Music has always been strange for me. I learned to use a pen in a young age — as all of us do — and never I felt any strange feeling using it.
On the two dimensional space of a plane, you move the head of your pen, may it be the carbon of a pencil or the ink of a fountain pen and you see how that gets applied to your paper.
How can the keys of the piano have sounds?
And so it always is very very strange. After all these years of music. Playing and composing; I still don’t believe that I’m using these things. I don’t feel they are real.
And I always feel the alienation of sound and its visualization and identity.
For many years it was a hard thing for me to play certain things on the piano. The sounds; the chords; the notes; they seemed; to put honestly; arbitrary. I had to memorize them and play them accordingly which all seemed rather not good. But then; after some years had past; those became things that made sense. Patterns I could recognize. Music became more and more like lego.
The pattern on the left hand that repeated and repeated in variations till the fifth bar was the first pattern I had noticed in music and I used to be both surprised and excited to find it in other pieces.
Some time had passed and I realized much of music is like that; but still; playing these things were hard for me. Years later; I was playing “Rêverie” by Claude Debussy and I found another pattern that changed my music:
I used to extract these patterns and use them in my music. After some time; I had played them so much that my brain could easily play them; they were no longer arbitrary, and after some time; they began to be so in my mind that I could have played them with my eyes closed and at some point they began being so in my mind that I could play a melody and the mind would play these as something in the background automatically.
After years of studying different composers; I have come to realize that most of them have the same thing as a “Toolbox” of different patterns, melodies, chords; arpeggiation; scales;… that they mix to produce their music. Just as anyone doing anything that includes making.
When I first tried to do drawings; I was stressed how to follow paths. But then at some point I realized that I could draw this and that and that I could draw these basic things. And when you can do that; you can combine. In computer; I could make tiny graphics and combine them. I could even make bigger and better things once I knew all the small elements of the system. Isn’t that interesting? You can only create things once you internalize their elements. Their core system.
My good friend Mohammad had this wonderful realization around 2024 ~ 2025:
Iran is one strange and amazing country; something curious about the way things are imported into Iran is that we Iranians don’t just import things like the other countries; we synthesize them into our culture and after some time we create our own versions.
And that is all correct. As he points out when cafes moved to Iran; we made our own culture out of it. And this brings me to the point of my other dear friend Mohammad Zanganeh who mentioned something incredible to me: he mentioned how Iran’s startup ecosystem got built and how intentional its building was. There I understood what it truly meant. If you wish to create a system that has parts A, B, and C. If you import them it becomes hard; expensive; and fragile. But if you have companies that produce A, B, and C. Not only you can build what you want; but you can build a variety of them and even have resilience. Iran now has multiple data centers; multiple cloud providers; multiple map companies; chat services; … If you wish to create an app or service in Iran today; you can very easily do it. Just as easy as you can do the cafes. The kitchenware gets produced in Iran; the furniture; here; the material to produce the food; here. We have back to back production and that is why our industries are thriving and that is why we can; as Ansari says; synthesize things to our culture.
Now if we combine all of this we arrive at the idea that understanding something (like how to play Bach) needs an internal “Ecosystem” of the parts. This is somehow either a generalization or an effect of Mind Graph; Graph Convey; and effectively the “Toolbox Theory”!
I guess while I showed the idea of Toolbox and its tools the “Ecosystem” aspect was left behind in my writings. Well then; here it was!