When I think of who I am as an artist, I think a lot about the interesting nature of self-sampling and recursion. There's a beautiful landscape that occurs when you work on a process that is both expansive but can have rules added to it that make it constantly evolve, even though it's the same underlying process. Those are the kinds of fundamental axioms that I think about often.

Ever since I was young, I was always a kind of experimental musician. And that translated to writing strange compositions that were slightly classically oriented, to exploring atonalism for a brief moment, to diving into electronic music production. But I've always prided myself on being able to find some type of originality that was abstracted from the world. Nothing is ever truly original, nothing's new under the sun, but I hope to, in my lack of experiencing and readily listening to pop music and in general listening to the world around us, am able to create music that is more based off of my own work, semblances of music theory, and a really constantly moving mind. I think a benefit that I have is being able to quickly come up with and start drawing up ideas almost immediately.

I realize that when I'm creating, it's all a connected web of motifs and different kinds of iterations of, I guess, original material, if you want to call it that. This evolution stems not only from optional rules that I choose to abide by, but also from the kind of materials and software that I'm working with as I've expanded over the years.

Some of my biggest brands that I use are BeetSurfing, Kilohertz, and ToneBoosters. Of the free plugins, the most prolific of them all is AirWindows. AirWindows is an incredible suite of plugins that are all designed with minimal graphics, for the purposes of being simplistic and focusing on the sound. I really enjoy quite a few of those plugins, and I still have much to dive into when it comes to that.

As I've developed my plethora of plug-ins, I've realized how my sound has changed. When I started playing with Pigments and Vital, both specific synths, they opened up a world that I still need to dive deeper into, of a more synthesized, brute kind of sound that I love and adore.

Growing up, I used to listen to Michael Jackson, Sade, Janet Jackson, Prince, and even then I wasn't really listening to music often. I was just developing an ear for these very specific artists. That never extended into pop culture music. Sure, we would listen to stuff on the radio, but I never wanted to pursue music outside of the specific beginner-intermediate studies of classical piano and a little bit of jazz piano and music theory that I was into.

This led me to finding a lot of solace in old music from the 1970s through the 1990s, and even more so in exploring the influences that other people had. My favorite music to listen to, rather, is between the 1980s and the early 2000s. But in general, I really don't tend to spend a lot of time listening to music at all. Just my own.

The only kind of artist that I was really inspired by from recent times was from the hyperpop movement, SOPHIE. Because the sound that was presented in the early stages of hyperpop, pioneered by SOPHIE and A. G. Cook, is this very abrasive, almost to the level of disgusting and sickening extremes of what popular music was and still is. And when we listen to music now, especially with the influences of Charli XCX, for example, the influence of hyperpop is truly extending beyond what was imagined in the 2010s. Even most people agree that pop music between 2004 and 2015 was kind of a weird period for pop music. There were a lot of competing elements going on, hyperpop seems to have survived into the 2020s. It's just fascinating to me how developed some of these abrasive, in-your-face, full-rich sounds are. And I really loved that kind of extremity in my music. So I definitely, if anything, have taken that kind of sound from the post-2010s era.

I don't want to be the type of artist that says I'm underground or I sound like no one else and I'm just purely unique. Because we all have ties and influences back to different people, places, spaces, and cultures. But at the same time, I do try and avoid being influenced by anything too much. I definitely don't put myself in a position to consume a lot of music in aggregate to come up with something unique. Rather, the exact opposite, and keep myself somewhat closed off from listening to any music in general other than my own. And I do also go out of my way when creating albums and things to try and not sound like certain artists, or just artists in general, other than the ones that I had mentioned.

Something that does often perturb me in a very soft kind of way now, but before when I was young, it really bothered me, was the proclivity of listeners calling my music game music. And while I do agree that some of my music definitely sounds like it could be in a game, I think the gamut of game music is so broad that it's really hard for me to understand how it could be placed into there. But I do think that there's a melodic, sometimes somewhat repetitive nature that definitely is a part of what game music as a whole has. But that's just another digression. But when people say that I sound like something, I try and think of how I can expand outside of that. Just because I think that encourages me to keep growing and trying something new and not get too comfortable and complacent in what I'm doing. Not necessarily to be constantly contrarian. That's not my goal. But it sometimes can seem so.

When it comes to the world around us, I think there are so many beautiful influences. That's why I often download gigabytes upon gigabytes of Foley sounds. Those sounds to me represent the real world encroaching upon a space in which we call art.

I think nature and society and all that kind of fun stuff is art as well. But I value the kind of slightly fictional and slightly out-of-touch world that we create and call human-made art, or if you want to go further, human-influenced art. These kinds of interesting spaces lend special importance to me because you can do whatever you want in these worlds. You can try and empathize and develop an innate understanding of certain realities that you could never touch.

Art can be a very simple thing. It could be a banana on a canvas. At the same time, art can be a very deep thing. Both of those things are equally valuable in understanding yourself as an artist and what you want to do, and in understanding the complexity of the state of the world.

I know that a lot of people will argue that art is only human-made, intentional, somewhat complicated, with a meaning behind it that was intended. But in my opinion, everything can be looked at from an artistic lens. That is why I believe everything is art: everything has the ability to be analyzed from an artistic perspective. What is that perspective? It is what can be contrived and developed that has some kind of meaning beyond the semantic literality of a description, beyond our plain senses of what we can see. What could be derived from it all?

No matter how complex or simple, no matter who or what made it, art is something interesting that should be explored. That is why I do what I do. My albums definitely have, and will continue to, take up strange, unique perspectives that are not my own and might not even be found in reality.

To me, being ScilentSymphony, being this intriguing artist or trying to be intriguing, means that I have to explore all of these unique avenues. And I will continue to do so for as long as this artist thing stays alive.

The last thing I would like to share is how music has been connecting to the rest of my life. I'm studying entrepreneurship, specifically to become a consultant of some kind, whether that be for small businesses or medium-sized businesses, people who are looking to found new businesses, specialists who are not really in the business world but are trying to start a business, people who need some kind of systems guidance, ideation, and exploration of a lot of different pathways.

To me, my music life replicates that and imitates that. When I studied for my undergraduate portion at Florida Gulf Coast University, I wrote a thesis on improvisation. This thesis describes how improvisation can be thought of as a cycle of time perception, and this idea of time influences how we all create. It's the most fundamental level to improvisation that spreads across cultures. Each culture has a different way that it implements these temporal aspects, these ways in which they activate the same core, maybe some could say primal, time-typed urges.

And when it comes to improvisation as a whole, the more that I looked into this concept, the more that I realized it occurs in many aspects of creativity and can even occur in entrepreneurship. And part of that exploration, part of those stages of time, you do some avenue exploring and diverse ideation to create. But it comes down to having a base level of knowledge and understanding what you know. And knowing that you have to have a very good knowledge base in order to start activating these creative respects and not to get pulled into the Dunning-Kruger effect.

This thesis, even though now looking back at it, was well developed and evidenced clearly, still hedged a little bit too strongly on the aspect of universalism. While I do believe that theoretically this could be a universal way of understanding how the mind works, or at least understanding or not understanding, being able to have a mental model of how improvisation could work. And it's a very strong contender for working on any culture. I still gave a little bit too much credence to the improvisational universality claim that I made throughout the paper as a whole. And that's something that I somewhat regret.

But that is the plight of academics. And definitely in music, I have written some things and done some things that maybe I would have changed or honored more the rules for. But it's interesting to see how these different worlds intersect because of who I am at the end of the day. And I hope that my music allows you to experience some of those complexities, or just be a simple background listen. It's meant for anything.