I’m sick as a dog, I couldn’t sleep last night, and my ears are clogged so I’ve taken the day off from mixing. Mostly I’ve been laying on the around watching futbol.

Meanwhile, I’ve been meaning to post about the Music/Food connection for quite some time, and now that I’ve got some forced down time I can finally get to it.

To me, mixing a track is the same as making dinner. To make a great meal, first you have a recipe or at least an idea in mind. Second, you have to shop for the highest quality ingredients you can get. Thirdly, you put love and care into prepping those ingredients – chopping vegetables, etc. Finally, the actual cooking step – an alchemical process where the ingredients come together in the right proportions, with the right treatments, and magically transform into something that is more than the sum of it’s parts.

Sometimes if a client walks in on a mix before I’ve had a chance to do my thing and prematurely starts giving me feedback, I’ll say “Don’t taste the soup when it’s just boiling water and carrots!” They might say it needs “salt”, but they don’t know that later I plan to add some pancetta or other salty ingredient. Sometimes we talk about effects – reverbs, delays, etc. – as the “sauce” or “gravy” of a mix. Also the analogy holds that I can only make the meal as good as the ingredients I’m given. No matter how good a “chef” I am, if I’m forced to work with wilted lettuce and tainted meat, there’s no amount of cooking that will make it a great meal. On the other hand, tracks that are like amazing organic, local, in-season produce, when supplied in the right proportions, almost mix themselves. This is one reason why it nice to produce and engineer the projects I mix, albeit much more time consuming. As the great football coach Bill Parcells once said, ”If they want you to cook the dinner, at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries.” I also realized this after doing so much mixing – that if I wanted the mix to sound better, I needed control over the arrangement and recording as well. Three guitar parts all noodling in the same frequency range and stepping all over each other (bad arrangement) make mixing very difficult.

I’ve always been interested in the “meta” aspects of things. How music, cooking, and even engine maintenance all basically stem from this same approach, the same philosophy. All are about systems that involve both art and science, and all involve arranging components in such a way as to create what is ultimately a final product that elicits an emotional reaction.

One good book that covers much of this is the Pulitzer Prize winning classic tome Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (http://www.amazon.com/Godel-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237082331&sr=8-1). This guy is almost too smart for his own good. In it he compares the music of Bach to the artwork of Escher and the mathematics of Gödel.

The idea that there is some common force behind all this may come as no surprise to some. One definition of music is math over time, since so much of what we consider harmonious (albeit culturally-limited) is based on certain Pythagorean ratios.

Then there is also the field of study of Musica universalis, a.k.a. Music of the Spheres (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_the_spheres), which extends the Pythagorean concepts to measurements of the celestial bodies in the universe and describes them in musical terms. In fact, in 2003 it was discovered that black holes emit a B flat! Admittedly it is impossible to hear as it is 57 octaves below middle C.

So, as you can see, at this point the boundaries of music, math, physics, astronomy and even astrology all start to blur together. (Don’t forget cooking and motorcycle maintenance!) What we are left with, what this universal (pardon the pun) force is that makes all of these secondary fields of study possible, is something that is beyond the limits of our current wisdom. Some would say de facto it is God, but that’s a subject better left to the theologians in their ivory towers. All I can deduce is that it’s about vibrations, without which life as we know it would cease to exist (part of the definition of absolute zero degrees Kelvin); it’s about ratios, since everything is relative; and it’s about time, without which this blog post would never end, haha.

Thoughts?