Psychic Time Code.
September 23, 2004, 01:15 pmI was reading A Musician's ABC's by James Boyk (who is one of my new favorite guys) and was floored when I read, “Music blossoms from silence.”
This is something that I have thought about a lot... probably since I was a junior in high school and suddenly everything was blowing my mind. Things like getting the right answer in chemstry class – everyone following the same bunch of steps, using the same significant digits, not making any mistakes in-between steps – seemed like a miracle. Thinking about how if you hesitate or play at different levels, you'll be out of time (let's not even get into the fact that the speed of sound becomes an issue when you're dealing with sound sources that can be 80 yards apart).
I thought to myself, music is like an elastic bubble that is born out of a void, the silence before you start playing. While you're playing, you can speed up/slow down, get louder/get softer, &c. and the bubble will move and grow, but if you speed up too quickly or people don't play together, it'll pop and the song will fall apart.
I get excited when I think about individuals playing as a group, everyone subdividing the same time in their heads like psychic time code link.