Andrew Sega quotes - page 2
I think there are some objective [musical] qualities... how complex something is, how melodic, how diverse the tonality is, et cetera. But I could also make a piece of music that contains all of those and yet isn't "good" from a subjective viewpoint. For example, take Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", Beatles "Yesterday", and Underworld's "Born Slippy", and play them all on top of each other at the same time. Great music in their own right, but terrible sounding together.
Andrew Sega
I think [Britney Spears] is a perfect example of an artificial construct -- someone with a decent voice and a very marketable image, that producers and business people turned into a pop star. Unfortunately, I think it took a toll on her, mentally, and I feel bad for the trouble that success has brought onto her. However, her music is pretty disposable, and she doesn't have the intelligence and cultural impact of someone like, say, Madonna.
Andrew Sega
A lot of my tracked music was written when I was very young, relatively speaking. I was very optimistic, I had finally discovered some sort of public musical outlet, it was generally a very happy time. So, the music of that time sort of reflects that, I think? By the time I started the Alpha Conspiracy project, I was older, a bit more sophisticated (and, well, cynical), and so the music got more complex.
Andrew Sega
We started out in the middle ages creating music which had certain desirable physical properties (for example, a major chord sounds "nice" because the frequencies are in integer ratios to each other). And then as society evolved, we created these emotional contexts for certain instruments and progressions. Major-chord arpeggios sound "happy", minor chords sound "sad", chromatic scales can sound "scary", et cetera. In the 20th century, film soundtracks reinforced this point as people associated certain kinds of music with certain visual and emotional experiences. It's a giant feedback loop, really; once you grow up in a given culture, it leaves this musical fingerprint on you which colors your experiences.
Andrew Sega
So, if you played a C major chord to pretty much any person on the planet, they'd say that it sounds "harmonious" (or pleasing, or happy, etc, etc). But now when you want to put chords and melodies in an ordering and make a larger piece called a "song", then that is a much more difficult process, and gets very subjective. At that point, it's not just the chords, it's the lyrics, rhythms, instrumentation, tempo, intensity, any number of other things that goes into a song... so many variables that it's almost impossible to predict how a song will affect a given person.
Andrew Sega
Well, when music "moves" someone, it doesn't necessarily have to be in a positive direction. Some people certainly get moved by darker music, and there are all sorts of emotions which music can create that are interesting -- aggression, foreboding, anger, fear. Not everyone wants to feel happy all the time :)
Andrew Sega
I think much of the conflict in the world is directly the result of people's varying interpretations of reality, or perhaps you could term it the "distortions" in their lenses. The best one can do is to try to consume as much knowledge as possible, both from your experiences, and from the words of others, in order to try to form a complete picture of the world.
Andrew Sega
