple English Wikipedia.)