Moving Hands

First of all: I just updated my “About Me” and “About This Blog” page. Go check those out.

Okay, on with the post.

One of my hobbies is making CD mixes. I work pretty hard on my CD mixes. Now, I’ve known people who just throw random songs into a playlist and then call it “done.” No offense to those people – it works for them, after all – but I tend to be more obsessive about making the songs all fit with each other. For example, I wouldn’t put a quiet, serious, acoustic song about atheism next to some sort of crazy techno party dance music. I also like to make themed CDs – for example, one of my current CD mixes is named DRIVE FASTER!!! and it has all sorts of really fast-tempo songs.

One issue that I’ve encountered, though, is that I feel like I lack a lot of musical vocabulary. When I was in high school, I studied music theory for Academic Decathlon, but none of it stuck.
Part of it was that, although I liked some music in high school, I wasn’t super-interested in music until recently.
Most of it was just the way that AcaDec presents its information in general: they give you a pile of extremely dense text to read, then tell you to memorize it for the competitions in test-taking. Seriously, this stuff may not have as many big words like “semiotics” or “ontology” as I’ve encountered in college, but it is really really freakin’ dense nonetheless.

Basically, AcaDec threw me into the ocean in the middle of a stormy night. Not exactly a great way to learn how to swim. I definitely feel like I could have used some “Music Appreciation 101″ texts. Stuff like “major key songs are usually happy” is a lot more useful for a beginner than “Newton believed that the diatonic scale corresponded to the seven colors of the rainbow.” Especially when you don’t even know what the fuck an octave is. (I’m sorry if this last fact about Newton is incorrect, by the way – after five years, I’ve forgotten the music theory I learned in AcaDec.)

Incidentally, one thing I’ve found really helpful in the intervening years? Don’t laugh, but – last.fm. Its tags are like a freakin’ goldmine of knowledge that explain musical history and the key features of certain genres very well. From last.fm, I’ve learned the definitions of dreampop vs trip-hop, hardcore vs metalcore, etc. Yeah, some genres are totally made up by the listeners – just look at “lolicore,” if you dare – but even trash can be educational. All in all, it’s a much better way for me to learn about music than “Please memorize these key facts about Beethoven’s symphonies, then answer A, B, C, D, or E.” Also, bugging my hearing friends who are music geeks (or who just really like music a lot) has helped. Thanks, hearing friends, for putting up with my questions!

What’s that? Oh, how does this relate to CD mixes, you ask?

Well, right now, I usually end up saying, “This is good enough – I’m gonna burn it and go for a drive with this CD now.” (I really like listening to music in a car, especially one equipped with strong speakers with good bass, but that’s another post altogether.) I have fun making CD mixes – I just listen to everything and try to fit it all together by ear. But I wonder, what if I could say, “Hey, so, this song has jargon jargon jargon and is in the minor scale; it’d go just wonderfully with this song that is also in the minor scale but is jargon blah jargon etc”? If I could identify what is going on in the songs, would I be able to make more precisely matched mixes?

Or is it better that I don’t know the vocabulary? After all, “This slow and serious song about atheism would go well before this song that starts out slowly, then builds up to something louder and faster – then I’ll put the crazy party techno song after that” works pretty well for me at this point.

I think that, in the end, I’d like to learn more vocabulary so as to better identify what kind of mix I’m making. But, when it comes down to it, the thing that really helped me to enjoy music was saying “Screw this, I don’t care what hearing people say, I’ll enjoy it on my own terms.” I mean, this is just a hobby – I don’t have any career aspirations to become a professional DJ or anything like that, so having fun making CDs is more important to me in the end than making 100% perfect CDs.