By Eric Noel Roman

I push a button on the keyboard of my laptop; a loud buzz emits from my studio speakers. All I can do is wince and think, “How the h*** is this supposed to make music?”

The basic process of making music on a computer is taking sound waves moving at certain frequencies and adding effects and limitations to how the waves perform. As you navigate through the complicated knobs on screen, flick virtual switches, and manipulate how the sound moves, you begin to shape an instrument. Some of those sounds are bearable and make your ears prop up like a dog who has heard his favorite bag of treats begin to crackle. Other times, the tones created instill a feeling one would get as they are walking into a dental office and hearing “the drill.”

Even though each action on screen has an effect on what you hear, whether positive or negative, you keep moving forward in the creative process. Each tweak leads you in a path that will eventually place your sound exactly where you imagined, or a dead end where the sound might need to be scrapped and a new beginning is required. By the end of the process, you have created a series of sounds that are satisfactory to your ultimate song goals.

As the time progresses in this creative process, you begin to tie in each sound to others and mold a melody, and eventually a song. Each piece you add or subtract is based on what you want your song to be and sound like. Emotions might affect the tones, but overall the song is still being created from a buzz.

Just like life, remember that it is just a buzz. Its most basic element is you, and you affect that buzz (think wavelength is life line). Each experience you have in life affects the outcome of you. As you follow along the path of life you add and remove things. Similar to those effects, some experiences make you smile, like the harmony of a sonnet on a spring day. Other moments are not so fruitful, like the ominous tone of a cello. Either way these are all instruments in your life that eventually will make a song.

As you go along the timeline of life, like a song being created, do not be afraid to experiment and try things out. Each time you add, you can remove. This way your life has every instrument you enjoy. At one point you will have a band and that band will create a song. A song created from nothing, but built by you.