Text for Shankar Barua's IDEA Gazette

From the earliest, I craved the arts, any of the arts, all of the arts. The feelings, thoughts and imaginings presented to me by other minds did not represent, reflect or resonate with my solitary subjective experience, nor did they provide the means I so urgently felt I needed of making life's momentary intensity more comfortable.

As a result I have always been involved in far too many things at once: writing, playing and composing music, making visual images and pursuing the externalization of the evolving visuals that appeared only in my mind's retina into video and visual music, developing new tools for these tasks via techniques ranging from soldering through computer software, and getting excited about ideas in many fields.

At every stage several threads intertwined, components not only of created work (sound, image and text), but of daily life and the pursuit of understanding (home, dogs, friends, beloved plucked acoustic instruments, several sciences, electronic and mechanical tinkering...). I have found myself almost always in overload, especially as a little goes a long way, any interesting idea tending to intersect with others to spin off into many more. As a teenager, a shy awkward "girl nerd", I could be seen playing guitar and banjo, taking woodworking shop and drafting classes, running little scientific experiments, drawing and sculpting, writing poems and fiction, doing science fair projects, inventing a phonetic alphabet, even winning a prize for advertizing layout, and reading, reading, reading.

More recently, technology has furnished a means of interconnection for all the parts of this disparate array. Paradoxically, by specializing in music (for I always found it the least resistible of all my pursuits) I found that all the other domains that I had thought I had traded off against it were drawn back in. Music does not exist in isolation any more than any individual, society or subject of study. Music touches upon everything else, from mathematics to philosophy to carpentry. Most important though, it touches our innermost selves.

I did not expect to become a composer. I just kept finding, when I went to my record collection, that the music I was looking for was not there. So being a tinkerer I would make some for myself. My computer music software, best known of which is my little program "Music Mouse", is similar, made for my own use, and only ex post facto discovered to be wanted by others. Though I have made music "on demand" and to others' specifications, such as for dance, theater or film, I am primarily inner directed and all of what I consider my best work is always made for my own needs. This is another wonderful paradox that perhaps only the arts manifest well, that by pleasing the self we are more able to please others.

Because much of what I have felt and seen in my mind and imagination is difficult to mash into conventional media, I have spent astronomical amounts of time on the design and creation of tools, mostly electronic and computer-based. I love this work almost as much as the music itself. Each tool (instrument, medium, technique) is like a language, able to express some things inexpressible by others, and yet full of commonality with them. Each may severely limit the nature of one's creative output but in the cause of revealing with a clearer focus a unique aesthetic domain. In this way an instrument is like a person, and each individual artist has similar uniqueness and communality with others.

This is why I have worked hard to make it easier for more people to be able to express themselves in music and art by use of new technology. There should never be a minority category "creative artist" from which most people are excluded. All who wish to speak any language - sound, sight, speech, should have the opportunity to do so. And I have long hoped that the logic of computers makes this possible for more people than ever before. As each individual is "a universe entire", so does the benefit of creative self-expression fall primarily to the maker, leaving to that person's audience, however large or local, only the artifacts of the process, the works that remain.