Music is Language
I grew up playing the piano for 12 years with the Royal Conservatory of Music in Canada. On my own, I learned to play the guitar, bass, violin, and I even DJ’d for several years. In parallel, I learned French and Ukrainian at home, at school and through university. It wasn’t until I bought my first hardware synthesizer that my brain fully understood the concept, music is language.
At heart, I’ve always been a musician. I listen to every genre to find new sounds, melodies, rhythms and beats that bring me joy. I can name thousands of songs within seconds of hearing them, but I can never remember the lyrics. That’s mostly because my brain recognizes vocals as another instrument. Lyrics to me, carry no meaning beyond the feeling that’s put into them, but I still enjoy rap. To me, music is feeling, understanding, and most importantly, a way to express something you can’t put into words.
While playing the piano, I learned a lot about technique and how certain aspects of a song can affect the way others hear it. The problem for me was that I understood all of this intuitively. What I was never actually good at, was expressing myself on the piano. No matter how many years of effort I put into it, I could never really express anything by parroting great composers. This is why the conservatory killed music for me in a way. They taught me everything about Bach, Mozart, Handel and Beethoven, but never how to extract what was playing in my head, and share it with the world.
After a while I realized that I needed to make music. There are sounds in my head that people have to hear. Of course, the first thing I do is buy a MIDI keyboard, because “I’m a pianist”. I tried writing in programs like Logic, Ableton, FL Studio, Cubasis, Korg Gadget and everything else under the sun. Nothing I wrote sounded quite like what I had in my head, so I spent hours downloading sample libraries and plugins to find something as close as possible. This proved to be a huge waste of time that just took up a lot of hard drive space. By the time I would open my laptop, set up all my software, and finally start jamming, the inspiration was gone.
I decided to take a music production course in Kyiv, Ukraine — which really helped me understand how to build a song structure and layer instruments that compliment each other. When I finally felt like I was getting somewhere, russia attacked Ukraine, and I was left to diddle away on my iPad for months while hopping from hotel to airbnb across Europe. The turning point for me was when I started looking into physical drum machines. I realized that to me, there’s no real joy in clicking through sample libraries on my computer, when I spend all day clicking through Figma files for UX design. I thought maybe if I had something that was dedicated to music, I might be able to actually write something. I wanted something I could physically interact with, that had no notifications popping up to distract me.
The device I was looking for had to be small and portable, that could produce full sounds. My first instinct was to get the Teenage Engineering OP-1, because “I’m a pianist”. Then I started looking into less piano-like alternatives like the Dirtywave M8, and eventually I bought the Elektron Syntakt. And it was the best decision I could have made.
At first, the Syntakt felt strange because there was no traditional keyboard, remember “I’m a pianist”. But the more I used it, the more I realized that I actually enjoy it — and it sounds amazing. It’s so satisfying to start with an idea, and with the flick of a dedicated “On” switch, I could build an entire song in minutes. I noticed my skills improving, but what I’m making is still not quite what I have playing in my head. And then it clicked — music is language.
When we learn languages, we focus on the 4 foundations — reading, listening, writing and speaking. Reading and listening are forms of input, that teach us to understand. Writing and speaking are forms of output, that teach us to produce. It works the same way with music. My entire life I was taught to learn songs written by someone else, not how to play the music in my head. It’s like endlessly learning poems in a language you haven’t learned yet, in hopes that at some point you’ll be able to speak fluently. If I learned how to recite hundreds of poems in Japanese, it wouldn’t really help me to strike up a conversation. For that, I would need some basic knowledge, liquid courage, and real-world practice.
So like a mumbling infant learning their first words, I’ll keep producing. I’m sure that at some point, I’ll be able to share music that I was able to eloquently articulate on my own, the same way, or hopefully better, than I was able to express in this story. I am no longer a pianist, I’m a musician.
