the sonicon and the zone

I spent something like 47 hours a while back working on a piece of music that's 2.11 seconds long.

It's a corporate sonicon, or sound trademark, like the NBC major chord tones, or the "Law & Order" chung-chung, or the Intel "bum-beem-bum-BEEM." It's a very small but incredibly important little sound that they'll use in all their radio and TV and web ads and other things — eventually you'll begin to just hear the sound and know what it means. (No, you may not hear it yet.)

Like those other sounds, it has about 15 layers of samples, instruments, musical things, percussive things, atmospheric recording, and other stuff all blended together into a unique thing. So, with each hour I spend on it, it really does get better and better — it's been a total blast.

The initial idea — a basic sound effect and a simple cadence — took me literally 2 minutes. Then the whole rest of the time it's been tweaking and polishing, sanding away with finer and finer grains. Allllllllllmost done now. I'll come out of a long tweak, covering the final quarter-second, and realize it's 5am, and I've been going at it non-stop for hours. This kind of zone, where skill and interest and absorption-cum-obsession meet, is one of my favorite ways to live. And yet it's kind of the opposite of the usual sentimental myth of creativity. (My friend says, "so I guess one 2.11 second note on a tuba wouldn't have done the trick.")