The creative constraints of a mixtape
Lately, most of my music listening has been about ‘discovering’ songs in multitudes. Every day I come across something new and this instant novelty of discovering new songs ruins the joy of repetitive listening and understanding the nuances of a song.
That’s when I came across this beautiful article on Medium by Dan Dalton and it gave me ideas to form my own mix tape, if not weekly at least a monthly one, for more slow and repetitive listening. If you are a minimalist like me, you might want to consider this idea.
“Art consists in limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
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Dan says that one of the beautiful aspects of a mixtape is that it has a limit. And, it’s this limit that makes it all the more special. After all, we are hardwired to understand stories and scarcity and we value scarce resources more.
“I’m a story teller. It’s how I make sense of the world. I need a narrative. To do that I need limits. A creative constraint. I limit my playlists to ten songs. You could fit many more than that on two sides of tape––depending on the tape — and almost double that on a CD. But ten songs is enough to tell story without losing the listener. On average I end up with around 40 minutes of music; a focused, cohesive collection spun around a single theme. The tracks aren’t always killer — that’s often not the point — but it means they aren’t filler either. It’s about finding the right ten songs. Putting them in the right order. That’s the joy, other than the listening. The challenge of it. Like putting the right words in a sentence.”
“The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem.”
“At some level, music is often the soundtrack for something else.People pay a premium for a story, every time.”
He further adds that even in today’s world of predictive analytics and computer-generated suggestions, the act of human curation is more relevant than ever.
“It pays to be obsessive about how songs segue into each other. To think about the story you’re telling. This is why making playlists by hand will always beat out an algorithm. As good as they are, algorithms lack nuance, they can find similar songs, match tempo, but they have limits. They suck at making left field choices.”
“A good curator is thinking not just about acquisition and selection, but also contextualizing.”
“Ideas are the most valuable thing. Good ones make all the difference; bad ones can hold us back, maybe even destroy us. If we can focus on finding the right ones, helping distill them, and transfer them as quickly as possible, we can get more of that. Curation is that means to the end.”
Here are some tips that can help you curate your own mixtape.
“The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.”
“The mix tape is a list a quotations, a poetic form in fact: the cento is a poem made up of lines pulled from other poems. The new poet collects and remixes.
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Could this mean that we may have to delete some of the music from our not-so-regularly-heard collection? It is a painful heartbreaking process, I know. This article by The Minimalists might help.
Also, do check this mixtape I created on my SoundCloud page.
[UPDATE 1]
The reason we love live gigs and concerts is because of the constraint induced by time. We love tight deadlines and that's a reason we love football games, quarterly reviews, and SMART goals in organizations. Deadlines are a creative constraint and they induce a sense of meaning to things we do. Without a compressed time scale, we might lose the thread of the whole story as it becomes tough to stay motivated for long.
[UPDATE 2]
Existentially, boredom as a result of introducing constraints is probably the most promising gateway to happiness. It's an antidote to the ever distracting digital life we are living nowadays. From my personal experience, I can vouch for this fact since the most resourceful/liberating period in my life was when I took a break from full-time work and moved to the US and spent 4 years of my time working as a pro bono consultant and blogger. There were several constraints in my life at that point - visa limitations, vehicle, and money.
This counter intuitive idea could be one of the reasons we miss our childhoods and we tend to get nostalgic about it. Childhood is a time when a person experiences the most number of constraints since we had to seek permission from the adults. Constraints in terms of money, activities, socializing, and screen time only makes a child more resourceful in finding a solution to his or her boredom. And, that is the true cure to existential emptiness.
No thinker in the history of humanity has talked about this topic than Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher.
“A solitary prisoner for life is extremely resourceful; to him a spider can be a source of great amusement… What a meticulous observer one becomes, detecting every little sound or movement. Here is the extreme boundary of that principle that seeks relief not through extensity but through intensity.
The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.”
Not only in life but also, in music, it's the constraint introduced by the seven notes that makes music so interesting, complex, and beyond mankind. In Carnatic music, the Neraval in Manodharma Sangeetham uses this idea where the singer improvises the piece using just two or three phrases.
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