(2022-02-11) Rosano Tools For Musical Thought

Rosano: Tools for musical thought. Applying my 'note-taking' approach (of capture, organize, and purge) to sound and musical ideas.

Since acquiring my first iPhone 3G in 2009, with the ability to record voice memos that can be synced to the computer, I hoped my system would naturally extend to music at some point—it didn't, until 2022.

The problem was that I captured musical ideas and then didn't do anything with it afterwards, lacking the 'organize' and 'purge' phases of the trinity

Although there are plenty of apps for music production or developing musical ideas, I also got stuck on the (perhaps programmer-minded) idea of trying to turn each audio fragment I record into some kind of abstract 'module' that can be incorporated in various projects

I ended up accumulating about three thousand recordings of singing, piano, guitar, ambience, noise, and nature, without 'turning them into something', and this is for lack of some way to let the ideas mingle together

My ideal workflow would be something that lets you put groups of ideas together and lay them out in various ways

For now, I settled on the session view in Ableton Live, which I find spatially cramped (and unfortunately lacking any mobile or tablet interface), but it allows me to improvise and mash up musical ideas in a non-linear way and then easily move into a traditional linear timeline view afterwards

Focusing on a 'song' as the context or shelf (to lay down good, bad, related, and unrelated ideas) strangely makes the fragments seem easier to reuse and repurpose than when I tried to 'abstract' them away into isolated blocks: there's meaning to each song, and that meaning is memorable, which makes the ideas findable

led me to create this jungle / drum and bass track Listen!