| Berklee | This user attends or attended Berklee College of Music. |
This is the userpage of the Wikipedia user camous10. I'm in my last semester at Berklee College of Music (Songwriting major), and have joined Wikipedia as part of my work in Professor Isaiah Jackson's class, Towards a Vision of Music's Future.
My definition of Music
Music is a form that combines sound and silence, or their conception, is intertwined with time, and involves a listener. If the word silence is used here it is as a shortcut to “relative silence”. Even when humans have tend to build a completely silent place such as an anechoic chamber their hear still perceives sounds from the body. But relatively to sound, silence exists, at least as a notion. In music this silence is necessary for the shapes and sounds involved to be identified. The word “intertwined” has been chosen over “framed” because the latter evokes a defined beginning and end. I think that Music doesn’t always have these two things. It can be because we here a very subtle melody that we can barely identify and therefore we are not able know when it actually started, or because after going to a concert we still hum that tune in our brain until we go to sleep and are not able to say when the music really stopped. Even from a strictly physical point of view the end of a sound wave created by any music is not identifiable. It continues to vibrate less and less asymptotically gravitating towards silence. The latest part of the definition is probably the most controversial one and I will do my best to clarify my opinion. Is a piece of music that has been written but never been heard or played by anyone still a piece of Music? Yes. It is because it has been conceived and therefore heard by the person who wrote it. I am aware that this definition could be applied to any of these words but I am not capable of going further into defining Music without feeling like I am amputating the notion I am trying to grasp. I will therefore stop here and let the listener do his/her job and decide for them whether he/she is in presence of music, or sound, or noise.
About my music
I was taught piano in a European school that was run by a woman who was traumatized by her experience of conservatories and wanted to build a system that taught classical music while being “more human”. I think this experience came from a legitimate place but was an impossible task because of the nature of European classical music itself. Besides, music demands a lot of discipline and training and most children have to be “pushed” to get the work done. That was my case. Underlying this very strict notion of music that I built through the years at the music school, there was this “fun” thing that was pop music. My first musical crush was when I was 3 and my mum was listening to this Tina Turner tape in the car. I ended up going to school with the tape and still own the tape. As strange as it seems Tina Turner is my first memory of music, more so than any children tune. My fascination for American pop music grew into the form of Blues, my second musical crush, when at 10 tired of the music I was listening to on the French radio I randomly put on a CD of my stepfather’s collection. It was BB king. I felt like blues was always known to me. It probably was since blues progressions are everywhere. Then came Whitney Houston and my secret desire to be able to belt like her. So I started training in my room, then I took private instructions with teacher and I joined several Gospel choirs. My first intention when becoming a singer was to be like a craftsman. I always wanted to execute a technical difficulty like a dancer would learn choreography. Therefore my music was always something I put into a pre-existing form. I never felt it was a limit to cover songs. There are infinite ways of singing one song! Coming to Berklee showed me the pressure that the industry put on oneself to write one’s own music. My outlook is still undetermined when it comes to what my music is or should be. I feel every answer I come up with is artificial even if I learned to give one for the sake of not losing credibility, or a potential gig.
I would like to create a page on
- Tamia Valmont an artist and composer that made major vocal experiment in the 70's
- Voice : but there is not much to add to the article except give a different insight especially on the posture for "correct technique"