Talk : Music And Metaphysics

Join me for this erudite conversation with fellow Insight Timer meditation guide and composer, James Anthony Walker. We chat about how music and consciousness are interlinked and how ambient music opens the door to altered states of consciousness. James kindly shares some samples of his ambience by way of example.

Transcript

First of all,

I've got to thank you,

James,

For getting up at an ungodly hour.

What time have you got over there?

I've got 6.

01am.

We're 2pm here.

We've got people in Australia,

All around the globe.

Yeah.

No,

This is not that different of a wake-up time for me.

So this is perfect.

And we've got someone morning,

Andrea,

Morning in New Zealand.

So we've got people all around the globe coming in to talk to two old duffers about music and metaphysics.

There we go.

So I always find it difficult to introduce a polymath,

Somebody who's got fingers in many pies and talents gushing out of every single pour.

So I first knew of Utor Insight Timer for that lovely track Floating,

Which had been listened to millions and millions of times.

That's my go-to,

Get me back to sleep in the morning track.

But how would you describe yourselves,

James?

Oh,

Gosh.

I think I have been my entire life in the process of reinventing myself,

And I think that's been a healthy path for me.

I very early on was convinced that I was going to be a composer and write music,

And that would be my lifetime career and avocation,

And I took a left turn with that somewhere fairly early on,

Where I was finishing my graduate work and feeling pretty good about myself.

So I went to a specialist headhunter here in the States,

In Chicago,

To see what they could do to place me,

Because I wanted to teach at college level,

And this was—here,

I will date myself—this was in the mid-70s.

And after the guy stopped laughing,

He said,

You know what?

I can place you somewhere for a semester at a time,

And you may be in Chicago for one semester,

And then the next semester we might have something for you in Los Angeles or somewhere else,

And so I became incredibly discouraged by that.

So I found myself going into the music manufacturing industry and went to work for a company called Gibson Guitars.

Oh,

Guitars.

Yeah,

And started there with no business knowledge.

I worked on the phones and customer service,

Spent an 80-hour day answering 120 to 150 phone calls,

And mostly people who were rather not happy about something in their situation.

But over the course of the next seven years that I was there,

I had a wonderful mentor who had come there from Procter & Gamble,

And I ended up as a director of marketing for them.

It was just a lovely,

Lovely time.

Anything was possible,

And that's kind of where I framed my outlook.

I still believe anything is possible,

And no matter what your age is,

You can do it if you want to.

Was spirituality part of your makeup then?

I think on a visceral level,

Yes,

But not on a formalized level.

My fiancé and I went through seminary.

It was about a three-year program several years back,

And we found ourselves deeply involved and moved by what is now known as inter-spirituality,

Outside of what was known as interfaith,

Which relates more to the monotheistic trio of religions.

This is all religions that we studied,

And really how to better communicate and establish communications with other people.

That's really the goal of the whole program.

So it's been interesting,

And I found through Insight Timer that's really a part of my ministry,

And it's been great to know so many people through that platform and through Cloud English,

Which is kind of an anomaly,

I think.

But anyway,

It's been fun.

When did the composer come out to play?

The composer came out at a very early age,

And I found myself in high school actually picking songs off of records.

I had a guitar,

And I didn't have anything else but a guitar,

So I kind of picked off vocal parts off of songs,

Chord changes off of songs,

And found it myself in high school starting to arrange songs for.

We had a folk quartet at the time,

And it was a lot of fun.

We also found ourselves forming a barbershop quartet,

Which was really rather odd,

But it was fun.

I had convinced myself by the time I was getting out of high school that that's the degree program I wanted to go into in college,

So I went from there out to Boston University for my undergraduate work,

And then came back home to Chicago,

Which was home at the time,

To go to the University of Chicago for my master's work.

And then the composition part of it really was kind of relegated to a hobby for a long time,

Because I was busy trying to earn a living,

Which is hard to do as a musician,

As everybody knows.

So I would say within the last 20 years,

It's become a focus,

And it's been a lot of catch-up,

But it's been fun to do.

And when did the compositional work and the spiritual leaning kind of fuse together,

Or were they all kind of always there?

No,

Actually they weren't.

And probably now,

40 years ago,

I would say,

I had a bunch of music that I'd written,

And not insignificant in terms of volume.

And one day I just said,

You know what?

I don't like this.

I just don't like it.

So I pitched it all,

Threw it away,

And because it was ugly,

It was following the—everything in this world has its own dogma,

It seems,

And certainly music has dogma.

And the one in which I was engaged was a very post-serial,

Ugly kind of a rhetoric.

And oftentimes,

As good as it may or may not have been,

Your premiere performance was probably going to be your last performance,

Because nobody really wanted to hear it again.

So I decided,

Well,

This is really not worth the time and energy.

So over the years,

I started to have a vision for something which was more approachable,

And over time,

That got me into—not without screaming and kicking—got me into the kind of work that I do now,

Which is,

From a classically trained perspective,

I was convinced that if I started writing music for meditation,

That what I was doing was writing music that just started somewhere and didn't go anywhere.

But that's the whole beauty of it.

It's something that can,

On the surface,

Clear your mind,

But underneath the hood,

There's often a lot of complexity going on.

Well,

You sent me some files in the week.

Let's have a listen to one.

And I got Ableton,

Which you probably know of,

And I did a conversion from audio to MIDI.

So it allows you to deconstruct them.

And even those sort of 30-second samples,

There's so much going on in them.

Oh,

Yeah.

So it's interesting that I was so misinformed at the time,

Because really,

I look at it—I guess one similarity I could make is that what I've arrived at stylistically is sort of like doing a watercolor wash,

Where you have these proto-melodies,

These little snippets of things,

And they don't evolve,

They don't develop,

But they do gravitate around one another,

And they intermingle with one another.

And it sort of continues to paint this evolving picture,

And it's really dense,

And it's fun to do,

And the result is that typically,

The mind becomes so focused on all of this that's going on,

Even on a subconscious level,

That you can't keep the chatter in your mind.

There's too much else going on.

So I think that's one of the keys for this kind of music with meditators and people who are involved in any kind of other somatic practices,

Is just that you have to be in the moment,

And that's kind of where it seems to—when I listen to it,

I'd rarely listen to my own stuff for very long,

But you don't have a lot of choice but to be involved on some level and just kind of let go.

So just to let people know in the chat,

With this technology where I'm allowed to bring someone in on the live,

Which is great,

The guests can't see the chat,

Which is a bit as old as you've got any questions,

Just fire them in,

I'll try and pick them up.

But lovely Siri,

Hopefully in Norway,

Who is an amazing watercolor artist and also an amazing musician is as well,

Just said,

I can certainly hear that you're painting with your music.

So there you go,

Corroboration from a fellow Insight Timer guide.

Beautiful,

Beautiful.

So do you find then that—because I'm sure you're a quite accomplished musician—do you find though that it's fairly effortless and also that the music you create,

The state that you're in,

Gets mirrored by the person listening to it?

If I understand your question,

Yes,

I think what,

You know,

Music and consciousness is pretty much a two-way street.

You know,

For a listener,

Your state of mind might alter what you're hearing and vice versa,

What you're hearing may alter your state of mind.

So if I'm reading your question,

I think that that's a very complicated but really reciprocal kind of a situation,

Listening and music is,

You know,

Music and consciousness,

Listening are very,

Very much highly related.

And we entitle this talk Music and Metaphysics.

I always like looking into words.

And the word meta comes from Greek,

Which means after or beyond.

And I always like to think that today's metaphysics is tomorrow's physics,

If you know what I mean.

So when you compose a bit of music,

Let's take floating,

I don't want to be going banging on about that one,

Because you've got some loads of wonderful other tracks out there.

But is there a meta idea behind what you're doing?

So you're trying to make people float?

Sometimes,

Yes,

And sometimes no,

Which is a cheap answer,

But it's a true one.

Sometimes I do have a concept in mind and then go about trying to make that make sense musically,

At least to me.

And other times it's just of the moment and,

You know,

It takes me… actually it took me back several weeks ago,

Maybe longer now,

When the first images from the Webb telescope came out.

The first one in particular,

The deep field image.

And maybe I want to go back to some of my favorite philosophers,

Because my experience with that image is very similar sometimes to the experience I have with the music that I'm writing.

Kant called this consciousness that we have the phenomenon of experience,

And what he called the thing itself,

He called the noumenon,

Which is something that exists in and of itself on its own without our perception and without our coloring.

Schopenhauer called this thing the fundamental reality,

And he also thought that music had one of the most direct accesses to that fundamental reality,

Which,

You know,

Exists apart from our perception.

The guy that I went and revisited,

Though,

That really kind of blew my mind was Roger Scruton,

Who's sort of the last in the lineage of these philosophers,

Anyway,

That I've read.

And I wrote it down,

And I want to spit it out here,

Because it's almost like poetry,

And every word is important.

But he saw music—and I can read it twice if it warrants it—he saw music as something which induces a response in us in which we acquire a first-person perspective on a state of mind which is not our own.

Wow.

Yeah,

It's really deep.

Yeah,

It's very deep.

And,

You know,

It got me to thinking,

Well,

Okay,

I think I understand that basically,

But what state of mind are we referring to here?

The composers?

Or the state of mind of something more fundamental?

Are we talking about source?

Are we talking about God?

Are we talking about…?

So we get into this whole metaphysical conversation about the relationship between music and fundamental reality.

It's fascinating,

And I just found myself being drawn to revisiting those people after I saw those images from the Web,

And it was kind of nice to revisit.

And of course,

Do I have any more answers than I did before?

No,

Not really,

But… Well,

I'll tell you,

I'd love to hear a piece composed by you inspired by those images.

Yeah,

You know,

I've given that some thought.

Somebody on—and I think it was just anonymous,

You know,

Mr.

Or Mrs.

Anonymous overlaid that first image from the Web onto Van Gogh's Starry Night,

And it's really spectacular.

So,

You know,

And I think that would be a fun thing to do.

I find,

Though,

That part of what I resist more than I used to is that if I want to force an outcome,

If I have a concept and really want to force it,

I don't succeed as well as I would like to think that I do.

I find more and more in recent years that if I start something in one day and I get tired and I go to sleep or whatever,

I come back to it the next day,

And what I do may bear no resemblance to what I thought I was going to do the day before.

And I've really completely abandoned the idea,

Which I used to hold dear,

Of really,

Really blueprinting a work.

And I want a section of this many measures,

And then I want to go to this,

And then I want to go to that.

It really comes in from a whole different place anymore.

And it's something that's hard for me to explain,

But it's not random.

I think it's just guided in some way.

Yeah.

And there's been a lovely comment from one of my soul sisters on the app Sister Sunshine,

Who said,

I think that's how that inspiration works.

You see or hear something created by someone else that turns on your own subconscious creativity based on the same vibration.

So can you talk about vibration?

Because sound is vibration.

As I'm speaking now,

I'm vibrating the air.

It's going into people's eardrums through a quite complex process of digitization and recreation back into analog.

But it's all vibration.

And I guess music starts with one note.

I haven't got the same level of music theory behind me.

You have,

But I know if you add another note,

Then it gets a bit more complex.

And then you add a third note,

It gets more complex.

And there's a thing called a triad,

Isn't there,

Which is the one third and fifth.

And if you just lower that third note by one semitone,

You go from major to minor.

You go from happy to sad.

So how can three notes make you happy or sad?

What's going on?

You know,

It's interesting,

Because there is this—I look at it any more—I mean,

It is sound,

Fundamentally.

Music is a man-made construct.

Pythagoras had a whack at developing scales,

And he did a rather good job.

And it was really a matter of dissecting a string and using the interval of a fifth and the interval of an octave,

And when you dissect that enough,

You construct a scale.

And the thing that happens,

Particularly in his kind of approach,

What you see is that all the intervals are what you would call pure.

And that means that all of the intervals are not exactly the same size.

What we've come to in our century is what's called equal-tempered music,

Where every half step,

Of which there are twelve in an octave,

Is equal in size.

So most people don't realize that back in the day,

If you played something in the key of C,

And you played then something in the key of A-flat,

Both major,

They had very,

Very different sounds.

And composers back then were aware of that and wrote based on that.

And you'd always think that major is happy,

But sometimes back then,

With the tunings the way that they were,

Sometimes major was played at a funeral.

So we're in a different place right now.

So the way I—to answer your question,

Major,

The way the scale is constructed,

There is a half-step relationship between the third and fourth degree of the scale,

And a half-step between the seventh and eighth degree of the scale.

So what you have there is a tendency to resolve upwards.

And what you have in minor is the exact opposite.

You have the third degree of the scale either wanting to go to the second degree,

Or down an octave to the seventh degree,

And the seventh degree wanting not to go to the octave,

But falling back on itself.

So I think part of the reason why minor seems sad to us is because it does fall onto itself.

It's contained much more so than a major scale is.

And a lovely observation-stroke question from Siri in Norway about baroque instruments being tuned differently.

And she just wonders what you think about that.

Well,

You know,

There's two parts,

I think,

To that question.

One is—and this,

Back in school,

Took me a while to wrap my mind around—but there is tuning,

And then there is temperament.

So there are different things.

So we're today used to a piano being tuned where the note A is 440 cycles per second.

Back in the baroque period,

It was not 440—I don't remember what the number is,

But it was less than that.

So there is a different character to music that's played authentically in that fundamental tuning.

There's also a different thing where—I was saying before that now we have equal temperament.

When you don't have equal temperament,

You have systems that work in a very different way,

And these are man-made systems.

So we have 12 half-steps in our octave.

In the Orient,

They practice many,

Many songs in their literature,

Have five steps,

The pentatonic scale,

Which on a piano is all the black keys,

For instance.

And currently,

Contemporary composers now,

Even those in the last hundred years,

Have been looking at other temperaments.

Harry Parche,

For instance,

50 years back,

Perhaps,

He had a 43-tone equal-tempered system that he composed with.

Forty-three steps to an octave,

Each of equal size.

And it sounds odd,

Until you listen to it for a while,

And then you start to see some of the nuance of it.

So all of it really,

I think,

Is a matter of looking as a composer at,

How do I get more nuance into what I'm writing?

And I think you're seeing more and more of that today.

It's not as out there as it was even 10,

20 years ago.

It's kind of interesting.

I haven't gone down that rabbit hole,

But it's an interesting practice.

And so it's just an extension of,

You have minor,

You have major,

You have five notes to an octave,

You have ten notes to an octave,

You have 19,

You have 31.

And it's all just a way of creating a soundscape that expresses what you want to say.

I pretty much use what I would call a pandiatonic palette,

Which means that in a diatonic scale,

Which could be major or a minor scale,

So you have eight notes that you're working with,

But in a pandiatonic scale or approach,

There is no pecking order.

Every note in the diatonic scale has equal weight.

So if you're in the key of C and you go to an F chord,

And then you go to a G chord,

Typically that would resolve to a C chord.

Again,

In a pandiatonic scale,

You may be playing a C,

And then you could go to a D,

Or anything in that scale becomes the next root value.

So they're all equal,

And they all carry no propensity to resolve in a certain way.

So by way of example,

Let's listen to a sample of your pandiatomic approach,

James.

That is good,

Because that gives you a lot of scope to go to different places.

And Blossom just asked the question,

How do you think music will evolve?

I think this is part of an answer,

But I think what I've observed anyway is that if you look at music and trends and styles and periods,

I tend to want to look at it as spokes,

All of those things as spokes in a wheel.

And the more styles that develop,

The more spokes there are,

The stronger the wheel.

So I think we're coming on to a time where,

From a technological standpoint,

We're getting pretty close to having any—at your disposal and at your whim—any sound that you can imagine,

And an ability with technology to shape and construct and paint with any sounds you want.

And it really comes back,

I think we were mentioning towards the beginning,

That music is a man-made construct,

Sound is vibration.

I think we're coming to a point where we're going to see more creative use and acceptance of using vibration as a tool,

As a creative tool in music.

So what does that sound like?

I think it's going to sound like whatever you want it to sound like.

That's the beauty of what we're going through right now,

Is that we're—one always wonders,

With all the tools that you and I have to work with,

What would both side have done with all of that?

Wow.

Coming back to the theme of music and metaphysics,

We could have easily entitled this music and evolution,

Or music and mathematics,

Because there's relations with all these things.

How can you use music in spiritual development and evolving,

And specifically,

How can you get music to activate different chakra senses?

You know,

To the first part of your question,

I found in practice,

And we do this quite a bit in class,

Live,

And it's just amazing to see and hear,

But from a spiritual perspective,

We work with a fairly wide range of students,

But primarily—I mean,

The median age is probably 25—and from typically very not spiritually oriented backgrounds.

I mean,

More often than not,

They will be what I would call recovering Catholics,

Who have really had this worldview instilled in them by their parents,

Typically,

That,

Well,

Catholicism is the right thing for you.

And they found upon some reflection that it wasn't the right thing for them,

So they turned towards spirituality.

And one of the things which I've been very focused on doing is bringing that opportunity for spiritual reflection to our students through music,

Where we have,

You know,

What our Buddhist friends would call monkey mind,

Where this is constant chakra,

And students of that age are particularly susceptible.

So what I've found is that they are very,

Very quick to adopt music as a spiritual medium with which they can develop a practice that's enduring.

Wow.

And you've got a course on the app called Good Music,

Good Medicine,

So music is obviously a healing power as well.

It is.

There's a tremendous amount of research,

Actually,

On what it could do for us,

And I think it's important when one sort of starts to dive into these things that they become aware of what's happening on a subconscious level.

And,

You know,

Music can affect your body rhythms,

It can affect your energy levels,

Whether,

You know,

You want to push them in one direction,

Being more energetic or less so.

It can affect your blood pressure,

It can reduce the amount of stress on your heart,

It can enhance your creativity.

I'm very firmly a believer of that.

And it's very,

You know,

It's very… a response typically is fairly predictable by psychologists as to,

You know,

Who you are,

What kind of personality you are based on,

What kind of music you listen to.

I mean,

There's just been a ton of research done on the psychological and physiological effects of music,

So it's… I think when Schopenhauer said it's the fundamental reality,

It is.

Vibration is pretty fundamental.

I'll go to the other part of your question,

I can't answer the other part of your question.

I'm not… admittedly,

I'm not well versed in sound healing per se,

In terms of the ability of music to affect chakras.

I'd love to dive into that at some point,

It just hasn't happened yet.

Well,

Let's have a conversation maybe offline about that,

Because I've got some knowledge about chakras and not so much about music.

Although I did download under license a bunch of music I've used on a course on chakras from a guy in Australia,

Christopher Clark,

And they're all tuned to different frequencies,

And they seem to work pretty well.

But I also think that music and sound can be used for things like levitation and that kind of more metaphysical application as well.

It's just,

You know,

It's really so fascinating,

And I think that more listeners,

I hope,

And I include myself in the list,

But I think more listeners will benefit.

I know everybody knows what kind of music they like and what they're drawn to,

But again,

It's maybe you owe it to yourself to experiment and listen to other things which you normally wouldn't feel attracted to,

For no good reason.

But it really will start to grow your ears.

Well,

A couple of observations in the chat room,

One from Suzanne about physical applications like ultrasound therapies.

We've been talking about the audible frequencies,

But there's the sub-audible and post-audible frequencies.

Do you have any experience or thoughts on what happens outside the audible range?

Yes,

I do.

As a matter of fact,

Years and years and years and years ago,

More than I would want to count,

I got into reading a book by Barbara Brown,

And it was way back in the genesis of biofeedback.

I actually got some equipment and found,

I was amazed.

I mean,

This is all in the sub-audible range.

What happened is a relaxation response to that.

Then I got into,

Which I know is,

I see a lot of contributors on Insight Timer using binaural beats,

Which has grown to be a substantial practice musically.

For those who may not be familiar,

I guess in a nutshell,

Distributing a sound where on your left side,

It may be,

Let's call it,

There's a hundred cents,

C-E-N-T-S,

Cents to a half step.

On your left ear,

You might be hearing something that's a hundred cents.

On your right ear,

You might be hearing something that's 90 cents.

What your brain does is create what's called a difference tone of 10 cents.

The smaller that difference becomes,

The lower your brainwave activity becomes.

It really has a direct impact on it.

It's quite remarkable.

Many people,

I may have done one or two over the years where I have that embedded as part of a track.

It's not really audible.

I don't know if it really serves the purpose of augmenting the effect of the composition itself or not,

Because I sometimes get so involved in doing it that I think surely this must have some effect,

And it may not at all.

I'm really not very well versed in that,

But I do know that some of the results,

Particularly in terms of relaxation,

Or going to the other side of it,

Which you can also do with binaural beats is kind of the energizing side of that production,

Is very effective.

And someone called T's mentioned,

They find binaural sounds to be so high pitched,

Maybe because they're older,

But it actually irritates many of the system.

And I found that some people use binaural beats as they might use an instrument.

And I think I'm just using binaural beats,

But they're not quite sure about what it's doing.

And it can make you quite nauseous if you don't use it subtly and correctly.

Yeah.

And I think really the key there is the level.

Really,

What it's doing,

It's going to do regardless of what the level is.

If it's something which you're audibly ingesting,

It doesn't have to be loud,

It doesn't have to be treated as an instrument or a track in your composition.

It just needs to be there.

So yeah,

I know it can be annoying,

And when it's done badly,

It's really pretty bad.

Yeah.

I think I might answer your second question there,

T.

A couple of technical questions in there,

Siri,

And Blossom wanting to know what DAW do you use?

What digital audio workstation do you use?

Or maybe it's a few.

I use Ableto.

For many years I used Cubase and just got frustrated with it.

So I went with Ableto.

It took a lot of getting used to for me because it's so different from Cubase.

It has some fundamental usage applications that really were foreign to me.

I mean,

I'm not an accomplished performer.

So Ableto Live was something which I wasn't sure about going into,

But I find it to be just a lovely platform.

And some loose thoughts in the chat room.

You ever thought about teaching compositional theory over Zoom,

Perhaps around a platform like Ableto?

I've given it a little thought.

I probably should give it some more because I enjoy it.

I have found that for the many years that I wasn't primarily focused on writing music,

I was a communications director for corporations and I enjoy teaching very much.

So that's what I really originally intended to do back when I was finishing school.

So maybe that's something I should look more into.

I enjoy it.

I have my own quirks about it,

But I think it would be fun.

And I should announce to everyone that's listening as well,

And your good self,

Is that anything you do over Zoom,

I'm recording it right now,

You can then repurpose and reuse.

And I've been very fortunate to be on 10 teachers who are beatering video courses on Insight Timer.

So anything you might deliver live like that,

And I put my hand up to be one of your students on the first intern,

Is anything like that you can record and then use it as a course that goes out.

I love the sophistication of what they're offering right now.

So the video courses are coming out probably September,

October,

Or onwards.

So if I can encourage you to do that,

That'd be great.

That's soon.

I didn't know that was that soon.

That's great.

Yeah.

Let's get back to music and metaphysics.

The question was before,

Where's music going to go?

Can music and our personal evolution sit hand in hand and ride together?

I think so.

And I say that because it's always been the case.

And the interesting thing to me,

Having a little bit of a bent for history,

Is that—and being where I am now with my writing—it used to be the case where I felt like I needed to be accepted.

I had to be a part of whatever was a choral,

Whatever the current practice was,

Whatever the current stylistic tendencies were,

That was something where if you wanted to be part of the gang,

Then you did that.

Truth of the matter is,

And what that does,

Though,

Is engender in people who like music,

It engenders fear,

Really,

That,

Oh,

I shouldn't sing in public,

I don't sing that well.

Or even as a professional musician,

I wonder if I'm going to play this as well as I did the last time.

Or I wonder if the other person performing tonight is going to blow me off the stage.

It's all ego-driven,

Which is like free lunch for fear.

And the fact of the matter is,

Primitive cultures,

Even today,

Music is an integral part of their life.

I mean,

They sing from the time they're born,

And they play instruments by the time they're born,

And they have no fear of this joy.

And I think if we can carry forward with us the appreciation of joyful living and the awe of living,

I mean,

I go back to the web images,

We can't rekindle awe from looking at that image.

We're in a bad place.

And I don't think we are in a bad place.

I think it's just something we need to continue to remind ourselves of.

And so yeah,

I think that we're all vibrating.

So I think music is always going to be something that we carry forward with us.

And going back to a very ground,

Down to earth question from Siri,

Do you write your music down in notes before recording?

Sometimes.

I find that with Ableton,

I like actually some of the MaxForLive instruments and devices that they have on the platform are really,

Really helpful for me.

One of them is a score writing application.

That's kind of been shorthand for me.

Maybe I'm lazy,

Or maybe I just don't feel like doing it anymore.

But I think when you get in real time,

When you get a score written for you or a part written for you,

It's very easy for me then to go back and say,

From a different perspective,

Other than just listening,

To go back and structurally say,

You know,

That doesn't work the way I wanted it to.

Maybe I could just change these notes on the score,

On the digital score,

Which then become your MIDI track.

So it's really,

Really convenient to… I mean,

Gosh,

Back when I was in school,

It was tedious at times.

I think it really kind of took a lot of the creativity out of the process.

Now you have so much capability of just doing things on the fly and listening and re-listening.

I find that often I will listen to a passage 30,

40,

50 times.

And if I still like it after that,

It's probably okay.

Gotcha.

Well,

We've got another slew of questions coming in.

I'll start with Andreas,

Which is a fairly deep and wide question.

How do you find the inspiration?

How does music come through you?

We can spend an hour on that topic alone,

I think.

Well,

We could spend a long time or a very short time,

Because oftentimes I just don't know,

Tom.

I'm being completely honest about it.

I don't know what the feed is.

I want to think it's a divine feed.

I did not feel anything like that when I was working in a very structured environment,

Where I pre-planned where things started,

Where they ended,

And in between how they got there.

And I think in retrospect it's kind of a stifling process.

So like I may have mentioned,

If I start today,

If I start at seven o'clock this morning,

And I may write for an hour,

And then I want to take a break,

And I come back to it,

Upon leaving it I had no concept of where it was going from there.

When I come back to it,

Somehow it finds a way to go somewhere.

Something's going on at a level that I don't understand,

And I think that's okay,

Because surrender is a part of the creative process,

As I've come to know it.

So I wish I could say that I had planned every note,

And each note had the only purpose it could possibly have,

But I don't write that way anymore.

Suzanne just asked you to repeat that quote about music inducing a response.

Yeah,

This is the philosopher Roger Scruton,

S-C-R-U-T-O-N,

And he saw music—tell me if I need to go slow here—as something which induces a response in us,

In which we acquire a first-person perspective on a state of mind which is not our own.

I have gone back quite a lot of his writings,

And very unique,

But this is just,

Like I said,

It's just poetic to me that every word in here is so well-structured.

And I think it's testament to all of these philosophers,

It's testament that they have all,

Since the beginning of philosophers,

That they all feel it's incumbent upon them to write about music as something which is fundamental to our life.

And that's,

Again,

Tom,

Why I think going forward,

Will it evolve with us?

Yeah,

Absolutely,

It's done so far.

Wow.

It's such a joy to get to know the man behind the music I've been listening to for the last five years.

I must thank Insight Timer for providing this platform that's bringing all us like minds together.

Thanks for all the people that have been listening today—120 people on the call.

I'll make sure I put the recording out there as well.

Anything coming up for you on the app soon?

New materials?

Working on a couple of things now,

New pieces,

Both of which are kind of a different direction for me.

So I think I found—I don't know about you,

But I have found that often,

And you know,

I am blessed to have floating as a piece that's so well-listened to.

But I think,

As you may have found as well,

We sort of develop an audience and an expectation for what kind of music it is that you're producing.

And if it's typically with people who are sleep-deprived or people who are in meditative practice or any kind of somatic practice where they need to feel centered and calmed,

That's their expectation.

But I do have several things in the works now which are more of an energizing nature,

So I don't pretend to know how those will be received,

But they've been fun to work on.

Well,

I was listening to the Mystic Choir,

A restorative meditation,

This morning while I was writing.

I just found that an amazing soundscape.

It's different,

Yeah.

I mean,

To me they're all different,

How really different they are,

I don't pretend to know,

But they all have a purpose,

At least in my mind,

That I wanted to develop.

So it's great,

It's a great ride,

And you know,

The Insight Timer has been a wonderful platform.

I know we were both in from the early days and things were a little kind of,

Well,

In development,

So yeah,

You know,

It's come a long way and I think it's a great platform.

And I think we'll be coming back ourselves,

James,

And have another session on music and something or other.

And something or other,

I really enjoyed it,

Tom,

It's been fun.

I'm probably just about awake now,

So thank you for that.

We'll do the next one an hour or two later.

There you go.

But it's been a real joy,

A pleasure,

And I'll be student number one signing up for your new training course.

Beautiful,

Thanks so much.

And thanks everybody for asking some great questions and sticking with us all the way through to the end.

It's been absolutely amazing,

Thank you so much.

So signing off from the UK and from sunny USA as well.

And we'll see you all on the app soon.

Bye now.

Take good care.

Take care.

Reviews

Really interesting talk. I love the way music can affect how we feel.

This is outstanding! Enjoyed it very much, and learned a lot as well. Both of you are so inspiring and fun to listen to. Thank you for your talents, and contributions to music that helps us navigate through this beautiful world of color, sound, and light. -Lee

That was so interesting!
Thank you Tom and thank you James.
p.s.
I can’t really imagine life without music.
🤍