Executive Overview

This week, we interviewed three people who were involved in music composition, production, writing, and arrangement in various ways, some full-time and some as a hobby. We asked them a variety of open-ended questions to get a sense for what emotions arose when they spoke about their music, as well as what some potential pain points might be. Here are some of the questions we asked:

• Tell me about yourself. 
• Tell us about your experience with creating music. 
• Why do you enjoy making music?
• Is there anything frustrating in your experiences with making music?
• Can you walk me through a typical day in your life when you’re working on a musical project?
• Is there anything else that you want to talk about?

Interviewee 3

Key Takeaways

Interviewee 1 explained the importance of music in their life, and how it had always felt more natural than the rote memorization of pieces that other people wrote. They distinguish between “composing” and “writing a piece” as two separate processes, and lament that it’s too hard to write down ideas digitally before they get lost, since software like Sibelius is too finnicky and counterintuitive, which makes it slow to use.

Interviewee 2 expressed how much they loved creating music, as everything from a bass player to a producer and sound engineer. They described their love for analog sound quality and complained of eye pain after staring at frequencies on a screen all day. They admired the learning curve of Logic, with GarageBand to ease creators into the workflows, but complained about how difficult it is to get musical hardware and computer software to align.

Interviewee 3 described their process of creating an “intent” for a piece and then “executing” it on Serum, along with a number of other plugins for it. They also elaborated on her process of gathering inspiration from other artists on Spotify before creating their own pieces.