Ember and Ash on YouTube

A FEW NOTES:

    I am a visual artist. I started creating what I call “Hand-Crafted Audio Designs” in 2025, so music composition is a new adventure for me. I do not play any instrument proficiently. The timeline in the music software is my canvas and I paint pictures with sound. The resulting composition must be melodic and make some sort of musical sense. I spend hours in the key editor moving notes around, expanding and shortening note duration until what I see and hear connects. I am sketching, illustrating, and painting the sounds. If you think about it, no matter whether it is visual art, music, or written word, it is all light and shadow. I have been creating art all my life. By the early 2000s, art technology began to come to the forefront and I soon became proficient creating static and video art in the virtual world. Editing graphics and video on the computer for all those years prepared me for creating music this way. I just never saw it coming. The biggest challenge for me is the math of this sort of creative process. Instinct is fine, but when something is off it can be quite a nuisance to track it down and instinct is not enough. Often, I have to find the first few phrases, count the number of measures in the phrase and between each phrase, and then calculate by simple addition where something should be further down the midi track. My method may be more complicated than is necessary, but its the only way I know... for now.

    Wink is a concept composition, but there is no backstory or literal theme to the concept, and no relevance to the title, Wink. The title Refrigerator would have been just as relevant... or irrelevant. The concept is the simple continuity of repetition, but with enough variance to avoid an annoying redundancy (I hope). As a visual artist, I select a canvas, and then paint on that canvas. In this instance, the canvas is a time limitation of 46 minutes in two 23 minute segments, a diptych. As is common with all art, the concept and actual imagery evolves as the process of creation continues. The final composition painted sounds across 41 minutes and 44 seconds of the 46 minute canvas. The first panel has sound painted across 20 minutes and 12 seconds, while the second panel has sound painted across 21 minutes and 32 seconds of the canvas. When I began work on this piece, I didn't have a melody or beat in mind. I picked a dormant project, a fragment of a composition, and began rearranging the elements until something started to emerge. At some point during this process the elements begin to form relationships with each other. If they have meaningful conversations, then they stay together. If they argue, or if one of the elements is downright offensive, it is removed, or perhaps isolated until its proper place is found. Sometimes the creative process is like watching birds fly in elegant murmurations across the sky. At other times it is like trying to herd cats across a frozen pond. While the process of creation may be full of joy or frustration, often both, it is a wondrous thing; a true adventure.