Andrew Sega: Trending quotes

“A lot of [my] songs have various strange oddities in them - usually this is the result of late-night dementia.”

“I'm starting to realize that touring really involves a lot of waiting around doing nothing.”

“There's a big difference between playing shows for fun, and playing shows because you're in desperate need of the money.”

“To impact someone emotionally, [a musical piece] has to contain "interesting" melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic content, and what defines "interesting" is up to the listener.”

“As with any collaboration, you have to find someone that's in your 'mode' of making music.”

“Music is nothing but ratios and harmonic math, anyways.”

“It's hard to quantify a 'top ten' list of songs for many reasons. I like many styles of music, and it's difficult to compare radically divergent types of music with each other.”

“The usual problem with progressive rock is that the band can get so wrapped up in their own fantasy land that their music becomes completely inaccessible. "Wanky", if you will.”

“I think there are some objective [musical] qualities… how complex something is, how melodic, how diverse the tonality is, et cetera. But I could also make a piece of music that contains all of those and yet isn't "good" from a subjective viewpoint. For example, take Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", Beatles "Yesterday", and Underworld's "Born Slippy", and play them all on top of each other at the same time. Great music in their own right, but terrible sounding together.”

“We started out in the middle ages creating music which had certain desirable physical properties (for example, a major chord sounds "nice" because the frequencies are in integer ratios to each other). And then as society evolved, we created these emotional contexts for certain instruments and progressions. Major-chord arpeggios sound "happy", minor chords sound "sad", chromatic scales can sound "scary", et cetera. In the 20th century, film soundtracks reinforced this point as people associated certain kinds of music with certain visual and emotional experiences. It's a giant feedback loop, really; once you grow up in a given culture, it leaves this musical fingerprint on you which colors your experiences.”

“I think [Britney Spears] is a perfect example of an artificial construct -- someone with a decent voice and a very marketable image, that producers and business people turned into a pop star. Unfortunately, I think it took a toll on her, mentally, and I feel bad for the trouble that success has brought onto her. However, her music is pretty disposable, and she doesn't have the intelligence and cultural impact of someone like, say, Madonna.”

“Every musician, I guess, wants to alter the world to his or her taste in some fashion… That's part of why I write music.”

“Stylistic evolution comes from listening to what other people have done and making a Darwinistic modification.”

“One of the issues these days is the sheer amount of music out there to be listened to. There are more bands than one could ever hope to explore.”

“Unfortunately Sting's jazz work isn't nearly as inventive as his rock songs.”

“Once you have a basic grasp of the theories underlying music, you can pretty much pick up any instrument you want.”

“A human is a complicated organic/electrical system, which is immersed in a culture. Try raising a monkey like a human, it won't work, you need the human's certain brain characteristics (including self-reflection) in order to create a truly intelligent creature. The brain processes inputs and perception in very particular ways, and I think until we understand the underlying processes better, there is no way to really simulate it in software. Computers will continue to be good at simplistic analysis, and raw processing power, but the subtlety of emotions is something intrinsic to the human organism and culture.”

“I think much of the conflict in the world is directly the result of people's varying interpretations of reality, or perhaps you could term it the "distortions" in their lenses. The best one can do is to try to consume as much knowledge as possible, both from your experiences, and from the words of others, in order to try to form a complete picture of the world.”

“A lot of my tracked music was written when I was very young, relatively speaking. I was very optimistic, I had finally discovered some sort of public musical outlet, it was generally a very happy time. So, the music of that time sort of reflects that, I think? By the time I started the Alpha Conspiracy project, I was older, a bit more sophisticated (and, well, cynical), and so the music got more complex.”