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Track Thinking

The track is an organizational unit in edited audio. In the most basic sense, it’s a pathway for a voice or instrument inside your audio workstation. But each track can be given its own set of effects and its own spot in the right-left spectrum (pan), so two could also house the same source instrument or voice and still create different pathways. I like to think of tracks like train tracks, as holding sounds that move through time together. Sometimes there is no neighboring train, sometimes they run in cluster. 

Tracks give you a chance to think about center and periphery. You could make a wall of sound or you could make something that sounds like a quartet of distinct but blending voices. This felting up or separating out is largely a function of making space in two dimensions: first, the one controlled by EQ, the frequency range — so that one track might find its fullness in the lower range and have suppressed high range, and another track its inverse: they don’t occupy the same frequencies (I remember once I had an air conditioner that perfectly cancelled certain frequencies in a record of mine); second, the stereo range controlled by panning, the right-left spectrum. Even nudging one track slightly off center to the right and the other slightly off center to the left will produce a clarity that is missing when they are both equally on center. 

There are hygiene considerations to tracking: things like arranging them in an intuitive order and grouping them for clarity — so if I have three vocal tracks combining to make a harmony, and then a few tracks with sampled sounds, I will put my three vocal tracks next to each other. (I also like to color-code.)  If you’re using a lot of samples or elements that show up only once, it’s useful to group them on one or a few tracks, so as not to have a piece with a sprawl of tracks.

But I want to pause on track thinking as a compositional affordance. If you think of time as the warp, then your tracks hold the weave yarns. There is a possibility for real alignment of aim between the material on one track and the material on another (a union controlled by harmony or by a beat, say); the possibility for a dialogue (an alternation of sound and silence so that a conversation takes place between tracks); but also a possibility for independence (emergence of a new sound in a new rhythm). There is possibility for a system of subordination (lead vocals and backing vocals), but also possibility of a meeting place between elements, an alterity between elements. If you’re stuck while you’re editing, perhaps ask yourself what a new track, housing a new sound, might offer to the composition.

(For extra credit, transpose track thinking to a writing assignment for several voices, playing with alignment, dialogue, and independence, with subordination and equal alterity.)

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?