A Painful Realization
When I was a young child, I remember that I used to sit in the bathtub and play with various floating objects. I also had some kind of spray foam soap that was in a can decorated to look like a robot. I would sit there and hum long dramatic musical pieces to myself that I was making up on the fly.
When I grew into a slightly older boy, I had one of those spring-suspended hobby horses. It was positioned directly in front of the stereo in our living room. I would ride it for hours at a time, zoned out, listening to my parents' record collection, which included stuff like Santana and Bobby Fuller. I would go on long flights of fancy in my imagination, building strange flying machines or having other adventures, always aligned with the music as the appropriate soundtrack. My zone-out sessions were so long that I wore through the metal springs on that hobby horse. Multiple times.
As a tween, I loved playing computer games on my Commodore 64. I also loved the wide array of music that they featured. I used a cheap tape recorder to make a "mix tape" of all of my favorite game songs, even in-game ones, by just holding the recorder near the computer speakers. That allowed me the joy of listening to these chiptunes without having to actually play the games.
Then I was a teenager. I got a drumkit and taught myself how to play rock drums (badly). I assembled collections of friends into a seemingly endless stream of garage bands, full of angst and good times, in which we constantly practiced for gigs that never really happened. I wrote many of our songs. I remember placing different-sized coins out on the coffee table to try to illustrate visually the concept of "sections" of a song to my bandmates: quarters are verse, nickels are chorus, this dime here represents the solo. They would look at the coins for reference while we rocked out.
Around the same time, I learned about composing multichannel MOD files. I learned the joy of finding the music others had written and shared online, which I could download and re-use instruments from. I started understanding that music could be composed using something besides just traditional notes and staves.
I began dating a girl who was not only a skilled pianist, but interested in the study of music cognition. Perhaps amusingly, she was also a big GWAR fan.
Then it came time to go to college. Like most people that age, I was still trying to figure out who I was and who I wanted to be.
Eventually, my love of the art and creativity I had seen in computer games, coupled with my love of technology, convinced me that I should study Computer Science. This may have been where I went wrong.
Throughout college, I continued writing music in my dorm rooms, much to the extreme chagrin of my downstairs neighbors. Technology advanced and I started composing using more sophisticated module formats than MOD, with more channels: Screamtracker, Composer 669, Impulse Tracker. I even got hired to write the music for a couple of shareware games, with a profit-sharing agreement. The music won rave reviews and awards.
I sold my drumkit.
As a Senior, one of my Senior Honors projects was a program I wrote, inspired by some comments by Brian Eno in an issue of Wired, that would allow musicians to compose snippets of music then "cross breed" them with snippets of music from other artists. The software did analysis of the structure of the two songs and represented that as a type of genetic code. Then the "offspring" style could be used to compose new music algorithmically, which sounded like a blend of the styles of the two original musicians. I got an A.
Then I got married, and I got busy with a job in the computer game industry. I had a hard drive failure that destroyed all of my unfinished songs, which was a heartbreaking event for me, and unfortunately, a landmark one. I made the decision to stop composing. I always assumed the ability to compose music was in no way special. Anybody could do it, I thought. It's not hard at all for me, so I'm sure it's not hard at all for anybody else. I should stop wasting my time, I thought.
A decade passed. It took some important events (the collapse of my marriage, my beginning to play taiko, and my meeting of some incredible local friends) to fully re-awaken in me my love of composing music.
So here's what the painful realization was.
For most of my life, I've thought of myself as a computer programmer who dabbles in music. I've had a wide variety of ideas for software projects, but somehow I just never felt like working on them. I wanted to be like those guys who love hacking away into the night...but I never was. I can easily stay up until 3 AM writing music, but not writing code. I have a job as a programmer. I'm very good at it. But I don't love it. What I love is writing music. I do love technology, but what I love most about technology is when it helps me unleash my creativity.
The painful realization for me is that it's been right in front of my face for my entire life, I just chose not to see it. So here I am, 35 years old, finally "getting it". I suppose I should be happy that I figured it out, but it's painful to realize how much time I spent missing such an obvious and fundamental truth about who I am.
I have built up much of my life around the assumption that I am first and foremost a Computer Geek, not a Musician. But the reality, the simple truth that I can only now finally accept, is that I am a Musician, who happens to enjoy using computers, and who works with them to pay the bills.
I don't love coding. I will never love coding. I have never loved coding. I like it...sometimes.
But what I love, what I truly love, and what I must embrace about myself, is that I love creating music. I love creating things. It is the process of creation that I enjoy, not the gears behind it.
This, for me, is a massive inflection point. There's no turning back.
