I’m building something new and strange, that I can’t talk too much about. Software construction is much like creative writing; it’s a lonely process, and one fraught with mistakes and false starts and encouragements and setbacks, none of which can be shared publicly until the result is ready for mass consumption. The process of creating it has been expensive, and emotionally challenging, but I stand the chance to make a great deal of money if my talent matches my ambitions.
I am building it for the same reason that I wrote Zombie Vixens from Hell and The Hermit Bird and Silent Hill: Homecoming and every other large and important creative thing in my life; namely, the thing already exists in my mind and I am arrogant enough to believe that the world will benefit immensely from having the thing that is, at the moment, only real to me.
After all this is over, even if I am wrong and the world does not need what I am making, I will remember that, unless I had built it, I would never have known if I was right or wrong.
It’s hard. It’s expensive. And time is ticking into the past, never to be recovered.
And yet, despite the expense and the time and the minor disappointments… yet again, I believe that can I see the future of things, the same way I did with all those plays and songs and scripts and games that I’ve worked on.
Commandment number one of Captain Beefheart’s Ten Commandments for Guitar Playing is this: “Listen to the birds. That’s where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from.” So I did just that. I went outside and I recorded a blackbird and then I came back and pulled that sound apart, frequency by frequency.
Mother Nature, she’s not wasteful. Three quarters of the genes in mice exist in humans, and only two percent of our genes differ from us to the apes. All those strands of DNA, matching, mating, reintegrating, but the underlying patterns are the same. The algorithms for finding the common subsequences, the music of us… we are all the same.
You listen to a guitar riff on the radio, play it back, change it, recombine it, improve it. Imperfect copies of imperfect copies of imperfect copies, until the original Xerox isn’t even recognizable.
I can hear things now. Things that other people can’t hear. Patterns, relationships. How sounds flow into other sounds. How frequencies beget frequencies. I know where music comes from.
Everything will be possible; all the sounds that might exist, will exist.
I want the world to be able to hear things, the way I can hear them.
