What it Means to be an Artist — and Why I Study Computer Science

Is music created or discovered? This question has been the subject of ongoing philosophical debate for centuries. Some argue that composing music is a work of invention; rendering beauty on the nothings of silence. Others, however, believe that to not be the case — that silence is not the absence of sound¹, but rather every sound in its potential — and to compose is to hear a distinct melody in the cacophony of silence. In the same way, a sculptor notices the sculpture in a block of stone. Michelangelo puts it this way:

“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

A sculptor is someone who can see the sculpture in the marble block. In the same way, to be an artist is to be someone who sees the good or beautiful² in anything. It is seeing potential where others have not; it is being a visionary.

“Music is the silence between the notes.” — Debussy

To compose is to hear music in the vast silences, and the other half of the process is translating the beauty you’ve noticed into a human-readable form³; it is projecting that sublimity⁴ onto a medium. And anything — canvas, language, or code — can be this medium.

Aside: By “human-readable”, I mean low dimensional; sublimity is the high dimensional input, the artist is the bottleneck who filters/parses sublimity through their senses/perspective (aesthetics), and they encode and share their perspective and insight through language/music/any other medium that is art. If composing is hearing music in the silence, the recognition of music is seeing the artist in the music. Understanding any art/act of communication is decoding it, and this recognition of pattern is similar to Kant’s idea of purposiveness without a purpose and works the way language works (cf Noisy Channel Model⁵ and Roman Jakobson’s functions of language). This recognition is what makes art worthwhile — because people/artists want to be understood, and we hope that when someone sees our work they’ll be able to understand a little more of us (cf Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, also cited below¹¹). Somewhat relatedly, this train of thought resulted in my sketching of a framework similar to that of an encoder-decoder model before I knew anything about Machine Learning.

I’ve been enamored with the idea that silence can be parsed since writing a paper on (silence and American identity in the early 1900s)[https://medium.com/@lois_wong/the-silent-account-of-american-history-fd3f1b971d57] . I postulated an inverse account of American identity written entirely in omissions and eloquently memorialized by the oeuvre of songs unsung by the enslaved — unwritten songs about fathers, weddings, and home. Arguing that silence — constituting a signifier and song of its own — safely encodes tremendous tragedy and loss, I developed the idea that silence is meaningful. Words cannot capture the extent of loss suffered, and the profoundest rendering of tragedy is instead articulated in absence⁶. Just as composers hear music in the silence, the ability to recognize others’ pain in the silence — the silences of missing people and those denied opportunities to articulate themselves⁷ — is what motivates me. For a long time, I’ve chosen to believe that I was made for reducing the amount of pain in the world. And now, I am doing everything I can to help these people who have been denied a voice. When I was 15 and depressed, I decided to keep living if only to reduce the amount of pain in the world. This prospect of reducing pain has stayed with me the whole time and is what drives me.

At the same time, my inquiry on the nature of art led me to the realization that — like language — art is arbitrary. You can’t argue that any given item is not art⁸. Like any act of communication, the recognition of art is the recognition of pattern, intent, or dare I say purposiveness⁹.

This immense — yet, on a second thought, quite obvious realization pushed me outside the fields of Linguistics and English, and I began investigating the subjects of Data Science and Machine Learning, since the recognition of pattern stuff is nearly synonymous with finding patterns in data. For many years, I had been searching for a method with which to render the ideas in my head of what the world can be — imparting real-world impact and all. And the interface with solving real-world problems is the second thing I love about Computer and Data Science. I believe this to be the method/medium with which I do something good with my life. And it is for these reasons that I still think of myself as an artist, ~3 years later and learning Computer Science from scratch¹⁰.

Footnotes

1. And, by extension, that nothing is not the absence of things; much fascinating work has been written on the concept of zero, e.g. The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero by Robert Kaplan
2. Interesting scholarship on the relation between beauty and art and goodness, cf Plato who thinks that if something is good, it is beautiful; Aristotle who thinks beauty is the goal of virtue; Kant who thinks beauty is a symbol of moral goodness
3. For more on formalizing understanding/recognition of art, cf Roman Jakobson’s “Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry”, Linguistics and Poetics “A Postscript to the Discussion on Grammar of Poetry”, Stéphane Mallarmé and Barbara Johnson’s Divagations, Charles Sanders Pierce, Roland Barthes, and Umberto Eco
4. Sublimity is a fascinating concept, sort of like a well-formulated theory for the feeling of awe. Put simply, it is the feeling of overwhelm, knowing that you can’t grasp the extent of what you don’t know and realizing the infinitesimal nature of your existence. Sublimity is often discussed in conjunction with beauty, terror, pain, and pleasure, and is regarded as one of the most fundamental, human experiences. A key recurring feeling and concept in my personal development, I reference it in one of my application essays¹⁰ (cf Longinus’ On the Sublime, Burke’s On the Sublime and Beautiful, Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime).
5. The Noisy Channel model (from Phonetics and Information Theory) states that a message is transmitted from a sender to a receiver through a communication channel that may introduce errors or ‘noise’ into the message. It begins with a sender, who has a message they want to transmit to the receiver. This message is hence encoded into a signal (for example, a thought or idea can be encoded into an acoustic signal/speech) and subsequently transmitted through some communication channel (e.g. speech travels through air) that possibly distorts the signal, and finally received by the the receiver who then decodes the signal to get the message.
6. Building off Linguistic theories and frameworks which formalize understanding, I posited silence as a signifier — one that safely encodes everything that no longer is, never was, and will not be. Cf Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics and other works in Semiotics
7. Cf Virginia Woolf on the unwritten books in A Room of One’s Own
8. The way you cannot argue that anything is not music, cf John Cage’s famous composition 4′33″ (spoiler alert: silence is musical). Additionally, interesting work bridging Linguistics and Art has been done by the Russian Formalists, e.g. Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky, e.g. in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays
9. Cf Kant’s work on beauty in The Critique of Judgment, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
10. A disproportionately short summary of my somewhat messy and uncertain transition into Computer Science :) Notably, one key indicator that I was in the right place came from being able to glimpse an implementation of the silence thing in a project where I used NLP to detect suicide ideation here

Other quotes I like

¹¹“every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.” — Basil Hallward in Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray

“The prospect of imparting real-world impact motivated me to study first Criminal Justice, and now Computer Science — and the awareness that there are people hurting right now is what drives me. But awe was all I felt I had to offer. Awe of the strength and human kindness that preserves understanding despite an improbable communication system. Awe that an encoding — be it an utterance, poem, or symphony — is unwrapped like a worthwhile enigma.” — a cool passage from my personal statement

“In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of.” — Schumann

“There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres.” — Pythagoras

“If I can stop one heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one in pain

Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again,
I shall not live in Vain.” — Emily Dickinson