Wednesday 14 January 2009

floundering under a sea of books

Looking at the pile of books around my desk at the moment, I am finding several that I really haven't gotten around to reading yet, that I have had out on loan from the library or have acquired some other way, for a shameful amount of time. 

Some of these books have been key references for me - Wiggins and Delieges book on musical creativity, Lerdahl and Jackendoff's book A Generative theory of tonal music, various books on creativity or emergence, Bregman's Auditory Scene Analysis - the list goes on and on.

Let's face it - even if I sat down and did nothing else but read the books in my shelves, I still couldn't read all of them properly, page-by-page, and in any case I don't have that luxury with time. 

So a new approach is required - I'm going to train myself to be able to pick and choose content better from these books. I need to be stricter and really focus my attention on my research area of musical creativity. Which means, for example, that the Lerdahl and Jackendoff book is only useful to me (right now) for a small project I'm doing on the crossover between musical creativity and creativity in language use, so I should give it the appropriate level of attention and then return it so other people can read it. 

I've kept very sporadic notes from the reading I have done so far, so as of now I'm going to keep these notes electronically and file them together, otherwise they're impossible to find. I guess this blog would be a good place to do this, so quite a few future posts will be my thoughts and notes from books I've read over the past year and a half as well as future books. In a way this will be good anyway, to review what I have read - I'm sure that 75% at least of this reading has gone out of my head by now...

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