O'Reilly Digital Media

Sometimes the best way to overcome annoyances is to embrace them and make them your own. To protest the way rampant commercialism has corrupted Christmas carols, O’Reilly author Michael W. Dean recorded “God Rest Ye Merry Bonzo.” This “perverted Xmas music” mates a drum loop from Led Zep’s “Bonzo” Bonham with vocals, bass, sleigh bells (!), and an e-mailed guitar track.

On a more expansive note, soundscape artist Darwin Charmber just released 3D Christmas Sound Effects (iTunes link). I’m sitting in the middle of its swirling virtual snowstorm as I type this.

Happy shopping — or nothing-buying. Please leave a link if you come up with your own twisted take on this raucous season.

I feel a little like Bob Moog today — or maybe Adolphe Sax. While Googling for one of my articles, I discovered a musical instrument called the Battino:

You play it by whacking a wooden ball with a hammer, causing the ball to tumble across some pegs and strike a bell. “The balls make a pleasing clickety-clack sound as they bounce and roll down the colorful descending wooden bars and ring the little jingle bell at the end,” says one seller. “Turn Battino over and baby has fun rolling the balls down the colorful wooden bars.”

I was pleased to read elsewhere that “Battino is finished with non-toxic, water-based dyes and fragrant beeswax,” making it “the perfect gift for antsy young infants and toddlers.”

Or as the manufacturer says, “Great — now I can bang about and make as much noise as I like!”

That definitely sounds like the type of instrument I’d want to be named after me, but at the same time, it’s not a very obvious name. According to digital illustrator Allen Battino, whose ancestors came from the same Greek village as mine (we haven’t figured out our exact relationship yet), “Battino” means “small tap” in Italian. Supposedly the original Battinos were blacksmiths.

But I’m intrigued by the bigger question: If you could have a toy or a musical instrument named after you, what would it be?

Evan Van Zelfden’s coverage of the Project Horseshoe game-design conference reminded me of a striking moment in one of the speeches there. Mike Sellers of Online Alchemy challenged us with this question:

Original CD image by Arun Kulshreshtha

Name a wildly popular entertainment technology that suddenly perished because its stewards didn’t innovate. Here are your clues:

1. It was introduced in the ’70s.
2. It became more popular in the ’80s and hugely popular in the ’90s.
3. By the turn of the century there were 9,000 titles available.
4. By the ’10s it was the dominant entertainment technology in the U.S. and Europe.
5. By the ’20s, everyone who was anyone in entertainment was distributed via this technology.
6. And then, almost overnight, it became irrelevant.

Can you guess? Answer after the jump….

George “the Fat Man” Sanger with his hand-tuned 1958 Rolls-Royce. He learned auto repair keeping it going; at one point he had almost enough tools and spare parts in the trunk to build another engine.

I’m just back from my 14^th trip to Texas to participate in one of the Fat Man’s amazing digital media conferences. This one was called Project Horseshoe, and dedicated to “solving game design’s toughest problems.” (That’s my back in the photo on the site; the image was from last year’s event, in which I ran a brainstorming group tasked with exploring how — and if — video games could become artistically “legitimate.”)

Videogame journalist Evan Van Zelfden was covering this year’s event, and just published this teaser. In the comments on that article, though, was a link to an earlier article about the Fat Man’s game music, and I found it mighty interesting reading.

Look for more detail from Evan over the next week, and the full reports from all four of this year’s brainstorming groups next month. If history holds, this improbable but beloved conference will have far-reaching results.

For anyone immersed in the digital music space, the past couple of weeks have brought some shifts that are reasonably seismic in nature relative to the shifting balance of power from record labels to artists. Here’s a summary of some the most recent (and significant) activities to highlight what’s going on:

*Oct 1st — Radiohead upsets the apple cart by announcing they’ll release their new CD “In Rainbows” via the Internet in 10 days (which was on Oct 10th), and would allow fans to pay what they wish for the download.

*Oct 8th — Nine Inch Nails announce they are leaving their label (Interscope) after over 15 years with them.

*Oct 9th — On what would have been John Lennon’s 67th birthday, George Harrison’s solo catalog is made available digitally on iTunes (the last of the solo Beatles catalogs to be released). The Beatles not far behind.

*Oct 16th — Madonna announces she’s leaving her label, Warner Bros, for a $120M deal with Live Nation.

*Oct 16th — Artist Nation launches with Madonna as its first signed artist; essentially a new form of a more artist-oriented ‘label’ if you will. Housed under the umbrella of parent, Live Nation, Artist Nation aggregates the diversified components of an artist’s distribution and revenue streams, including recording, touring, merchandising, fan clubs, and licensing of rights for traditional & digital use.

*Oct 16th — Led Zeppelin are no longer digital holdouts as they announce they are making their catalog available across a range of digital music stores in mid-November, of course including iTunes — which are making a ‘virtual box set’ of Zep tunes available for $99. This coincides with their ‘reunion’ charity concert taking place in London on November 26th to honor the late Ahmet Ertegun, former chairman of Atlantic Records (the band’s label) who passed away in December of 2006.

*Oct 23rd — The Eagles leave their label and sign a deal with Wal-Mart that gives the chain exclusive rights to sell all future releases from the group. This kicks-off with the release of their first CD in nearly three decades.

These are significant developments folks — and they usher in a whole new era where artists will be more directly engaged than ever with their fans, embrace themselves as the brands they have become, and stand to retain more of their revenue streams across the board. Long-awaited and long overdue.

Man, I wish I hadn’t just snapped the mic off my pocket voice recorder. Today I got a hilarious call from a robotic telemarketer. Apparently hoping to add impact, the programmer set its speech synth to use a British accent. The greeting went something like this:

Hello David. This is Ian from the university. If there’s one thing holding you back, it’s your lack of a college degree.

I typed that phrase into a handful of online speech synths to try to track down the voice. (If there’s one thing holding me back, it’s probably my curiosity.) The closest match I found was Acapela Peter:

• Hello, David (68KB MP3)

Compare that to the uncultured American voice you get by clicking the “listen” link above. Are British robots more persuasive? I remember hearing, perhaps at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference, that German GPS devices don’t use female voices because Germen men don’t like to take directions from women, but maybe that’s an urban legend.

For more on speech synths, see Digital Media Insider Podcast 3: Singing Computers.

Here’s the best argument I’ve seen for (and against) legalizing digital mashups. YouTube contributor StSanders took concert video clips of guitar heroes like Clapton, Santana, and Van Halen and replaced the guitar solos with hilariously bad plunking. (Plus other noises, as you can hear here):

The sync is amazing. But what’s especially funny is that StSanders’s soundtrack manipulation is so skillful that half the viewers simply think their musical heroes were stoned.

This is exactly the type of derivative artwork that should be covered under Fair Use, but at the same time, one can see how it could damage the original artist’s reputation.

(Thanks to Julian Kwasneski for the tip.)

I just got a call from a blind man who liked the sound of my podcast. He asked how he could get started podcasting. Would it require expensive equipment? I told him that all I used was a USB mic and some software. (In my case, Ableton Live, BIAS Peak, and Izotope Ozone, but there are plenty of free options as well.) The secret to my sound, I told him, was upgrading the mic, learning the software, and speaking with enthusiasm.

To demonstrate, I referred him to this before-and-after example (516KB MP3), contrasting my voice in the first episode and the tenth. The difference is enormous.

Then I offered to send him links to podcasting tutorials I’d found especially helpful. But when he told me that he uses a screen reader to browse websites, I started to wonder how helpful this background would be. Even if he could make sense of the pages (try clicking the “Listen” link above and closing your eyes), how would he be able to run a graphic waveform editor? I spend many hours cleaning up my recordings, often on a syllable-by-syllable level.

If you know of audio-editing software or techniques that are friendly to disabled people, please leave a link below. In the meantime, here are some of the podcasting tips I assembled for my listener.

Just in time for annual Talk Like a Pirate Day, I got this disturbing note from someone who read my “How to Stop Music Piracy” blog:

I recently found an area manager of a store selling illegally produced CDs, mostly dance club mixes by Hex Hector and people like that. He offered ten songs per CD. He makes a lots of money selling these illegally copied CDs. I told him he should not be selling CDs that are copies. He laughed and said no one cares. He had a catalog of 100s of CDs that he offered customers. Is there anywhere to report this or is it true that no one cares?

I replied, “Wow. That’s sad. You might try contacting your Better Business Bureau or local Consumer Action office. I suppose the RIAA would be interested too, as well as the local police.”

According to my correspondent, here’s what happened next:

Social Networking is exploding — that much is clear. But did you know that sites such as Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace are more than online watering holes where kids gather and socialize? They’re creating social change in tandem. Facebook recent launched a “Causes” application tab, allowing members to participate in what the creators have dubbed “equal opportunity activism”. Over 35,000 members sign up each day. The user’s chosen cause is referenced in his profile, and he can then encourage friends to join and raise money for his selected charity. Apparently, “Causes” exceeded $250k in donations during the first two months. Causes on Facebook run the gamut from those that are serious to those that are goofy and more eccentric.

Facebook isn’t alone in encouraging members to make a difference. Friendster recently began allowing non-profits to create profiles, and MySpace launched its “Impact” channel earlier this year — which encourages political activism and lets users participate in a wide range of charities. And one final example is a fashion brand launched by my friend and colleague Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies. His new venture, 61 Brand is focused on donating a significant portion of the sales of its clothing line to end global slavery. He designed the company from the ground up with that vision. An example of the new “Millennials” in action. More about Millennials in a future entry. Bottom line: this generation can actually change the world while socializing in online communities.

If you’ve been following Brad Fuller’s blogs on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) movement, you’re probably as intrigued as I am by the creative potential of these tools.

Today, though, I received a press release touting a more sinister use of laptops. The Spy Laptop, from an Indian company called SpyInvent, is built around a remote-controlled pinhole camera that lets you “know if your manager is floating a parallel business in your office right under your nose.”

The Spy Laptop. Click to enlarge.

I initially laughed at the paranoid pitch, but then recalled another e-mail from an Indian businessman who was worried someone would swipe his pocket voice recorder and steal his ideas. (I pointed him to a Panasonic model that encypts the recordings, but also suggested he could simply leave a message for himself on his voicemail.)

Do you think this paranoia is a sign of an emerging market? I know I’ll look twice at desktop waterfalls now.

I was speaking with an artist manager colleague of mine the other day. This esteemed colleague has represented the likes of Alanis Morissette, LeAnn Rimes, and Collective Soul among many others. He’s a sharp guy. We were discussing how historically, recording artists frequently lost the rights to their master sound recordings (known as “masters”) when they signed recording contracts with record labels. And how difficult it is to get the rights to those masters back.

My colleague shared an analogy that I thought was really profound. He said the story he shares with artists is that the ‘masters situation’ is kind of like taking out a mortgage with a bank, paying it off, and then at the end - the bank keeps the house title. Absurd right? Yet that’s how it has been (simplistically) for artists who have ’signed away’ their master recordings to labels. Some artists who have been unfortunate enough to be in this position have been bold enough to take the reins and either they have purchased their masters back from their record labels OR they’ve re-recorded and re-issued their original albums (if they didn’t have a clause in their original contract prohibiting them from doing so). But artists who have taken either of those measures are in the minority.

Now that the balance of power is shifting to artists and they have more choices available to them, they (and their handlers) have become more astute about not giving away more rights than they need to. My crystal ball predicts that fewer artists will repeat the mistakes of the past in this context moving forward.

Our Los Angeles event went really, really well. We had great turnout and the entire thing lasted over 12 hours with a lot of people sticking around for the whole thing. After the event, which ended at around 9:45, we all took a cab back to the hotel to pack and shower. Then around 1:00 we headed out for the looooooong drive from Los Angeles to Dallas. Google says the drive is about 22 hours, but for us it was more like 24. Luckily we had a lot of stuff to do on the bus, so we didn’t go *totally* crazy. Most of the time was spent coding or watching some movies in the evening.

Some of the guys woke up at 3:00 in the morning that night while we were driving in the Mojave Desert to stop, get out, and look at the stars. I wasn’t one of them because I was sleeping, but they said it was really cool and that it was the clearest they had ever seen the Milky Way. They also said they saw satellites and a couple of shooting stars. We ended up getting into Dallas about 1:15 in the morning, which was 3:15 Dallas time, so we checked in and went to bed.

We’ve got a chat application up on Ted Patrick’s website now, so if you want to chat with us while you’re watching the live video feed, you should check it out. Plus we’ve got a lot of photos up on the Flickr feed.

So I read in this article on Salon.com about SoundExchange’s “deal” with Web broadcasters. After pushing internet radio to the brink of extinction, they now graciously extend their hand and offer salvation - for a price.

O’Reilly Missing Manual editor Pete Meyers tries reading on his new iPhone. Check it out.

I just posted about our Vancouver stop which was a lot of fun. It’s been almost non stop since we left Seattle. We’ve been playing some Guitar Hero and people are spending a lot of time coding. Lee Brimelow and Mike Chambers have been updating the on AIR Blog and Ted Patrick is building a chat application for our live video feed. Kevin Hoyt is coding up an AIR app that will let you geotag your photos by dragging them onto a map.

Luckily we made it through customs just fine and we’re rolling to Portland via Seattle. Portland starts at 5:15 and then after that we’re starting the leg to Las Vegas. We’re going to be sleeping on the bus for that leg so hopefully I’ll have some good stories. We’ve become addicted to Bubble Gum Pop Rocks which should give us a nice sugar rush for that leg.

Podcast producer Daniel Steinberg has a unique audio editing technique: he uses a Wacom pen controller in one hand and a Countour Design Shuttle controller in the other. I asked him to write a tutorial on his system, which obviously works well because he cranks out a huge amount of high-quality material. We hope to have it online soon.

In the meantime, I was intrigued enough to order my own Wacom pad. DealNews.com found them on sale at J&R Music, so in bargain-hunter mode, I also peeked at the site’s audio clearance section, where I found this beauty: 8GB of royalty-free WAV files for $9.97.

For ten bucks, I got 10,000 royalty-free sounds in WAV format. The catch? Using them on commercial productions requires displaying the Magix logo.

The Magix Sound Pool Collection 2005 DVD is listed as a Windows product, but in reality it’s a two-sided DVD containing 10,282 16-bit WAV files and a handful of documents designed to import those files into Magix’s music-arranging programs. I had no problem loading them into my Mac.

The package arrived today and I’ve been plowing through the sounds with RapidPreview. (I’ll soon switch to AudioFinder, which has a killer rename-by-BPM feature.) Many of the sounds are goofy, and the pitched ones are often repeated in six keys, but at a tenth of a penny a piece, I’m still smiling.

What audio bargains have you found lately?

Soundsnap.com launched yesterday with 30,000 free audio samples. As far as I can make out, the sounds are both free to download and royalty-free, so you can use them in your own commercial music productions.

Like the popular Freesound Project, the Soundsnap site has audio and waveform previews, so you can see quickly if you’re getting an individual drum hit or an entire groove. Unlike Freesound, Soundsnap has simple licensing terms and a clean layout.

I also like Soundsnap’s Web 2.0-esque “tag cloud” of popular search terms. When I poked around yesterday, drumloop and impact were the biggies, followed by metal, percussion, drop (?), bass, guitar, and piano. I got forest onto the list by searching for it a few times, but I imagine it will drop off quickly as more people discover the site. Anyone over 18 is allowed to post or download original sounds, so it should bulk up quickly.

Soundsnap’s tag cloud shows that most people are still looking for meat-and-potatoes samples, but I bet that will branch out as they upload files.

The quality of the samples was decidedly mixed, but there again the waveform preview helps. I found the wimpy-looking waveforms generally portended poorly recorded sounds. Check it out yourself. Here are quick search buttons for Soundsnap and two other free sound sites I’ve covered.

Hi! I’m the newest enlistee to the O’Reilly Digital Media blog, Ryan Stewart. I work as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist at Adobe and I’m going to be going to be blogging from the road during our on AIR bus tour that’s passing through the western part of the United States starting on the 9th of July. This space will mostly consist of my notes from the road. At our events I’ll be talking to developers and on the bus we’ll be talking about Rich Internet Applications and Adobe AIR. I’m planning on capturing most of those thoughts here so you’ll have a front row seat to how we hatch ideas and what’s going on with the tour.

I’m also hoping that this will be an outlet for you to ask questions and get responses from the people on the bus. On the Adobe side we have Mike Downey, Mike Chambers, Daniel Dura and Kevin Hoyt. We’ve also got Andre Charland from Nitobi and Lee Brimelow from Frog Design, so there will be a lot of interesting conversations and if you want to chime in or ask questions, comments or my email are a great way to do that. I’m looking forward to the trip - I’ll see you next week.

I’ve been playing with the Cepstral speech synthesizer, which offers a unique twist: You can buy individual voices at bargain rates. The standard voices cost just $29.99, and the special-effect ones, which I find have more creative potential, are just $6.99. The synth runs on Windows, OS X, Linux, and even Solaris, and sounds at least as good as the one on this site. (Which you can hear by clicking the Listen link above.)

You can even add effects, including Dizzy Droid, Liquid Love, Old Robot, PVC Pipe, Spacetime Echo, and Split Personality. Here are the $6.99 Damien and Whispery voice reciting a phrase my 5-year-old son suggested, monster house darkness power super monkey fruit pizza:

• Damien Voice (MP3)
• Whisper Voice with Echo (MP3)

Another fun twist is that the downloadable version nags you to pay up by inserting random comments into the speech output. For example, when I rendered a phrase with the drill sergeant-like Shouty voice, it interjected, "This voice is not licensed! Purchase a license!"

This preference pane shows the Cepstral voices I’ve installed. You can adjust their pitch range and add effects, but it would be interesting to be able to adjust the "age" and gender as well.

Cepstral’s FAQ page explains how to render speech output into WAV files using the Terminal, but you can also use a streamripper program such as Audio Hijack.

For more on creative speech synthesis, check out our Digital Media Insider Podcast #3: Singing Computers.

Paul McCartney turns 65 tomorrow (June 18th), and his creative output and youthful enthusiasm doesn’t seem to have been dimmed by age. His new CD “Memory Almost Full”, marks his 21st solo delivery in a 37-year solo career. In a partnership with Starbucks’ new label, the CD (which has been out nearly two weeks now) is pushing sales of nearly 200k units thus far — at least three times stronger than sales of his past CD in the same time window. Sir Paul has embraced a multi-faceted marketing campaign that includes digital sales of his catalog for the first time.

The Starbucks tie-in has certainly catapulted him front and center into a receptive retail audience; and we know about the power of Starbucks to create momentum, buzz, and impulse sales. To be specific, the new CD is being saturated across more than 10,000 Starbucks locations in 29 countries reaching an audience of nearly six million coffee drinkers. McCartney is the first artist on the new Starbucks label.

This marketing approach is coupled with a digital push through major online retailers (iTunes & many others), and heavy dedicated programming on Hear Music (featured on XM Satellite Radio). There’s a video clip of one of the singles on Amazon.com. And finally, to celebrate the release — and Paul’s 65th birthday — Starbucks is planning a massive party tomorrow, on the 18th itself. The company is sending out camera crews in cities around the globe collecting birthday wishes from customers & splicing together a montage for release on the 18th.

This whole set of circumstances has to represent a festive, buoyant experience for Sir Paul who has had a challenging past year. All of this activity is perfectly timed with celebrating a milestone birthday. Macca certainly deserves all of his success, heartfelt birthday wishes, & our thanks for his many contributions.

With the release of its CS3 products, Adobe has once again ever so slightly shifted its official marketing and documentation language. The newest casualty? Palettes. Palettes no longer exist. The word “palettes” has been struck from the Adobe lexicon. Those things that were palettes are now “panels.”

I probably shouldn’t care. But after 20 years of writing, I’ve come to believe that words have meanings that transcend software updates (if such a thing is possible!). The word “panels” is already otherwise occupied, and panels aren’t palettes. Here’s my take on it:

• When a dialog box contains too many options to fit on screen at once, the developer tends to break the options off into logical groups that are clustered in separate panels. The panels are fixed inside the dialog box and they remain on screen only so long as the dialog box is open.

• A palette is a subset of options that may remain on screen indefinitely. You can move a palette. And it floats above the document that you’re working on.

In CS3, you can organize palettes into anchored docking panes, which locks them in place. But that doesn’t make them panels. They remain on screen indefinitely, you can move them, and they float above the contents of your document. They are still palettes.

The only application that gives me pause is the Bridge. (I call it “the” Bridge because it spans the CS3 applications and joins them together, just like a bridge. Adobe prefers just plain “Bridge,” but if you ask me, that’s a nickname for Bridget. And Bridget is no name for a digital asset manager.) In the Bridge, a palette can never float above the contents of the document window and your options for movement are limited. So in this one case, I resign myself to “panels.” But I could be wrong. There’s a good chance I should be calling them “palettes” in the Bridge as well.

How does shifting the name “palettes” to “panels” help anyone? The argument goes, “panels” might make Dreamweaver and Flash users — many of whom are understandably worried about their software’s assimilation into the enemy’s Borg — feel less threatened and more at home. But I reckon, as long as you’ve been assimilated anyway, you might as well embrace the good things that assimilation has to offer. If you get bit by a vampire, for example, you get to wear cool capes and stay up late. If you get gobbled up by Adobe, you get better software design. So I’m all for sticking with Adobe’s existing language where precedent and industry-acceptance are in its favor.

You get where I’m coming from? Just because a vampire switches to Abercrombie & Fitch and eats the occasional brain doesn’t make it a zombie. A thing is a thing. And these particular things are palettes.

There are several big Reunion tours taking place this Summer (including The Police, Genesis, and the Smashing Pumpkins); these are bands who have sold many millions of albums each, and who have a cadre of hungry fans around the world eager to experience the magic once again. I’m one of them. I don’t know about you, but when I go to see artists I enjoy in concert I appreciate the so-called “happy accidents” and miscues that only a ‘live’ performance affords. Disclaimer: this may be more of an analog post than digital — so bear with me.

Stewart Copeland is the drummer & founder of The Police (as an aside — he also happened to write the foreword to my book, The Art of Digital Music , co-written with David Battino). The Police have been rehearsing for months in Vancouver ahead of their big world tour which kicked off last week — and will span some 80 concerts and multiple continents. All of that preparation, and yet — things can still go off track. For anyone who knows him, Stewart is a very witty, intelligent, articulate guy who writes nearly as well as he drums. He’s posted an amazingly funny blog entry on his web site here about the first disaster gig of the tour which happened last week in Vancouver.

In this blog entry, Stewart goes into some detail about how the guys in the band were out of sync and just couldn’t get it together throughout the night at this show — despite who they are and what they’ve achieved. It’s a rare glimpse into what can go wrong; something you just don’t see a major artist write about publically too often. But I think it really levels the playing field between artist and fan — when the artist isn’t perfect & isn’t afraid to talk about what goes wrong along with all the good stuff; makes them more human & brings them back down to earth. I’m proud of Stewart for having shared the gory details — it’s a fun read with a happy ending (and you definitely feel as though you were there experiencing it all yourself). I encourage you to read Stewart’s blog entry; everyone I’ve shared it with has gotten a big kick out of it. For my part, I’m looking forward to seeing the live show in LA in a couple of weeks — and am hoping I get to experience some of the screw-ups first hand; guaranteed it will make the show that much more fun and memorable!

A translator sent me a sound file today, wondering how I would transliterate it to English. The sound is for an upcoming Japanese toy you jab with a tiny sword. Like a pistol in Russian roulette, the toy eventually explodes; this sound is what you hear each time you plunge in the blade:

• Sword Jab Sound (28KB WAV)

In Japanese, the sound would be written shakin (shah-keen). What does it sound like to you? The more I pondered, the more my ideas started to resemble Don Martin sound effects from Mad magazine…though perhaps that’s appropriate here.

For the ultimate list of Don Martin sound effects, visit the Don Martin Dictionary.

A sculptor I know likes to say, “Art is a hammer knocking at your eyeballs.” Architect Robert Venturi described one of his approaches as “contradiction juxtaposed.”

Amy X Neuburg, here live at EXIT Theatre, juxtaposes fiery operatic vocals with electronic audio loops. (Photo by Rob Thomas)

Much successful art, it seems to me, takes concepts—or symbols of concepts—and squishes them together so our brains are provoked into making new connections. The art, or hammer-like impact, derives from the way those symbols are juxtaposed, the artist’s skill in adjusting contrasts—dark vs. light, repetition vs. surprise, fast vs. slow, sharp vs. blurry, realistic vs. distorted. . . .

There’s a whole chapter in my book called “Distortion is Art,” inspired by sound designer Gary Rydstrom’s advice to his staff while working on the tornado movie Twister. I was particularly intrigued by the tension between the computer’s power to generate perfect copies with the artist’s instinct to distort and juxtapose.

I was thinking about that after reading an artist’s reaction to my latest podcast, “Seize the Rhythm,” which was about hearing the rhythms all around us and blending them into songs. The sigh of tires on the pavement, the stuttering voice of a nervous caller on an answering machine…there are so many patterns out there to explore.

But what this artist said made me realize that a big part of art is the original vision: