This probably won’t add too much to the discussion but I’m curious to see whether other people relate to this or have a similar process. I was kind of stunned when I heard from friends who got into composing about how difficult it is to figure out a melody and then write a complete piano piece because to me, whenever I open up Sibelius or Dorico (and more recently Ableton), internally it seems like I’m just listening to what I wrote so far, ‘hearing’ a possible continuation lasting a few bars, and then quickly trying to transcribe it before I forget it, or if I really want to be precise then just the next note-group. It doesn’t really come from anywhere and it doesn’t require any thought, but I can tell it’s obviously taking up a share of my cognitive RAM from multitasking experiments, it’s definitely influenced by the music I’ve listen to recently (e.g 1930s/40s jazz), and there are a lot of recognisable patterns. I gave up piano at Grade 1 and my theory went to Grade 2 (I think) where I stopped because I intensely despised it. I actively avoided formal instruction. It makes transcribing harder because I’m just clicking on notes to see if they match up with what’s in my head and that interferes a lot with my memory, playing on an actual piano is even worse. So now what I do is use a phone app to record myself whistling 10-12 seconds of the ‘top’ melody, and then I play it back while making a new recording and I whistle the notes underneath it to, and I keep doing that until all the chords are right and the signal isn’t too degraded. It’s still very annoying. Something I should note is that I whistle whenever I’m alone pretty much obsessively and that’s been the case since I was maybe eight or nine, especially to accompany whatever music is playing around me, and that I have mild autism. It makes me think that with pretty much any creative skill, there are unconscious cognitive modules/black-boxes in play that have been developed either through a lot of exposure or through the internalisation/automatisation of heuristics and rules, which are responsible for predicting small sequences of actions (“what note comes next?”) or doing error-correction (“what sounds good?”). It’s difficult to notice/interact directly with them, but it’s possible when you override conscious controls. The easiest way to see this is to try asemic writing/typing – just typing or writing mindlessly and allowing your hands to just move by themselves. Once you get into the groove with asemic typing, you get Markov-chain-like strings of letters that reflect the character distribution of the language you type with, and sometimes common words like ‘the’ or ‘and’. With asemic writing, you get common patterns of loops, vertical and horizontal lines, and connectors. I’ve seen what seems to be higher-level language modules at work when I’m in a semi-lucid verge-of-fully-waking-up/falling-asleep state where my eyes are open but I’m also in dreamspace at the same time (I have no idea how to describe this), and I can read an imaginary book in front of me or listen to someone, and it’s just a fluent stream of meaningless babble often with a poetic quality to it, sometimes where consonants are carried over to the next word or semi-rhymes that would be a pain to come up with consciously.
I tend to write melodies in multiple different ways:
1. Hearing it in my head, then playing it out. It’s very easy to generate (like GPT but with melodies), but transcribing is very hard! The common advice is to sing it out, and then match it with the instrument. This is exactly what you did with whistling. If I don’t record it, I will very often not remember it at all later; very similar to forgetting a dream. When I hear someone else’s piano piece (or my own recorded), I will often think “I would’ve played that part differently” which is the same as my brain predicting a different melody.
2. “Asemic playing” (thanks for the phrase!) - I’ve improv-ed for hundreds of hours, and I very often run into playing similar patterns when I’m in similar “areas” such as playing the same chord progression. I’ll often have (1) melodies playing in my head while improvising, but I will often play the “wrong” note and it still sound good. Over the years, I’ve gotten much better at remembering melodies I just played (because my brain predicts that the melody will repeat) and playing the “correct” note in my head on the fly.
3. Smashing “concepts” into a melody:
What if I played this melody backwards?
Pressed every note twice?
Held every other note a half-note longer?
Used a different chord progression (so specific notes of the melody needs to change to harmonize)
Taking a specific pattern of a melody, like which notes it uses, and playing new patterns there.
Taking a specific pattern of a melody, like the rhythm between the notes (how long you hold each note, including rests) and applying it to other melodies.
Taking a specific patter of a melody, like the exact rhythm and relative notes, and starting on a different note (then continuing to play the same notes, relatively)
This probably won’t add too much to the discussion but I’m curious to see whether other people relate to this or have a similar process. I was kind of stunned when I heard from friends who got into composing about how difficult it is to figure out a melody and then write a complete piano piece because to me, whenever I open up Sibelius or Dorico (and more recently Ableton), internally it seems like I’m just listening to what I wrote so far, ‘hearing’ a possible continuation lasting a few bars, and then quickly trying to transcribe it before I forget it, or if I really want to be precise then just the next note-group. It doesn’t really come from anywhere and it doesn’t require any thought, but I can tell it’s obviously taking up a share of my cognitive RAM from multitasking experiments, it’s definitely influenced by the music I’ve listen to recently (e.g 1930s/40s jazz), and there are a lot of recognisable patterns. I gave up piano at Grade 1 and my theory went to Grade 2 (I think) where I stopped because I intensely despised it. I actively avoided formal instruction. It makes transcribing harder because I’m just clicking on notes to see if they match up with what’s in my head and that interferes a lot with my memory, playing on an actual piano is even worse. So now what I do is use a phone app to record myself whistling 10-12 seconds of the ‘top’ melody, and then I play it back while making a new recording and I whistle the notes underneath it to, and I keep doing that until all the chords are right and the signal isn’t too degraded. It’s still very annoying. Something I should note is that I whistle whenever I’m alone pretty much obsessively and that’s been the case since I was maybe eight or nine, especially to accompany whatever music is playing around me, and that I have mild autism. It makes me think that with pretty much any creative skill, there are unconscious cognitive modules/black-boxes in play that have been developed either through a lot of exposure or through the internalisation/automatisation of heuristics and rules, which are responsible for predicting small sequences of actions (“what note comes next?”) or doing error-correction (“what sounds good?”). It’s difficult to notice/interact directly with them, but it’s possible when you override conscious controls. The easiest way to see this is to try asemic writing/typing – just typing or writing mindlessly and allowing your hands to just move by themselves. Once you get into the groove with asemic typing, you get Markov-chain-like strings of letters that reflect the character distribution of the language you type with, and sometimes common words like ‘the’ or ‘and’. With asemic writing, you get common patterns of loops, vertical and horizontal lines, and connectors. I’ve seen what seems to be higher-level language modules at work when I’m in a semi-lucid verge-of-fully-waking-up/falling-asleep state where my eyes are open but I’m also in dreamspace at the same time (I have no idea how to describe this), and I can read an imaginary book in front of me or listen to someone, and it’s just a fluent stream of meaningless babble often with a poetic quality to it, sometimes where consonants are carried over to the next word or semi-rhymes that would be a pain to come up with consciously.
I tend to write melodies in multiple different ways:
1. Hearing it in my head, then playing it out. It’s very easy to generate (like GPT but with melodies), but transcribing is very hard! The common advice is to sing it out, and then match it with the instrument. This is exactly what you did with whistling. If I don’t record it, I will very often not remember it at all later; very similar to forgetting a dream. When I hear someone else’s piano piece (or my own recorded), I will often think “I would’ve played that part differently” which is the same as my brain predicting a different melody.
2. “Asemic playing” (thanks for the phrase!) - I’ve improv-ed for hundreds of hours, and I very often run into playing similar patterns when I’m in similar “areas” such as playing the same chord progression. I’ll often have (1) melodies playing in my head while improvising, but I will often play the “wrong” note and it still sound good. Over the years, I’ve gotten much better at remembering melodies I just played (because my brain predicts that the melody will repeat) and playing the “correct” note in my head on the fly.
3. Smashing “concepts” into a melody:
What if I played this melody backwards?
Pressed every note twice?
Held every other note a half-note longer?
Used a different chord progression (so specific notes of the melody needs to change to harmonize)
Taking a specific pattern of a melody, like which notes it uses, and playing new patterns there.
Taking a specific pattern of a melody, like the rhythm between the notes (how long you hold each note, including rests) and applying it to other melodies.
Taking a specific patter of a melody, like the exact rhythm and relative notes, and starting on a different note (then continuing to play the same notes, relatively)