Silence and Technology

It's great to have so many comments on my blog! Please, keep it up, everyone, and don't feel shy to post. My posts are but the humble work of one man, but when we discuss and collaborate, this blog becomes a living, dynamic work of our collective mind, an existence far superior to any individual alone.

But yet... it is said that, "a person is smart, but people are stupid". At what point does the dynamic change from the idiocy of a crowd of panicked people, all intelligent when taken individually, stampeding away from the emergency exit, ignoring clearly marked signs in the throes of blind panic; to the brilliant and complex ballet of individually unintelligent bees working together to maintain and develop the hive, breed young, and communicate at a level where they can systematically harvest nectar and pollen from specific locations that can be miles away?

I'm not going to address this question today... I'm just throwing it out there. My thoughts today, rather, are about silence. And technology.

One of the valuable lessons I learned in college, I learned not from the classroom, but from my a cappella group. I arranged a number of songs for them, and while some were so bad that merely uttering the name of the song became its own punchline, I steadily improved, to the point where one musician I respect declared one of my arrangements to be his favorite song ever. (Though he had somewhat of a penchant for hyperbole, I did sense a fair bit of honesty in his statement).

Now as you may know, in Japan, there are some people who practice tea ceremony for the majority of their lives, dedicating 70 years or more to the refinement and development of their aesthetic sense of wabi-sabi, as well as the coordination of body, mind, and spirit. Other traditional arts are studied the same way - flower arrangement, martial arts, calligraphy, taiko drumming, as well as my personal favorite, the game of go. In all of these cases, the specifics of the activity have only secondary significance. A true and thorough explanation of the primary purpose of this study and practice is probably beyond my understanding and ability to explain. I believe an important part of it is to develop a deep aesthetic sense, not limited to a single game or art, but fundamental and underlying everything in life, and to engage oneself in applying it. In doing so, we learn about the patterns of things in the world, we recognize our limitations, and we learn valuable lessons that can be applied, perhaps non-consciously, to unrelated aspects of our lives.

In go, I have observed and lived countless patterns that apply to business, to relationships, to personal development, and elsewhere. It's a game about balance and about compromise. Play all your stones too high, too aggressively, and you'll have your base cut out from under you in no time. Play your stones too low, and you'll be walled out from the center, pressed down into a low, inefficient position with no potential. Every time you take something, you give away something else - it's not like chess where you just destroy everything in your path. This is not American foreign policy. It's a game for a realistic, civilized world of give and take, and I believe that by developing a good sense for the game, one can also develop the skills to be successful in business, negotiations, relationships, and self-improvement in life.

I feel that a cappella, or rather music in general, has many valuable lessons like these to teach us. While not a literal microcosm for the exchanges and relationships in life, music certainly does embody deep aesthetic principles that are true everywhere. Take harmony and counterpoint, for example.

Harmony describes the vertical arrangement of notes at any given moment into chords, and the relationships between those chords over time. It's concerned only that the group of notes fit well together and do not clash with each other at any given moment in the song.

Counterpoint, on the other hand, describes the horizontal flow of notes in their parallel and complementary melodies, and the relationships of these melodies between different instruments or voices.

To demonstrate the difference, consider that it's possible to freeze one's right hand in the position of a C major chord on the piano, mash it down alternately with the thumb on C, then G, then A, then F, and repeat, producing something that resembles the structure of a song. Mozart would never go for that, though - it has no finesse, no delicacy. Now imagine six virtuoso violinists in the room. You simultaneously tell them all to rock out on their most beautiful and emotional violin solo. Any one of them individually would produce a heartwarming melody, but in this room their melodies have no relationship to each other, and all that results is a cacophonous mess. This is perhaps a clumsy and not completely accurate representation of what harmony and counterpoint are, but I think you get the point. [Ed - This example was kind of off the top of my head, and I know it's slightly wrong - if you can think of a better example of counterpoint without harmony, please write it as a comment to this post! :)]

Japanese society places great value on their "wa", which literally means harmony (both musically and in the general sense). It might not be too much of an oversimplification to state that the ultimate ideal of their society is to preserve peace and harmony, even at the expense of individual freedom. The result? Low crime rate, high suicide rate, no guns allowed. Ok, that really IS an oversimplification. But as this is not the central point of my essay, I'll move on. Likewise, in the USA, we value personal freedom over just about everything else. In many cases I think this has been taken to too much of an extreme, as everyone and their mother expects "special treatment" for this or that, and people are aggressive and irritating because "it's their right" to be like that. Customer service sucks, and you have to fight for just about everything you want or deserve in life. Counterpoint out of control.

Possibly the most surprising (to me, at that age) insight I had came during grad school. I had just finished my undergrad degree, which taught me about the equations of science, the processes and tools of engineering, and that everything was done by the textbook. Analytical tools were available for everything from simulating lift and drag on a wing, to developing requirements dependency trees for top-level systems design. My music classes had taught me the rules for determining whether the next note should go up to the 5th, or down to the 3rd. I had learned everything there was to know, except for a few low-level specifics that I expected to learn in my Master's courses. Seldom have I been more wrong.

Though the learning process was rough in both cases, I gradually realized the truth - that musical composition, engineering design, scientific discoveries, and mathematical proofs are all arrived at the same way - through intuition. The analytical rules can then be applied to justify the conclusion you have come up with, which is of course a formalism necessary for communication with the scientific community.

The big lie, of course, comes when these discoveries are always presented as if they had been arrived at in the bottom-up manner in which they are described, rather than as flashes of guided inspiration. The key word here is "guided". All those years of education are not worthless; on the contrary, they build the foundation of concepts and ideas these inspirations are based on, and they create the networks of connections in the mind along which these inspirations flow. But in the end, it is our insight, our aesthetic that creatively synthesizes ideas and guides us in the right direction.

So it is in music - the rules and structures are merely the framework, the "lines on the field", to give a soccer analogy. The beautiful coordination of play, the graceful passes and daring steals in a well-played soccer game are no more defined by those lines than a musical masterpiece can be synthesized using formal rules.

There are many guidelines and patterns, however, that can be discovered through practice, whether on the soccer field, in an engineering lab, or at the piano keyboard, and this brings me to my last analogy, the inspiration for my title, "Silence and Technology". This was an extremely valuable and deeply fundamental principle that I learned over years of composing a cappella arrangements.

The principle is this: Silence is an essential element of music. It must be given consideration equal to that of the other instruments or voices in the composition of a piece. It is far too easy to be caught up in the harmony and counterpoint, or in complex rhythms and counterrhythms, or in clever ways of weaving lyrics into the background parts of an a cappella piece, and to forget the critical part that silence plays in a composition.

It's like they say with young children - I read somewhere that an elementary school teacher was famous among her colleagues for the beautiful artwork her students always produced. When asked what her secret was, she simply replied, "You just need to know when to take away the pencil." Young children often have little or no sense of the value of silence (or white space, in this case), and taking away the pencil forced them not to fill it all up. I remember some of my drawings as a child - they looked like some of those traditional Japanese tapestries, with thousands of little tiny people, each one living out his own life, surrounded with bridges, buildings, forests, trees, and maybe a parade or a battle going on to add to the complexity. Though the content differed (my drawings were mostly of spaceships and grotesque aliens), my mom often remarked about how busy those drawings were.

However, this is not merely an aesthetic principle for the visual arts. I think, and I'm sure many agree, that it is essential to apply this principle to our lives as well. Surrounded as we are by media of all sorts, advertisements, propaganda, meaningless trivia, and pop music racing like a cloud of informational sperm to be the first to get into our heads, it has become essential to manage our silence. There are many who choose not to do this, leaving the TV on in the background for the entire time they're home, or constantly listening to music on their iPod whenever they go anywhere. Certainly I'm guilty of the same thing - the first thing I do when I get home is switch on my computer. I believe, however, that this is not the way to live a balanced and fulfilling life.

The internet has only compounded this problem. Not only do we now have access to incomprehensibly vast sources of information, we have had a dramatic increase in noise as well - spam, popups, and annoyances such as spyware, of which we need to vigilantly keep abreast, that alone sucking away our attention and time. Although I fully recognize and appreciate the availability of information, I often find myself in a state of information overload. First it was email... trying to keep up with far more friends than I ever would have attempted staying in touch with using mere pen and paper. Then it was blogs - I have so many friends whose blogs I want to read, but opening them every day takes time and effort. Then I discovered RSS. I can have the information from my friends' blogs piped directly to me... as well as a profusion of news sites and blogs that I find fascinating - lifehacker.com, robots.net ... the list is long, and life is short.

So often it seems the timesavers that are meant to help us, consume more of our time than they save. It becomes a gamble. Is it worth my time to sign up for Orkut, Facebook, Mixi, or MySpace? Where should I host my photos? The importance of our digital data has brought up new concerns on our home computers as well. Which firewall should I use? Which antivirus? Antispam? Defragmenter? Photo organizer? Music organizer? Backup utility?

Perhaps one of the most disconcerting things is that these peripheral choices - decisions that must be made that aren't really essential to the content of our lives - are seldom permanent. Each year, or every few months, old services die. New services are released. One must remain ever on the lookout for the new trends in supporting technology, a huge burden considering that it has almost nothing to do with the things we truly care about. I use my computer to stay in touch with my friends, to manage my photos, and to write and record music. Ideally, 100% of the time I spend on my computer should be devoted to those tasks, but the other things are too distracting - installing the new version of Firefox breaks compatibility with plugin x, so now I have to search for a new solution for that, etc. etc.

Maybe the biggest thing that bothers me about computers and the digital age in general, is that by spending all this time on maintenance, I feel like I'm falling behind. I'm not sure with respect to what standard this is, but I have a perpetual feeling that I need to catch up. Organize my contact lists, tag my mp3's... and I find that this eats into the time I should be spending in real life. Sleeping, for example, or cooking, shopping, organizing my apartment, or ... even relaxing?

Again, silence (downtime, in this case) is the key. Until this NaBloPoMo thing started, I was even enforcing a 30-minute delay between when I got home from work and when I turned on my computer. I noticed immediately that it improved the feeling of relaxation in my life... except for those times when I felt pressed to deal with something over email. I've heard of people who refuse to check email outside of one hour per day, say from 7-8pm. Lifehacker, the blog I mentioned above, is full of ways to save time and improve efficiency. There are many books written on these topics, and yet... I seldom talk with my friends about it, or hear others talk about it. Is that because it's not a problem for some people? Or is it that we're living in denial?

I suspect that some people find it desirable to live without silence, because it relieves them of the responsibility of being introspective. Many people don't like to think, and especially when our lives encounter deep contradictions and dilemmas, we prefer to distract ourselves, rather than face the difficult thoughts and choices.
Is this our fate? As more and more of us enter the Age of Distraction, will we cease to be introspective, and become consumed with maintenance of information and persuit of new technologies? Or are we merely going through a rough transition to an era where computers and technology really will be transparent to us and save us time?

As I once again seem to be approaching the two-hour mark with my philosophical ramblings, I shall end this post with two recent quotes from ... me. :P

"A computer should not be like a hammer. It should be like the shirt on your back."

"When Google is out of beta, the human race will no longer have any need for biological memory."