Interview with A Musician

Hello, Tunehoney enthusiasts (AKA mom). Today we’re going to have a special guest on Tunehoney: co-founder and lead music director of game-development company Nisuboy, Parth Dalal.

Today Parth is going to share some of his experience with us and shed some light on methods of navigating the peculiar task of creating something out of nothing, or, in other words, making music.

So, without further ado, on to the interview!

So, Parth, how did you first begin learning to make music?

In a sense, I’ve always made “music” in my head, and I found that the best form of expressing that energy in this world is through what we consensually understand as music.

After displaying some interest in music when I was a child, my parents enrolled me in piano lessons. Perhaps these weekly lessons, though I was indifferent towards them, were what gave me a foundation to build on and what initially developed my musical intuition.

After I quit lessons, I found richer musical inspiration in the world of film and video games. When my parents bought me a software called PowerTracks Pro Audio, I began to mess around and create my own MIDI tracks (MIDI tracks were a ‘thing’ at the time). I even made a MIDI track called “Dragonball Y Main Theme”, trying to convince my brother that such a series existed. It was fun.

Fast-forward to high school, I eventually found my way to traditional DAW (digital audio workstation) software. I continued ‘messing around’ as usual, with new experiments, covers, remixes, and even some (or a lot of) “Dragonball Y” type tracks along the way. That’s how I began, and it’s in the same spirit that I continue to learn.

What form do your songs start out as? For example, do you begin writing with an emotion, theme, or genre in mind, or do you let those things evolve naturally as you write?

Just to give some background: I have an odd quirk I’ve had since childhood, where I sit down and wiggle my hands and fingers (often holding objects like pens or hangers). Here’s me in action. This results in a sort of stimulatory state where creative thoughts flow more freely and spontaneous musical ideas often get expressed, though this state is not consciously used to that end; it’s sort of a raw expression of thoughts and feelings from which ideas happen to arise. It just feels satisfying, I guess.

The form of musical ideas produced this way tend to emphasize melodies and chord progressions, with personal feelings normally as a peripheral component. But sometimes the melodic ideas do not make sense without the full emotional context or lyrics that I give them. I try my best to write down my ideas using as many mediums as possible to accurately transcribe them, and then work from there.

Another way my music often starts is through audio experiments. For example, I might wonder what it would be like to pitch shift my voice after it’s gone through a vocoder. Then instead of using a vocoder, I might impulsively apply a different effect out of curiosity even though it wasn’t part of my original plan, and that might end up sounding extremely cool. So then I might play chords that sound nice with this unique “instrument” I’ve constructed, and then find that this particular melody actually works better with strings. Then I might change it to strings and so on and so forth.

Can you talk a little bit about the value of a natural and playful music writing process versus applying music theory at every step?

I feel that music (and art, in general) is about expressing something personal to oneself. If it wasn’t, artists would be happy hiring experts to do all the creative work for them.

Music theory seeks to be objective, not personal. It represents a cultural musical paradigm, not an individual personality. So, if you are approaching music with the idea to express yourself (the usual case), the value of a natural process is that it can let you discover yourself independent from culture and conditioning, and possibly invent something entirely new. It might seem like you can do this starting with theory as a reference point i.e “Learning the rules to break ‘em”, but there are core aspects of personality that neither come from learning the rules nor breaking them.

What’s cool is that not only does a natural/playful process allow one to better express themselves, it is the reason music theory itself evolves. In this sense, it has historical value e.g guitar distortion, while initially not aligned with the musical paradigm of that time, defined new genres of music like Rock and Roll, with new theories within those genres.

All that said, I feel that an understanding of contemporary “theory” (i.e. what makes music sound like music today), obviously forms a valid foundation upon which one can play, express, and discover themselves.

Is there any musical advice you’d like to give to aspiring musicians / Tunehoney followers (AKA mom) who might be reading this interview?

Don’t forget what music (and art as a whole) really mean to you. It’s easy to get lost in identity issues pertaining to your label as a “musician” or “artist”. In this, one can overly intellectualize one’s musical identity and lose touch with the heart component that kickstarted everything. Soulfun.

Last but not least, are there any projects you’re working on at Nisuboy that readers might be interested in checking out?

Get a blista!

Conclusion

On behalf of Tunehoney and all the Tunehoney followers, I’d like to thank you very much for doing this interview.