Not too too long ago, Tori invited me to her place for swimming, food, and painting lessons. We started talking about abstract painting and why we like it so much. During that discussion, I tried to see if there was a connection between the abstract visual arts that I enjoy the most, and the aural art that I create. I’m really into electronic music (no way!) so the initial parallel I drew was that the synth sound that I like so much was itself an abstraction.

I thought about this a bit more the other day, and definitions are always helpful when trying to clarify thoughts and perspectives, so I thought why not look up the definition to the word “abstract”. Dictionary.com gives us a few definitions, so I’ll concentrate on the one that is most relevant:

ab·stract
–adjective
thought of apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances: an abstract idea.

Applying this, a painting is abstract when what you’re painting isn’t representative of an actual thing. If I want to paint a tree, I can make markings on the page to represent the tree with varying degrees of accuracy. If I want to paint love, there’s no “love” that I can paint. I can paint people who are in love, and try to portray that as best I can. I can use symbols like a cartoon heart to represent love. What I can’t do is paint a thing called love. I can’t paint gravity, the speed of light, sounds… you get the idea. I can try to evoke certain emotions and ideas with different colours, brush strokes, and techniques

So when we turn to music, it was apparent to me pretty quickly that when I create music, I’m not trying to represent a real thing. When I create a 4/4 drum beat, it’s not an attempt to “paint a tree”. There’s no 4/4 beat in the universe that I can point to and say “here’s my recreation of the 4/4 beat”. The only thing we can find are other people’s interpretations.

Another example is that if I use a guitar string, I don’t say that I’m trying to recreate a cord being vibrated against a piece of hallowed wood with a specific shape, I’m just using that as my starting point to make something else. To analogize with painting, I don’t say that I’m trying to recreate the 650 nanometre wavelength as it appears to the human eye, I use that wavelength as my starting point – it’s red, if you’re curious.

So are all instruments abstract?