stream felt like - march 17, 2026

Today on stream we were discussing music and it got me in the mood to tinker.

Thanks to Vibes sharing these analogies in stream and in Discord:

Learned something recently about melody and the best way i have found to make sense of it for me is this analogy and it starts with harmony: If you have a pool of water with a very reflective surface. And on the surface of the water you project different color lights. The way the water looks now is the "harmony".

You can add layers of harmony by slowly changing the colors of some the lights or flashing them or moving them around. Each of those layers/changes can be done with different instruments that play together.

Now, for the melody thing i learned. Melody is change within the harmony. And the way i look at that within this analogy is changes in the surface of water itself. So like dropping things into it or swishing it and creating ripples. And the way the ripples change the surface creates images. And those images are the ideas/messages/things being communicated by the song.

And to add that counter melody piece, its like the one melody talking to the other melody like a conversation or two voices communicating two parts of an idea together or in opposition to each other in order to communicate something holistically. And to make all that 'musical' it usually needs to have elements that are repetitive or cycling so that the other things in motion can be interpreted against that.

Hey look at this stock photo of light on water.

or another option

Like graffiti on a brick wall, to see the size and message of the graffiti the brick size needs to be regular and a different color than the graffiti. Lol musicality in this way is kinda like readability in design.

The bass and drums kinda act as the brick wall, with the drums as the bricks and the bass acting as the mortar/lines between

Banksy seems like a good example for the storytelling analogy

and another

Harmony is kind of the world characters are in melodies are what the characters are doing

wonder what this melody would be like, i can kinda feel this picture

these ways of looking at music were really helpful for me - not necessarily because I now understand each of those things, but because it got me thinking about music as a form of storytelling again.

The thing Vibes said about the melodies talking to each other like a conversation really got my brain a tinglin.

Me. Today.

I made a thing.

After stream today, I decided I wanted to try to see if I could create a kind of story of how today's stream felt for me.

The attached audio file is what I came up with by just sitting and thinking about it for a bit.

When I began stream, I felt steady. So I brought in a steady beat.

The initial stream is always kinda warm and slow moving as we get started, and then we head into the more ADHD style conversations, so I tried to bring that in with some lighter and weirder tunes.

Idk, I enjoyed making it. I don't know if it's anything I'm hooked on, but I liked the way it felt making it.

It felt like trying to find the right words to say something, or trying to find the right colored pencil to bring the exact vibe to a drawing I'm working on.

Fun exercise. Might do it more often. It's not perfect, but it's interesting to me. Neat. Neat. Neat.

As a reminder - I'm basically brand new to making music. I remember learning to play the keyboard a bit as a kid, I learned some tabs for guitar, but never really got deeper than that. This has been SO fascinating for me.

Interested in your thoughts and any insight into YOUR creative process, if you have one!