"WHAT IS FMT'S MUSIC?" An Essay by TI - Part I

There are still parts of it that I can’t verbalize well, and it’s hard to write in a language that isn’t my native tongue, but I’ll write it down.

[What's the music we're making?]

We've created about 50 tracks as part of The FURICO Music Team, and we've had a lot of people listen to them, and we're happy that they've received a little bit of feedback, but one thing that stands out in that feedback is that it's unique.

Of course, that's what I'm happy about, and that's what I'm aiming for, but what is unique about Unique?

I don't think it's just a musical story, such as unique phrases and harmonies. That kind of musical uniqueness is something that other musicians should have (not everyone, of course), and we're not the only ones who have it.

So, where is the difference between the music we make and other music, and what is the difference?

And in conclusion, what kind of music do we create?

That's what I've realized as I've been asking myself.

First of all

Our music is electronic data. (The structure of the music is very different from the conventional music. (Something that might not be called "music" if you think about it).

To elaborate on this, the music we are creating is not created with sound, but only with electronic data. In other words, we are not doing any work to create sound through physical movement, such as playing an instrument or singing.

To put it another way, conventional music is a human being's body or musical instrument as an interface, generating air vibrations to make "sound". And music is created by assembling these "sounds" in a chronological order, mainly using the body. But we're making music without going through any of that process.

In conventional music making, sound is always generated at the moment when the "phrase" or "rhythm" or whatever is the source of the "music" is born, but no sound is generated at the moment when our music is born. It is the result, not the process, that results in "sound" and "air vibrations.

Of course, there are many times in the production process when we use speakers or headphones to check the sound, but this is only for confirmation and is only an incidental part of the process.

In fact, it's not uncommon for me to get tired of listening to the sound, turn off the speakers and headphone output, write a score to MuseScore, and then visually edit the waveform in Studio One or adjust the volume just by looking at the slope of the numbers and graphs. In many cases, it is only at the stage of outputting the audio that we know what sound, phrase or song it was.

To put it another way, music packages (records, CDs, music distribution data) up to now have all converted sound into (electronic) data, but our music has been converted from electronic data into sound, which is the complete opposite.

To sum it up, our music has a very different structure from the conventional ones. Perhaps it's this difference that makes our musicality so unique and influences every part of our music.

Incidentally, it was in working with other musicians that I became keenly aware of this difference.

Most of the music creation of the collaborating partner (which is the traditional way of making music) was predicated on "immobilizing the performance (or its simulation).

Whether the data is MIDI or WAV, it's just a difference in the recording method of the performance, and most of the data is basically a human performance or a simulation of it. In other words, as I mentioned earlier, I am making music through physical expression or simulation of it.

In this case, the score is only a note for the performance and is only needed to guide the performance or to ensure reproducibility. Certainly, with that kind of creation, the score doesn't really matter much. That's why I thought there were so many people who said, "I don't use sheet music in my compositions.

This is also true of the "new type of musician" who composes with a combination of sampling material. The original sampling material is live music or other everyday sounds, which are packaged and waveformized from what has already become "sound". I put them together side by side on my computer display to create music. The reproducibility of the music is guaranteed by the DAW software.

The common point of both is that they cannot create a score or music data until the music is complete.

Our music, on the other hand, is about "creating a score, that is, composing". The process of creating a score is the creating music.

To be specific, our music, the sounds and phrases that come from it, are thorough, data and abstract. It is created by simply inputting the sounds in your own brain as computer data.

It is not a physical expression at all. At least the phrases that I (TI) create are not the kind of phrases that I want to play or play on the piano at all. As you can see, in order to assemble a work without going through physical expression, you have to have a musical score or its equivalent in the process of creation.

In this case, the score is not just a guide for performance or a note to ensure reproducibility, it is the canvas on which the painter writes his picture.

The same is true for tone, for example, when creating music with physical expression, the vocalist's vocals and the guitarist's guitar and the sounds he can use and the song are one and the same, and it's very difficult to think about them in isolation.

On the other hand, for us, tone is a means to achieve the sound we imagine, and we sometimes use an acoustic instrument with tone, but we just want to apply the sound, and it doesn't matter if it is that instrument or not.

So when we create a song on MuseScore, we're not too concerned about the tone. It can be changed at any time later on. For example, whether it's a violin sound or a brass sound, the phrase doesn't change whether it's a violin sound or a brass sound. Anyway, I'm only concerned with the phrases and the sound that the combination creates.

So, in the songs we create, we use sounds outside of the instrument's register, even on acoustic instruments, without worrying about anything else. This is also music that can be done because it is electronic data.

(To be continued)