Creativity

How the Guitar Made Me Lazy as ****

Or: How I Took My Guitar’s Help to Be Lazy

I haven’t always been playing the guitar. It’s only been about 9 years since I started. Before that, I was singing. I never realised back then, but I was paying a lot of…

The Shape of a Vowel

Music hidden in the vowels we speak

I’m sure many of us have covered and uncovered our phone’s (or even our radio’s) speakers in rapid succession to create a wah-wah sound. The music sounds dull and bass-filled, and then turns up the higher…

The Rhythm of Walking

How rhythm redefined the way I walk

“To be a ninja, first learn to move like a ninja.”

I was informally learning martial arts from a much older friend and those were the words he said to get a 9-year old excited…

An Injured Music

A musician’s attempts to bypass injury

About two years ago, I injured my left index finger from over-practicing. It was quite crushing, to say the least. I was practicing playing the flute too much (the metre-long Indian bansuri) and the resulting…

The Sound of Water

An exploration of the music contained in water

It was when I was composing a piece on the guitar recently that I thought to include a natural source for the rhythm section instead of using a drum machine in the intro. What I had in mind…

An iota of Creativity

The less you need, the more you have

Minimalism. You don’t need to fill books to tell a story. You don’t need to compose symphonies to be musical. You don’t need to be wordy to make a point.

How I learned to speak with notes: Connection

A personal recounting of relative pitch: Part 3

What makes music feel dynamic? What makes it an experience so close to living?

How I learned to speak with notes: Melody

A personal recounting of relative pitch: Part 1

As a 6-year old learning to sing, I was first taught the 7 basic notes of Indian classical music: Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha and Ni. This roughly…