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Introduction
This website is dedicated to a special idea: Have you ever encountered a new instrument for the first time, or, say, a new sound on a synthesizer, and experienced an unanticipated and strong burst of creativity in response? An experience that really amazed and surprised you, and made you wonder what just happened? A kind of “beginners mind” experience or state of heightened awareness wherein new music just flows from your fingers as if a magic door has somehow opened? If you haven’t, then I hope you will, and that this site can help get you there.
For want of a better term, let’s just call this Sonic Inspiration. I’ve personally found it to be one of the most powerful sources of creative inspiration I’ve encountered, and yet it seems to me that this kind of experience is not often discussed. One does hear artists and composers comment extensively about being inspired by emotion, or natural beauty, or other noble sounding things. And one can find endless discussions about the merits and characteristics of the sounds of instruments. But the connection between these two is not often discussed, or so it seems to me.
To be clear, I’ve likewise often experienced those other kinds of inspiration as well, and I certainly don’t discount them. They can be very profound and compelling. The regularity though with which SI has been a major inspiration for me though eventually led me to focus very consciously on just the sheer power of the “timbre” of an instrument, all by itself, along with the way it feels to play the instrument (e.g. a super-easy-to-play keyboard, or some such) to inspire new music. I suggest going so far as to elevate this experience to the level of a “phenomenon,” that is, beyond just being a mere “effect,” to emphasize that I don’t think of it as a simple and easily explainable effect, but rather a very important, and also a highly complex and convoluted process, involving real time feedback between different objectively measurable aspects of sound, psychoacoustic (subjective or perceptual) aspects of sound, the expressive capabilities of the instrument, and myriad aspects of our emotional and intellectual response. The latter aspects undoubtedly involves significant releases of various psychoactive chemicals (neurotransmitters and hormones), without the need for external stimulants, which fact might account for why the SI can be so profound and powerful.
Complex phenomenon deserve in-depth exploration, and so this website is largely if not entirely dedicated then to the idea of, and examples of, SI. Beyond SI, though, I’m also deeply involved in exploring the use of sound to generate powerful visual imagery, and having that feed back into the musical making process as well. And so this is also discussed on this website. And finally, there are other related topics addressed on this site, an overview of which you can find below.
I dedicate this project with all my heart to my parents: To my late father, David A. Luce (“Dr. Dave”), who was a pioneering researcher of musical sound, and also an important inventor of analog synthesizers. I’m eternally grateful to him for providing me with the rare opportunity to improvise with synthesizers in the first place, and to thus have SI experiences starting in my teen years (synthesizers are particularly well suited to eliciting SI, although by no means the only or primary means). He also taught me much about the science of sound. And to my mother, author and painter Mary Jane Luce, who inspired my interest in visual art, and also music, from an early age, by introducing me to the work of numerous artists in books and museums, and at the local art galleries she helped found and run, and through art workshops, and last but not least, to the piano.
To give you a sense of what SI is about, at least for me, the video presented just below documents one particular improvisation I recorded one morning, which occurred while I was first exploring the sonic possibilities of a vintage Baldwin Electric Harpsichord while visiting the Electronic Music Education And Preservation Project in Harleysville, Pennsylvania in the summer of 2021 (to whom I’m also deeply indebted for many wonderful SIP type experiences in recent years). I just happened to record this event on video, which is not something I usually do, mainly because I had some great props (the little “Tarkus” sculpture for example!), and because I knew it might be a good moment. (Note that the Minimoog bass line heard in this recorder was added after the fact).
This particular experience in fact provided the final spark of conscious inspiration for creating a website dedicated to SI, hence the piece’s name “Inspired by Sound.” I conveys a sense of inspired discovery I think, and in fact I do a number of things here that were completely new for me, and that I found a but hard to replicate later – hallmarks of a true SI experience:
If you’re curious, you can find more information about my creative work during that time with this little known but truly remarkable instrument, and more about the instrument itself, on the page found here.
As I mentioned above already, there are myriad websites and books and videos one can find dedicated to the features of various musical instruments, especially synthesizers, and the sounds they make. So perhaps it’s simply self-evident, or implicit, that interesting timbres possess great inspirational power. But as I also mentioned, I simply don’t encounter many discussions about how all those sounds are related to musical inspiration, either in general or through specific examples. And so that’s the gap I’m trying to fill here with examples like that above, where I can personally attest that the sound had everything to do the inspiration.
There is also of course an even vaster space of possibilities to explore regarding sound and other sources of inspiration work together synergistically. For example, how emotions or experiences with nature, or visual art, or interactions with other musicians, combine with the sonic characteristics of an instrument to inspire. I have tried to include some discussion of that wider aspect in a few places on this site, where relevant.
In any case, I approach SI on this site in a number of different ways. First, I simply provide recordings and/or videos of my own experiences along with explanations and descriptions to illustrate the SI connection explicitly. Links to pages for this are collected here:
As another inroad I provide some supporting information about various instruments that I would like to highlight in some depth, especially synthesizers, the pages which overlap to some extent with the above mentioned listing:
Related to the idea of sound as inspiration, I’d like to also promote the Art of Improvisation, which goes part and parcel with SI. The following link provides a simple guide of sorts to improvising that I hope you will find useful:
In relation to SI, this site is also dedicated to the rigorous scientific exploration of sound, something that my father, Dr. David A. Luce, dedicated the first phase of his career too, and something that I’ve also spent many years myself researching and teaching about. A major goal of this research has been to determine what the objective attributes of musical tones actually are, and how these are produced physically:
And finally, this site is dedicated to preserving and educating about my father’s original work in musical acoustics and synthesizers, and the work of all those at the great and storied Moog Music Inc.:
In summary, I hope you find these resources interesting, enjoyable and useful for your own music making, and that they help you unleash your own creative power, so that music can fulfill its true promise for you as a celebration of life and being in all of its myriad forms and manifestations. Comments, suggestions, and requests for more information are welcome via the Contact Form.
Best wishes,
Sincerely,