Andrew Sega: Making

“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.”

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

“Well anyone can make a 'weird' [chord] progression by randomly picking triads.”

“Religion is a simplistic answer that society has created in order to make people feel better, but there is little evidence as to its validity. There are thousands of religions in the world, each with their own "correct" answers, and each contradicting each other. For now the most sensible explanation to me is that we are the result of a lucky combination of cosmic factors, we're the "mold" that has grown on this particular planet and in a universe as vast as ours, it's expected that somewhere this would happen.”

“Usually musicians have egos and personality quirks which makes it difficult to form collaborative efforts (for long periods of time, anyways).”

“Some people are like "Oh, I hate guitars." How can you hate a guitar? It makes no sense. It's just an instrument.”

“If I was obsessed with making money off of my music, I wouldn't have released it for free on the internet for the last 5 years.”

“So, if you played a C major chord to pretty much any person on the planet, they'd say that it sounds "harmonious" (or pleasing, or happy, etc, etc). But now when you want to put chords and melodies in an ordering and make a larger piece called a "song", then that is a much more difficult process, and gets very subjective. At that point, it's not just the chords, it's the lyrics, rhythms, instrumentation, tempo, intensity, any number of other things that goes into a song… so many variables that it's almost impossible to predict how a song will affect a given person.”

“You could argue that there's maybe some mathematical interest in a Bach fugue, say, but the only thing that music does really well is "move" people -- make them feel something.”