A bit of a diary entry: I had another video call with a friend which was way less awkward than the last, which gave me some social confidence though I'm still paranoid of being noticed and judged, and I composed six short piano pieces this week - and have an album of 18 more from between 2012 and 2019 - but it's a shame that's not really a marketable thing that people would care about!
On Social Confidence
∞ I recently wrote about an awkward video call I did with a friend ∞; one of only a handful I've ever done, and the first in many months. My social anxiety convinced me it'd gone so poorly she wouldn't want to do another, but a few days later she said she was in a dark place mentally, said she needed someone to talk to, which transformed my insecurity into the desire to be useful, and I suggested we do another, which we did a couple of days ago.
It went much better! We talked for four hours and it all went smoothly; I cringed about a whole lot less after, and ended the call feeling a kind of social contentment that's very alien to me these days. It's nice being able to put a smile on another person's face and to see that in real time. Plus she outright said she felt much better afterwards and seemed to mean it, so that provided evidence against the "I'm repulsive and nobody could possibly like me" thoughts that have made up the fundamental assumptions about myself for a long while now.
We talked about doing it regularly since we agreed it'd help us both, but I suppose I don't need much social contact to feel exhausted, so I'm not desperately hoping for daily chats or anything like that. Once every so often would be enough for me!
Or I suppose I'm saying that because I've become overly emotionally dependent on other people before, and it's never gone well, so I want to avoid that this time...
I've wondered in the past whether to do YouTube videos of some kind - even if it's just my voice for visual/verbal weekly dev logs - and this brought those wonderings back up. Maybe, at some point? We'll see.
I've also been seeing posts on various indiedev subreddits fairly often over the past week; I subscribed to a bunch a while back, but only usually checked r/all so I never saw their posts, but recently due to the UFO stuff I've been checking my subscribed feed (or whatever) every day instead. There are many impressive solo-dev games posting there every day and it's intimidating! But I'm also warming up to the idea of posting there myself, so maybe I'll muster up the courage to do that one day where I'll get 2 upvotes maybe and 0 comments and then I'll feel horribly discouraged and give it all up to become a door-to-door dildo salesman. MAYBE.
Sometimes that feed recommends subreddits the algorithm thinks I'll be interested in, and today I was shown one called ∞ r/thespoonyexperiment ∞, which rung a bell but I wasn't sure why. It seems to be based around someone called TheSpoonyOne, whose name I vaguely remember from years ago, but not who he was or what he did. Something like the equivalent of modern youtubers, media creators, something like that? I don't know! I checked Wikipedia briefly and that's the impression I'm getting, but it feels like the sort of thing with this whole mythos around it that I'm not going to ∞ grok ∞ in a few minutes (also I can't be bothered trying). I've occasionally seen subreddits for youtubers that give me a similar feeling.
It looks like this guy's severely depressed (or bipolar, Wikipedia says) and fell from grace, and I don't know whether the posts are playfully joining his own jokes about that or whether they're just outright making fun of him, as old fans disgusted by what he's become, perhaps (I'm getting the impression from a quick skim that it's the latter). Either way, I get concerned whenever I see things like this about doing anything to attract attention to myself. I'd rather just be obscure!
Piano Miniatures
Another (completely unrelated) thing I wanted to talk about is music composition, which is something I occasionally do for fun. I've primarily composed albums for my games, but I've also composed non-game stuff occasionally... though not as often as I'd like. I put much of the stuff I've composed over the years is ∞ on my Bandcamp page ∞ earlier this year, and there's a fair bit of it (I have a playlist of all of those albums which totals about 17 hours; 368 pieces), but my output's definitely died down since the initial explosion of creativity. I'm always waiting for the muse to strike so I can bring a new piece into being, but it's annoyingly rare, and most years I've only composed a handful of pieces, if that.
The next in the series of albums I was going to release is a collection of short piano 'Miniatures' that I composed between 2012 and 2019; there are 18, which says a lot about how prolific I haven't been. I've yet to post it though because I don't know how much anyone cares about these albums in general, and about the non-game ones in particular. I have the audio files, but I still need to make some cover art, which I keep putting off.
Here's one of the tracks in video (sheet music + audio) form:
I started playing the piano when I was about 16, but I'm not good at it, at all! For the first year or two, I was enthusiastic and my skills developed quickly, but I only had a handful of beginner lessons - and no grading exams - so I was mostly self-taught. I found and attempted to play a whole lot of sheet music, with varying success... but mostly what I found were either simplified versions of Classical pieces (which annoyed me because if I was to learn a piece at all, I'd rather it was the 'real thing' and not a reduction), or they were just way beyond my skill level. I still attempted the difficult ones, but never got beyond fumbling poorly through them.
Then my interest faded and I only ever dabbled aimlessly every few days or weeks, never really improving at all. I suspect this isn't an unusual relationship-with-an-instrument story!
The idea behind at least some of these piano pieces was to write things I could actually play, and which were complete in themselves rather than reductions. Composing them myself meant I was able to develop my composing skills at the same time, plus I was able to explore musical territory that spoke to me more than other more popular stuff (I like the Mixolydian mode, as I've said a few times, though it's only years after composing these pieces that I even realised what that was).
I like them a lot - they're all different, and explore some interesting little places - but they're fairly awkward to play, and they were composed so far apart that there's no real coherence between them. The album feels like a collection of miscellany, because it is.
A handful of times over the past couple of years, I've composed new, slightly longer and more complex piano pieces that I could actually play, and I've been trying to get into playing the piano more to practise them... with some success. I can actually play pieces I composed now! Not well, but I can kind of do it! It's something I've wanted for years, so there's some definite personal satisfaction there, like a long-held goal finally almost ticked off. Those are intended to be part of a different album - together with some instrumental pieces - that's also complete but which I've yet to upload to my Bandcamp due to assumptions about lack of interest.
But inspiration for those more recent piano pieces strikes months apart, unfortunately, so it's been a while since I had a new one to practice.
Last week, for whatever reason, I decided to try to compose a new piece every day! That's an intention I've had right from the time I started composing, and I think I've attempted it a few times over the years but it never lasts long. This time, I tried to revisit my 'Miniatures' idea, to try to compose some shorter piano pieces I could write and play without too much investment. Here's one of them:
I've composed six of these now - each distinct and about a couple of minutes long - and I love them a lot! I keep thinking I want to share them, or at least do something with them...
But I'm also acutely aware that my own pleasure comes from being their creator, and that this is hardly the sort of thing other people are actively looking to consume. They're soft, reflective, minimalistic; very different to the bombastic piano pieces people might be drawn to if they ever bothered to look into any piano music at all.
It's a shame, though, that I can't monetise these, since I can do six in a week whereas making a game takes months or years!
I can imagine young, new - or old, rusty - pianists maybe getting something out of playing short, colourful, not-too-difficult pieces... but I also assume such pianists instead just use the sorts of simple Classical stuff I did at the start, or adaptations of pop songs or other things they recognise and remember. Even if I wanted to play some obscure creator's personal music myself, I have no idea how I'd find it. There's just no obvious form of distribution.
(I'm speaking of a hypothetical "I" there; I could probably find some subreddits for composers or piano music, but I'm reluctant to do that because I feel like they'd all be better than me and it'd be discouraging.)
I'm subscribed to a couple of pianists on YouTube, but essentially all the pianists I see on there are focused around 'competence porn' - ∞ they're phenomenally skilled and the pieces they play are extremely complex ∞ - and I suspect the human performance aspect is very important to observers. People seem to be more interested in performance than composition in general (music 'artists' become famous, while the music they perform is often composed by relative unknowns; see ∞ this person ∞ for one example, or ∞ Elvis ∞ for another) just because it's far more in-your-face and I suppose directly relatable to their familiar experience.
While I can kind of play these pieces myself, I have no way to cleanly record them, and my skills are poorer than the computer so I prefer to just use generated performances. The structure of the music - not its performance - is what's interesting to me personally.
I might upload the albums at some point anyway (once I've found the time and energy to do cover art), and I might also put the videos like these ones somewhere... I was wondering if anyone would be interested in those on Patreon, or if not that, then maybe I could put them on YouTube where they'd get maybe 10 views and a comment complaining that they're not MARDEK or something.
Only-vaguely-relatedly, I saw an indie dev I follow on Twitter mention doing an interview with a YouTube channel recently... ∞ where I see the videos mostly have sub-100 views ∞. I suppose most videos on there get barely any views, though that's a sad fact if true.
I should also mention that I'm paranoid of exposing these to scrutiny and getting critical comments, which saps all the joy out of creating them. That's the main reason I've got quite a bit of music to myself, unreleased... though I suppose the more likely reaction is complete apathy, disinterest, which is also deflating in a different way.
Anyway, I've been enjoying composing and playing these pieces, so even if nobody else cares to listen to or play them, that's not nothing! Plus I'm learning more with each one, so that should help my composing for games too. I feel way more confident about music theory stuff than I did in 2012! Feels like I knew nothing then... (The analysis on the 2012 sheet music was done recently, and it seems from doing it that I did at least have some vague intuitive idea of what I was doing, though. So that's interesting.)
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