Jacob's Songs About Hurt

 Listen to the progress on Soundcloud

I have chosen to shift my theme for the rest of this creative practice blog to resilience. I think it is much more in line with the scope of practice as we have learned it so far to focus not on our hurt, but how we are capable of overcoming it. I also think this theme is a little more open in terms of songs I think fall under the theme. I have also chosen to stop aiming to produce a whole song a week. It just is not reasonable to expect such results when I am still learning how to use these tools myself. So this week for example is just the laying the foundation and introduction for the song. In working on this particular track, I have had to listen much more intently, as well as become more familiar with piano rolls as they appear in Soundtrap. Piano rolls are just another way of fine tuning each track, and I find it much better for fine tuning drum parts than the BeatMaker tool I used in a previous blog entry. For this particular snare drum part, I laid down the basic sixteenth note...

 The theme I have chosen for this blog is hurt. My main medium will be singing, with digitally created electronic sounds to back me up. For my digital audio workstation (DAW) I will be starting out with Soundtrap and Audacity, and hope to experiment with Komplete which I just acquired recently. Soundtrap was featured in my Music Learning with Technology class this past spring, so I hope to brush up on the platform and use it as a jumping off point to learn more about digital music creation. Singing connects to the concept of hurt in that singing--and more generally, organized speech--allows us to express and process these negative emotions. I have felt a lot of negative emotions in the past several months and have barely begun to process them all. I think these emotions trace back to being hurt in someway, by myself or others. I notice that as I am singing and producing the digital sounds, everything else I might worry about seems to fall to the way side. I think th...

 This week's recording is the one I am most proud of so far, since the classical genre is what I am most familiar with. To me, "Turtle Dove" is about coping with the anxieties that come with a long-distance relationship, which is something I have been struggling with since coming to UF.   As I was working on this song, I realize that we have this idea of who our partners are or are "supposed" to be. It's this idea that makes us think we are compatible, and the anxiety of long distancing comes from wondering if one of us will change until we are no longer what makes us compatible. Learning to let go of this thought process is I think a huge step to reducing this anxiety and I honestly have this song to thank for pushing me in the right direction.  You may wonder what this has to do with hurt, but I argue that anxiety is one of the ways our mind hurts ourselves in an attempt to make us solve the perceived problem, and we may lash out and hurt others in the pro...

"Left Side" by Eloise is a typical broken-heart song. As I was working on this piece, I was reflecting on when my boyfriend and I hit our own rough patch this past spring. It can be hard to admit when you had something really good. Luckily, Mitchell and I didn't have to completely leave each other before we admitted that. It goes against our mental health to simply discard a relationship; we instinctively know that these relationships greatly increase our chance of survival. I think singing is such an emotionally heightened way of articulating these feelings of distress that we actually process them, and we feel heard, physically and metaphorically, when we share these songs with others. This was my first attempt to use Soundtrap's beat-maker, and I would say it was pretty successful in that regard. Replicating a beat takes a different level of attention when listening to music; every genre influenced by African rhythms has subtle variations on how to organize rhythm,...