Immersive Appeal

Immersive Appeal is a characteristic of media which inspires a state of involvement in which a listener gains a deep sense of union with a particular media. It is not the objective of most of the sorts of media that we encounter in everyday life. In purely musical or artistic creations, however, immersive appeal is often the goal. Immersive Appeal can be achieved by stimulating all the facets key to an experience, that is, the body, the mind, and the soul, all by way of the senses.
Physical: Often in academic music there is a sense of divorce from the body. The corporeal, visceral sense of music, however, is probably more than half the battle of communication through sound. Often there is a consideration of very lofty and technical details, but no consideration of the simple breath of a piece of music and it's discreet or dramatic physical sense of stillness and movement. The physical sense can also be tied in with the raw emotive aspects of the piece. If a dancer were reacting to it, how would they move? Their reaction is primitive and emotive, not intellectual.
Intellectual: What sustains interest and truly begins to strike a deep sense of affiliation and oneness with a piece of music is when the corporeal quality of the music is used to import something mental. This can be an image, a metaphor, a narrative, a sense of place, the feeling of a journey. Anything that begins to provoke at least some discreet degree of thought. Something that causes the emergence of a correlation to an audience's own life.
Spiritual: There is some spark of the immaterial which will set your piece on fire if you let it, given you are able to receive it. Like a person, a piece of music is a self contained universe which has a spiritual purpose and thus a certain character. The function of the immaterial in music is to use sound to sketch the activity of non-sound. To inspire an awareness of a thing which can not be heard, nor seen, nor spoken of acutely. This can not be thought over, it must simply be done.

Current Projects and a few Thoughts

Right now I'm working on an album and accompanying visualization that is a projected 60 minutes in length. The music is coming along very well and will be completed and I will be happy with it within a good time frame. YAY. I'm just doing this in the simple way that makes sense to me and makes me happy with the result. It's a kind of boundary-less approach that could be just about anything that it wants. In this case there are a number of sections built on grid-like time with looped material often interrupted unpredictably, like an erratic heartbeart, and there are a number of sections with more ambient construction, like breath. I just got my Canon Powershot SX 20 IS and I'm ready to start shooting HD Videos and then scrambling them for the visual side. I want to try to achieve something along the lines of Here Come the Waves by the Decemberists, Kouyaniqatsi, and the work of Takagi Masakatsu. In other words, Video Art. I'll need the visual component to be equally strong to the audible component which will prove to be a challenge, but I'm going to try to simply workshop it out until I'm happy with it. I'm going to start by simply imagining images while listening to the music, then drawing from those themes and ideas to try to capture real world footage and then alter and arrange it digitally to fit the aesthetic of manipulation of sound and image, regardless of the source, to be listened to and seen and appreciated for its simple, abstracted appeal.

It Occurs to Me that...

There is some sort of blockage in the center of the music world, where academics refuse to be artists and artists refuse to be academics. Where music does not separate and divide itself, but rather we, as people and as thinkers, begin to conceptually tear music into pieces. And then all of a sudden it's revolutionary when you recognize that sound is sound.

Squarepusher- Iambic 9 Poetry

Beautiful.

Monolake- Ionized

The second song I've posted (out of 3 total) to have ion in its name. Weird.

Control, Inflection, Breath, Chance, and Concept.

Compare these two ideas:
"When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound [...] I don't need sound to talk to me."- John Cage

An artistic medium is used to clarify and intensify events based on people's inherent psychological needs and desires.
-Paraphrasing Zettl's theory of applied media aesthetics

If you look at the work that Zettl studies and praises, it is incredibly controlled, such as Citizen Cain. Today my composition teacher, Josh Goldman, brought up the movie Citizen Cain, saying that the idea of being clever is very dangerous, and that when being clever becomes the focal point of the work, that the idea of a work shifts from the experience of the art to the process of the art, and puts the art back into the characteristic-oriented way of seeing things rather than the profound. He did, however, very much enjoy Citizen Cain regardless.
John Cage's statement is offering a thought-out relinquishment of control. He has asked himself the question of what he wants to hold onto and what he wants to let go of.
Often human cleverness can make the details of something too sharp, "intensify and clarify" something too much and one begins to destroy the natural experience of it. A piece can become overworked. The wonderful part about this though, is that this process doesn't prevent you from asking the question of adding something. As long as you know, in some abstract, creative, sense why you put something somewhere, not only will the places that you intensify be all the more real and clear, but the emptiness of the piece will ring truer, and all in all the music is sure to be more expressive and sincere.
Music is a process of thought, but not thought that only refers to doing. It can also refer to leaving something up to a chance process like John Cage, or even to leaving something empty, either using silence or letting the parts layered below speak. My room-mate Joe is a Jazz Studies major and he said "We study Miles for the notes he didn't play." Miles Davis is almost everyone's favorite.
I am saying this as a composer but really it is true of all things. Putting thought into something doesn't necessarily mean adding things, it means considering the possibility of a thing, or of taking something away, and developing abstract structure and inflection to guide the process of what speaks and what recedes in order to guide the breath and life of a piece, and say only as much as needs to be stated, but no less. When this process is complete, when the intent has been translated into a communication through sensory experience, a piece may be called complete.

Jaga Jazzist- I have a ghost, now what