Pat Carroll

  • Stages of the Creative Process

    Something I believe isn’t discussed as much as it should be is how different composers think about the creative process. What do they actually do, or think to do, when they enter the studio with no idea and leave it with a finished piece?

    What happens in this gap?

    I remember talking about this with someone, discussing the case of a jazz trumpet improviser (I forgot who). He said something along the lines of: “we know what [so and so] ate for lunch before his show, and which trains he took to get there, but we have no idea about what he was thinking while playing—how he did what he did.” We know so little about their creative process, which I believe is a massive loss.

    An awareness of these stages of the creative process, I believe, allows for a particularly focused and oriented creative process, rather than more of a mindset of “I’ll just head in and see what happens” one. There’s nothing really wrong with these sorts of sessions, but I’ve found the former to be way more conducive to finishing works.

    I’d like to talk about how I consider mine: To me, it consists of four main stages or categories.

    1. Gathering Materials
    2. Organising/Arranging Materials
    3. Processing Materials
    4. Polishing Materials

    I’ve built this understanding by reading about composition workflows, talking with other composers, and of course doing composition myself. I’ll break them down.

    There may be sessions where I only carry out field recordings, sketch out ideas, play and experiment with instruments, and make recordings while I do. I think of this as gathering materials. Then, there are sessions where I only arrange these recordings into musical structures: organising/arranging materials. There are sessions where I focus on making the sounds more ‘interesting’ through applying effects: processing materials. There are sessions where I only edit and mix these resulting elements, or master the finished work: polishing materials.

    The way of using this understanding of the creative process is to have a clear idea of what stage I’m going to be working in at any given time in the studio. It’s common to feel stuck with a work or larger project. To remedy this, I’ve found it valuable to sit back and think: “OK, where am I at with this piece? Do I have materials? Yes. Are they arranged in structures? Yes. Are these structures interesting or logical? They could be better…”

    …and then away I go into the second stage of the process.

    During this session, I might think that the sounds need some more character, then I know I’ll need to move into the third stage. If I realise I have a section that could do with some contrasting material, I’ll move back to the first stage.

    This desire to build a mental model of the creative process came from me thinking about how modern DAW software facilitates a non-linear workflow, rather that coaxing the user through more of a linear one. At any given time you can jump between each of these stages of creation. This contrasts the more linear design of a piece of software like Da Vinci Resolve, which moves the user through the necessary workflow to create, edit, enhance, and export a piece of video through specific modules made for each stage of the workflows.

    This isn’t to say that non-linear workflows are bad—in fact, the freedom DAWs offer the composer in terms of workflow is their strength.

    But I do think that it’s beneficial to think—at least sometimes—in categorical terms when it comes to the creative process. Every composer has a toolkit they carry around in their heads and hard drives, and in their studios. It’s full of their techniques, materials and technologies they use to make their art. Knowing where in the workflow these are best used creates order, and answers, when it comes to the question of “What should I be doing right now?” Opening up a fresh DAW project, the composer can know which materials, technologies and techniques to use to begin gathering the materials for their work. At another point, they know which techniques and aspects of theory they need to apply when they are organising these materials into structures—what sorts of growth, decay or stability they lean towards, and how to portray these through editing or automation techniques, for example. And of course, wanting to make sounds interesting, the composer knows which tools and techniques to use to mould material into their desired shapes and textures. In other words, instead of knowing what their favourite tools are, it’s better to know what their favourite plugins and techniques are for specific stages of the creative process. This at least slims down the possible options for what the composer should open up to begin making materials, or apply to process existing materials.

    I don’t think it’s worthwhile though being dogmatic about sticking to the stages in sequence: the composer doesn’t need to move linearly from one to the next stage. If they want, they might create sounds and process them immediately afterwards, before organising them into a structure. In what order the composer moves through or around the stages is up to them.

    And of course every composer is going to have different stages in their understanding of the creative process.

    I just think it is worthwhile—and has been for me in the past—to have a form of mental representation of the creative process in mind, rather than considering it as a mystical, amorphous blob that we enter when we head into the studio.

  • Storytelling in song, research, listening and everywhere else

    This week marked the first week of teaching for the year. It was great to be back on campus and meeting a fresh batch of new students. One of the songwriting classes I’m teaching this trimester is about the relationship between music and storytelling—primarily through lyrics, but also how musical/compositional and production techniques all play a role in reinforcing a lyrical narrative.

    As a class we unpacked these lyrics of Pearl Jam’s Black:

    Sheets of empty canvas, untouched sheets of clay
    Were laid spread out before me, as her body once did
    All five horizons revolved around her soul as the Earth to the Sun
    Now, the air I tasted and breathe has taken a turn

    This unit especially comes at a useful time for me, as I’ve been working on a writing project that involves surprising similarities to this approach.

    I did quite a bit of research during my days at uni, but haven’t done heaps of it since, besides a couple of papers last year. This year however, I’m taking on a project that hopefully will eventuate in a published book. I’ve wanted to do this for a while, so it feels great to finally take the plunge. But doing this process has put me back in the mental spaces I enjoyed so much when I was studying and writing my research projects.

    I, like many others, have often seen ‘research’ as a bit of a dry exercise of reading charts (not sure why I always think of charts when thinking about researching the creative industries. I guess sometimes we look at listener statistics—sometimes). But this process is in fact a great, creative experience, with similarities to the storytelling methods in my songwriting class, and with my approach to composition in general.

    The process began with a question and some vague ideas. With these in mind, I read and listened and thought about the ideas of others, and links began to form. When you have a question in your mind, you often find answers in strange and unexpected places.

    It’s like the experience of bringing forth one aspect of what we see—honing in on it. I do this sometimes for fun: look around at your surroundings, and pick out a colour. Then tell your brain to find all things in your visual field in that colour. You get this interesting sensation of a filtering process going on.

    It’s been a great experience to have fragments of ideas and answers emerge in my day-to-day life, and in the things I’m actively reading.

    To me, this has always been the definition of creativity: of drawing links between things that are seemingly unrelated, allowing them to represent. We do this constantly in speech and writing—our fundamental semiotic sign systems—but also in others, like the musical and visual arts. Even in things that just surround us, not ‘captured’ in pieces of art. Trees come to mean something to us; the stars always mean something to us. This ability of the imagination is, to me, the engine of creative thinking and art itself—being a creator and an audience of it.

    It comes down to constructing meaning and narratives from things that often, at their essence, are unrelated. Or, they’re deeply related, but only through links we think up.

    This concept is central to the act of listening in music: not just hearing but the act of listening. A sound will mean something different from one person to another, based on what they bring to the experience, just as a quote or a picture will. It’s all part of the same process of building connections between things, and allowing them to represent an idea of something.

    One of my favourite exercises for students in the songwriting class is to give them a set of unrelated words, and ask them to arrange them in ways to allow connections to emerge. As they do this, the students are actively making these unrelated things come to mean something. I love this exercise, and I think it is one that exercises creativity on a fundamental level. It’s the same process as arranging sounds on a screen to make them connect and work to create some gestalt meaning. It’s the same process as having a question and seeing fragments out in the world be able to be captured, arranged and formed into something that tells a story, answers a question, or perhaps asks another more fundamental question. This sort of “rabbit-holing”—of finding answers that lead to questions that lead to answers that lead to more questions—is what can be fulfilling, enriching, overwhelming, devastating, exhausting, and entrancing. To me it’s what pushes a creative person onwards, and allows their curiosity to guide them, but also itself become more complex as they follow it.

    To me, it’s central.

  • Time Vials: Part 3 is coming out this Friday!

     

    Hey everyone, I hope you’re having a nice start to the year.

    On Friday the 16th of January, the third part of the Time Vials series will be released.

    It has three tracks — Purslane, Campion, and Abigail — which reference the book House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds.

    I was reading that book while I was finalising these pieces, and felt that the mood of the book really related to the music, so I ended up naming the tracks after three core characters of the story.

    If you haven’t read the book, definitely give it a go — I highly recommend it. It’s a work of far-future science fiction that looks into the nature of humanity and what could be considered ‘human’ in speculative scenarios involving cloning and the manipulation of the body with technology, in the spirit of transhumanism. It touches on core ideas of post-humanism — how has/does our concept of the ‘human’ change, and what can be considered human after technological additions and changes to the body. (The character of the ‘Spirit of the Air’ was mind-blowing.) But it’s also just a really cool story!

    The third part of Time Vials begins with the track Purslane, which was built using a modular synthesiser running through some guitar pedals. It was recorded as a single take and then further processed in the computer, with a few extra parallel layers added: The original recording was sent out into other pedals, processed in different ways, then brought back into the session and overlaid with the original. I’ve been experimenting with this approach to processing and working with hardware — making multiple layers from a single piece of material, blending them, fading them in and out, and allowing them to morph over time. These techniques come very much from the workflows of Max Cooper and Jon Hopkins I learnt about some years ago, as well as approaches to electroacoustic music composition.

    The second track, Campion, is a little simpler and came out of a jam I was doing one afternoon on the Prophet synth. It’s just a few chords looping and gradually building over time. Nothing too crazy with this one, but I felt it worked well between Purslane and Abigail, and I also used some of the same processing techniques on it.

    Abigail is a slower-paced piece, and it’s one I actually started in between teaching classes at SAE. I set myself up in one of the studios and explored a workflow using Granulator, a granular synthesiser in Ableton Live. I was listening to a bit of A Winged Victory for the Sullen at the time — if you haven’t heard them, definitely give them a listen. Their influence mostly comes through in the atmosphere and chords, but I went for more of a synthesised approach than they typically do. I also started playing around with really high-frequency ‘pings’, which I love hearing in experimental electronic music — particularly in some Japanese work. Those really digital, high-frequency bursts almost act like pinpricks of sound in the upper registers.

    Overall, this EP feels like it sits comfortably as a part three. It brings the energy down slightly (not that the Time Vials series could be considered heaps ‘energetic’) and focuses on sustained sounds rather than plucked elements or strong pulses; everything feels more fluid on this release. In contrast, I focused more on pieces with a clearer sense of rhythm and pulse in part four — not necessarily percussive, but with a clearer and stronger rhythmic grid.

    Part three is out on Friday, and you can pre-save it here. I’m really looking forward to hearing what you think.

    Much love!

    Pat

     

  • Reflecting on What I Read in 2025; Specialisation vs. Generalisation in Learning

    Reading List

    I read and learnt about some pretty cool things this year. Here’s the list!

    Non-Fiction

    • The Molecule of More — Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long
    • The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma — Mustafa Suleyman
    • Chip War — Chris Miller
    • Nexus — Yuval Noah Harari
    • The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains — Nicholas Carr
    • QAnon and On: A Short and Shocking History of Internet Conspiracy Cults — Van Badham
    • Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference — Rutger Bregman
    • The Soul: A History of the Human Mind — Paul Ham
    • War — Bob Woodward
    • Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir – Israel, Palestine and Beyond — John Lyons

    Fiction (this was my year of science fiction!)

    • Raft — Stephen Baxter
    • Annihilation (Southern Reach #1) — Jeff Vandermeer
    • House of Suns — Alastair Reynolds
    • Pandora’s Star (Commonwealth Saga #1) — Peter F. Hamilton
    • Exodus (Archimedes Engine #1) — Peter F. Hamilton
    • Grave Empire (The Great Silence, #1) — Richard Swan
    • Empire of Silence (The Sun Eater, #1) — Christopher Ruocchio
    • Deadhouse Gates (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #2) — Steven Erikson

    My favourite non-fiction was The Soul — Paul Ham, and my favourite fiction was Exodus — Peter F. Hamilton.

    I don’t usually like to think about my least favourite, but this year, it definitely goes to Moral Ambition — Rutger Bregman.

    Specialisation and Generalisation in Learning

    As the year comes to a close, I find myself reflecting on my approach to reading and learning. In particular, I keep returning to the idea of the “right way” to learn: specialisation versus generalisation.

    Specialisation is often presented as the superior path — and in many cases it is, but only for particular ends. If the goal is to become an expert in a narrowly defined field, or to qualify for a specific role, then deep specialisation makes sense. But I often wonder whether that comes at the cost of something else: the joy of following curiosity wherever it leads.

    I find myself drawn to a wide range of topic areas that, on the surface, can seem entirely unrelated. This year I’ve enjoyed exploring the topics of power and technology, history, the Chinese revolution, dopamine, AI, and more. Each of these threads brought its own excitement and reward. I know plenty of people are perfectly content to stay within a single domain, but my mind doesn’t seem to work that way. It jumps around — and often, I let it!

    Is this a “bad” way of reading and learning? I don’t think so. It’s certainly not the most efficient route to becoming an expert in any one of these areas, but that isn’t really the aim here. Learning, for me, isn’t an all-or-nothing process.

    There are areas where my knowledge runs deeper — areas of music, through my PhD, and areas of cultural studies that I’ve taught over the past few years. Alongside these sit other domains about which I’ve read and thought a great deal, but I’d never claim expertise. Taken together, this forms something like a T-shaped knowledge profile: depth in one area, with breadth across many others.

    What I actively try to do, though, is build connections between these different domains. This, to me is the overarching project of learning: the interesting mixing and connecting of domains. History, for example, offers countless cases that can be drawn upon to illuminate contemporary ideas. Films play out philosophical questions that appear in histories, but also literature and music; abstract theories unfold out in stories, technologies, and social systems, all explored through various media and domains. When viewed this way, seemingly separate fields begin to cohere around shared themes.

    For me, many of these interests ultimately converge on questions about the nature of knowledge and ideas, and how they shape the world. Reading Harari’s Sapiens and Homo Deus played a significant role in forming this theme, helping me see how domains of history, technology, culture, economics, and art are deeply so interrelated.

    In that sense, what looks like generalism from the outside can begin to resemble a kind of hyper-specialisation: an ongoing inquiry into a very broad theme, approached from as many angles as possible.

    It brings to mind a quote I heard from Robert Sapolsky:

    “…when you think in categories, you overestimate how different [two facts] are when there happens to be a boundary in between them. And when you pay attention to categorical boundaries, you don’t see big pictures.”

    I wish everyone a wonderful holiday period, and best wishes for the new year.