Andrew Sega Quotes

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

Imagine presenting a Nirvana or BT track to someone from the 1850's, they would probably see it as noise and not much else. Society as a whole has a much more nuanced and wide view of what music can be now. It still usually contains various rhythmic, melodic, and vocal components, but they can be combined in so many interesting ways now.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I think as a musician you really have to have a wide variety of tastes, or else you will unconsciously get into a rut.

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.

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

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.

Certainly there are songs out there that are massively popular, and you can use some reverse analysis to see how they're put together, but it's difficult to reliably engineer a "hit". Add to this the constantly swirling winds of cultural taste, and you can see that the music industry is more akin to playing the lottery than anything else. Having some talent or taste can give you a bit of an edge, but it's still a huge roulette wheel..

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

Silicon approaches certain fundamental limits; organic bliss is the soul catcher.