Oh! The Joy to Play!

At a certain point in time, things became serious. Purpose. That seems to be the driving force of all actions — none shall proceed without purpose. The unfortunate is that our purposes, the purposes of adults, are necessarily tangled with da SYSTEM. Hence, the act of playing video games can not be an act of purpose. The attempt justifications subconsciously do not hold.

But oh man! The joy it must be to just play. I have started and stopped music production a handful of times. On my last run, I felt obligatory to study music theory for a month before attempting creation, as if creation is only reserved for those who have studied creations before them. On my current run, I fell deeper into the disease. I found myself obtaining an ear training book. All this, and I have only produced one track.

Efficiency-wise, I am perfect. All of these SYSTEMs will sure shave off 1000 hours on the long road of 5000 hours until mastery. But, have I lost sight of the journey? Two thoughts come to mind, I am tempted to motivate myself with the advent of AI. They are going to get so good at creating music, it might just make more sense to spend more time fooling around and have a chance to experience more raw creative joy. Second, I am a biological computational unit that have a higher chance of completing a grand goal when under low stress. The theories, the rules, the prohibition of the play, all stress and burn me out a bit.

Perhaps I studied the sciences too hard. I love the theories in computer science. The Curry-Howard correspondance. Type theories. Denotational semantics. But these theories are not analogous. All artistic theories are post-hoc analyses of all previous great works. Autoregressive, not bidirectional (unlike type theory, which extends through the future I’m sure).

The takeaway of this rant is that I need to play more. Some sessions ought to not interface with language. Don’t entertain the thought of “chase the dominant with a second dominant”. It should just be written down if I can pre-hear it. Forget about keys. Forget even what a hi-hat sounds like.

Play.