Fernando Gros's Blog, page 12

How To Maintain Your Motivation

“Don’t say you can’t when you really mean you don’t want to.”

I guess as a kid I was prone to saying “I can’t” when struggling to learn something. Every parent has heard that cry as their child tried to acquire some new skill or just to arrive at the right answer in maths homework.

My father was always keen for me to understand that your willingness to try is more important than getting it right the first time.

He made his career repairing electronics. While some equipment faults repeated themselves, many were one-offs that required trial and error to fix. I often think about how frustrating that work might’ve been. But he found joy in carefully tracing through a circuit. He’d often share a joyful story over dinner if the fault had been a particularly challenging one to discover and repair.

I think about his example a lot when asked about finding motivation. The most motivated people I’ve met all seemed to enjoy solving difficult problems. Not because they had saintly patience; they were just as likely as the rest of us to be annoyed about being stuck in traffic or having a flight delayed. But they seemed to relish a challenge, and trusted in their ability to overcome the obstacle or acquire the skills needed to do so.

What Is Motivation?

When we talk about motivation we’re often bringing together two different kinds of questions. On the one hand, motivation is about the choices we make, and where we devote our time. Why did some kids spend their afternoons doing extra homework while others mastered sports, or music, or hung out with friends? This relates to our goals, values, and our personal visions of what we want from life.

On the other hand, motivation is about how we keep going or stay focused, especially when faced with difficulties, frustrations, and setbacks. It’s the “I don’t want to go to the gym” or “I can’t be bothered cooking a healthy meal” problem. And this relates more to our attitudes, frame of mind, and personal resilience.

Conversations about motivation usually begin with a discussion of Abram Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow suggested that people were primarily motivated to satisfy basic physical needs, and found the motivation to achieve higher-level needs (such as belonging, esteem, or self-fulfillment) only if those basics were met.

Recent research casts doubt on this, and finds a simpler set of needs (autonomy, relatedness, and competence) to be the most important for finding a sense of motivation.

Autonomy is the feeling that we have a choice about what to do and how to do it. Relatedness is the feeling of belonging; feeling safe and connected to other people. Competence is the feeling of working towards competence, and from there, on to mastery.

Notice all of these are feelings. We can’t find our motivation or help others find theirs through abstract rules or effort and reward games. Motivation comes from engaging with and learning responsibility for our feelings. Only if you travel inwards to understand your feelings will you understand why on some days you feel like doing that thing, be it exercise or answering e-mail. On other days, you don’t.

We Lack Motivation When Faced With The Ambiguity Of Learning

It’s at school that many of us face our first major motivational challenges. Paying attention in class or finishing homework feels hard. In many ways, school and the model of forced learning isn’t a good template for the rest of our lives. But learning does continue to be an area of life where motivation can prove difficult to find.

Learning creates ambiguity. We come face to face with things we don’t know or understand, or are unable to do well.

The ambiguity of learning in beautifully summed up in this quote from Tara Westover’s brilliant memoir, Educated:

”The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.”
– Tara Westover, Educated

Learning is uncomfortable. Those important motivational feelings, of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, are all challenged when we try to learn.

The key to this is patience; learning to relax into the ambiguity of learning. This is central to mastery of pretty well anything. Impatience makes us short-sighted and reactive. It’s hard to focus, avoid distraction, or deal with unhelpful feelings when you’re in an impatient frame of mind. You need to be OK with the messy uncertainty of trying new things, experimenting, occasionally failing, and slowly piecing new knowledge together.

Understanding your character strengths is a helpful way to move from impatience to patience. One thing I do is to assign one or more of my top seven character strengths to all my projects (I wrote more about this here).

So, when I’m facing a chore or task that isn’t motivating me, I can reframe it in a more helpful way. An e-mail I don’t want to write becomes an exercise in honesty and bravery. That household chore I’m putting off is a way to appreciate beauty and excellence. The article I’m struggling to finish might be an opportunity for creativity or a way to express my love of learning.

We Lack Motivation When There’s Too Much Friction

Another way we lose our motivation is when the path seems to be full of obstacles. I like to call this friction. It’s the amount of resistance we face just trying to start. Friction limits your power, leaving you with less to show for your efforts. It can show up in the spaces you inhabit and the systems you use. And friction is deeply personal. A messy desk (or desktop) can be chaotic for one person and a source of inspiration for someone else.

The key to overcoming friction is design. Take control of your physical and digital environment. Shape it to suit you. Make sure things are where you need them. Choose tools, processes, and workflows that complement the way you think and your style of working.

Our rooms think on our behalf, encouraging activities based on how we have laid out our things in them. We can do a lot to remove friction and make our work easier by learning from the way in which chefs set up their work stations. And we can tame and control our software by setting it up to suit us (like I’ve done with Scrivener, which I’m using to write this article).

This isn’t the same as being neat or tidy. In fact, I don’t even like the expression “tidying up”. It’s an abstract and infinite chore. How tidy is tidy enough, anyway?

Removing friction is about being ready. Cutting down the time it takes from wanting to do something to being able to do it. And making it easy to keep going. Not having to search when you need a file, or pen, or tool.

We Lack Motivation When The Path Feels Overwhelming

Sometime we face so many challenges, disappointments, and setbacks that reaching the goal feels overwhelming. You might ask yourself if it’s just too hard. A crucial part of coping with this situation is our mindset.
Specifically, how we think about our abilities, skills, and even our intelligence.

Carol Dweck is renowned for her work on the power of having a growth mindset. She studied two ways in which people think about their intelligence. Those with an entity belief considered their abilities to be fixed. You’ve either got what it takes to master something, or you haven’t. Whereas those with an incremental belief see themselves as being able to increase their abilities. Just because you can’t do it now doesn’t mean you can’t eventually do it, after some effort.

The consequences of this are huge for motivation. People with an entity belief are more likely to feel disheartened by any struggle. The incrementalists will see that same struggle as part of the natural process of learning. Most surprisingly, the entity belief holders, after a setback or failure, will perform badly at things they were previously good at, with the effect of the struggle becoming so bad they learn to feel helpless.

“In fact, some of the brightest kids prove to be the most vulnerable to becoming helpless, because they feel the need to live up to and maintain a perfectionist image that is easily and inevitably shattered.”
– Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning

Overcoming this challenge involves developing what Dweck calls a growth mindset. I wrote at length about this here.

A growth mindset embraces challenges, persists despite obstacles, sees effort as the natural path to mastery, learns from criticism, and finds inspiration in the success of others. A fixed mindset, by contrast, avoids challenges, gives up when faced with setbacks, sees efforts towards mastery as pointless, ignores useful criticism, and feels threatened by others’ achievements.

The key to all this is perspective; putting your beliefs about yourself and your goals in the right framework. The limited mindset sees intelligence and other abilities as fixed, as things you have in order to look smarter than other people. The comparison is everything. But the growth mindset sees abilities as things you grow over time, that allow you to reach higher and higher goals, and your own satisfaction is far more important than comparison with others.

Living with a growth mindset, you increasingly find the motivation within yourself, your own ability to make challenges interesting to you, to learn and develop, and to gain satisfaction in what you do.

Remember Your Achievements

Sometimes we lose motivation because we’re so focused on the future. We’re jumping to the next challenge and expecting our motivation to turn up right away. Or we’re constantly imagining ourselves in the future and focusing on our goals.

But sometimes the key to being motivated is to look backwards. Remember your achievements. Consider the times you’ve overcome setbacks, faced down disappointments, or struggled your way to success.

Too often we complete a project, finish an essay, or ship a product, then switch immediately to the next thing. We don’t celebrate the success. Or mark it some way, so we’ll remember it in the future. As a result we don’t live with an awareness of the progress we’ve made; the way in which one experience builds on another to get us where we are now. Holding onto this sense of movement in our lives is crucial, because motivation’s favourite partner is momentum.

“Motivation is the fire that starts burning after you manually, painfully, coax it into existence, and it feeds on the satisfaction of seeing yourself make progress.”
– Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth

Regular reviews can help you with this. Whether it’s weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, or a combination of all of them, making time to look over your life can help you remember how much you’ve achieved. The technology doesn’t matter; app, paper and pencil, whatever you like — just find a way to remind yourself of how far you’ve come and the effort you’ve put in.

It’s so hard to feel motivated if you see everything you do as starting from scratch. But nothing you’ve learnt is ever lost or irrelevant. And if you take the time to consider it, you will realise that your life story is full of reasons to believe you can face your challenges today.

Some Notes On Motivation And Mental Health

Your motivation will be affected by your emotional, mental, and physical well-being. Our eating, exercising, and sleeping patterns can drift over time. It’s easy to slowly reach a point where our body is behaving differently. And changes to our emotional and mental balance can be even more subtle and harder to detect. I wrote a whole series on creativity and mental health. And it required a whole series, because there are so many aspects to this.

If you notice a significant or sudden change in your motivation, it would be good to talk to someone about it. This change could be part of something bigger, and there might well be a way to address it. Discuss it with your doctor, or consider seeing a counsellor or therapist.

We can become so obsessed with getting things done that we forget how the way in which we do things affects us. If we don’t take care of ourselves, we won’t just lose our motivation. We’ll lose the ability to do anything well.

“We must train ourselves. Not to make spoons or jewelry or paintings or chairs but to be more competent, more forgiving, more patient.”
– Gary Rogowski, Handmade

Motivation Feels Easy When We Don’t Need It

Our worst instinct when faced with an absence of motivation is to try harder. You might tell yourself to just concentrate or stick to your priorities, but it isn’t always that easy. Especially if you haven’t done the work we discussed above.

One thread that runs through our whole conversation here, from learning to processes, mindset and mental-well being, is coherence. Having a coherent picture of how we want to live and what we want to achieve.

One possible response to this is to set lots of goals. This makes us feel like we have a plan, like we’re in control. But having a long and complicated list of goals also makes us fragile, unable to cope with change or take advantage of unexpected opportunities. We’re assuming there might be only one path to the things we want from life, when there might be several paths.

Having fewer big life goals can sharpen our focus on how to reach them. And clarifying how we want our daily life to look can also give us a path to solving the many small obstacles along the way (the “imagine your ideal” day exercise is helpful for this).

You can think of it like this. Have two or three big goals for your life. Then make sure your desk is organised, turn off notifications, check your calendar for important appointments and commitments, and get to work on the things you need to do this week.

Most important of all, motivation isn’t some mysterious force outside your control, a magical power that’s sometimes available and sometimes not. You have everything you need to find motivation, manage the way you feel about motivation, and build a life that makes motivation available to you. Devote less of your energy to worrying whether you will feel motivated and more of your energy to building mindsets, processes, and work flows that make it easier for you to feel motivated.

“Incredibly successful people set a goal and then focus all their attention on the process necessary to achieve that goal. They set a goal and then, surprisingly, they forget the goal.”
– Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth

The post How To Maintain Your Motivation appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Craft Your Personal Brand In 2021

The phrase “personal brand” elicits very different responses. For some people, it’s just part of life. For others, it’s something ugly, an attempt to turn every conversation into a sales pitch.

I’m in the first camp. Fine-tuning my personal brand has always been a part of my life. It comes with trying to make a name for myself in music and the arts. But I know some of you are in the latter camp and are sceptical about the idea.

So, let’s talk a little about what personal brands are, away from the hype and cult of the hustle, to see how personal brands can work for each one of us.

What Is A Personal Brand?

A brand is a way to differentiate one product from another in a marketplace. More than just a logo or packaging design, a brand is a story. Most importantly it’s a story about trust. Why should you trust a brand? You trust it because it will deliver on a promise, a promise to make you happier, healthier, sexier, or wealthier.

But people are not products.

However, we do face a similar challenge, because we make promises, and we need people to trust our ability to deliver on those promises. Also, we need a way to differentiate ourselves from others who make different promises or simply are not trustworthy.

Working on your personal brand is a path towards that.

Notice I didn’t say creating a personal brand, because you already have one, regardless of your feelings about this subject. The way you act, the things you do, and how you do them, that’s your brand. Think of it like the impression you make, and we all make an impression, whether good, bad, or indifferent.

Why A Personal Brand Is Unavoidable

Cultivating your personal brand means being intentional about the impression you make. I think Dolly Parton said it best,

“Figure out who you are and then do it on purpose.”
– Dolly Parton

This challenge has always been with us. But it feels more acute now since the impression we make depends so much on what we share online. The Zoom-era work-from-home culture has allowed so many people to live like internet influencers. This has just accelerated a long-standing trend, in which the demands of technology have increased the number of skills workers are expected to have. Skills like typing, creating presentations, or communicating electronically went from being specialist tasks to things everyone was expected to do for themselves.

Li Jin, formerly of Andreessen Horowitz and founder of Atelier Ventures, has highlighted how most people’s jobs will increasingly have characteristics we associate with online content creators.

“No matter which industry you’re in, people are all going to be creators. … Everything will have a creator component to the job. … Everyone will have to build influence online, because we’re living more of our lives online. … All of us will have to adopt some of the skill sets and behaviors of creators in order to be successful.”
– Li Jin

Of course, you could try to avoid this and pretend this trend is somehow going to slow down. But you’d be taking a big risk and also potentially missing out on some benefits. Particularly because cultivating a personal brand puts you on a powerful path to personal freedom.

A Path To Freedom

Let’s get cosmic for a moment. What are you asking the universe for right now? What big thing, in your work or personal life, are you hoping will manifest itself soon?

One way to think to think about your personal brand is to imagine yourself in this context. What change are you hoping to create in the world? How do you plan to bring it about? What kind of people do you hope to do it with?

Hopefully, this sounds big – life mission big – because that’s the point.

This is how a personal brand becomes liberating. You clarify what you stand for in a way that lets people rally around you. Also, you stop being someone who’s here for whatever and become someone who’s here for something in particular.

Some people won’t like your brand. That’s cool. Those people aren’t for you anyway. They were never going to cheer your successes or support you in the tough times.

But the people who are for you and what you want, well, they can find you now.

A Personal Brand In 2021

Approaching your personal brand this way lets your values shine through. This matters because, in 2021, we won’t trust anyone or anything whose ethics are unclear. We’re too jaded from all the broken promises. We’re also tired of toxic people, unsafe workplaces, and unsustainable products.

What we’re looking for is perspective. It’s like a compass to help us navigate through life.

Think of people you admire. How much do you know about their perspective on current issues like climate change, racial or gender equality, mental health, or economic injustice? Maybe they don’t talk about their values all the time. But their opinions still shine through, enough for you to know what their truth is.

But it’s hard to do all this anonymously. You’ll need to find your voice and make some choices.

How To Tweak Your Personal Brand Right Now

One place to start is by crafting a simple introduction to yourself. There are many versions of this. I think of it as the XYZ sentence. I’m an X and I do Y, so we can enjoy Z. For me that becomes, I’m an artist and I write articles, blog posts, and books, so we can enjoy a more creative life.

Try that for yourself.

Next, put some intention behind it. Put this introduction into every act of communication. Online, in person, even as you talk to yourself. This is who I am, this is what I do, and this is why I do it.

Hopefully, two things will happen. First, it will start to feel like you’re telling a cohesive story about yourself. Second, you’ll begin to pay attention to the edges of life around you. This will raise a lot of questions as you audit your words and actions.

This is important because boundaries matter. Brands are as much about what they don’t offer as what they do. Coke doesn’t sell trucks, and McDonald’s doesn’t offer investment advice. With both, you know what you’re getting and also why you might say no to either.

This is where the freedom comes from. You can redouble your commitment to the people and places, things and tools, that move you towards your goals. And you can be comfortable in saying goodbye to those that don’t.

But most of all, the freedom comes from choosing to be yourself.

The post Craft Your Personal Brand In 2021 appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Cooking With The Meater+ Thermometer

It feels like one of those MasterCard ads.

Fennel and Lemon Spiced Spatchcock Chicken, £12.95.
Meater+ thermometer, £99.
A perfectly juicy slice of BBQ – priceless.

Okay, let’s get this out of the way: £99 is a lot of money to spend on a cooking thermometer. Sure, it’s a smart thermometer. Yes, it looks great and has a nifty charging case. And the companion app also looks great.

But for that money, it’s got to be more than good; it’s got to be amazing.

Meater+ And A Temperature Geek

Before getting to the Meater+, I should confess something. I’m a bit of a temperature geek in the kitchen. After a few pots, pans, and knives, the most important tool in the kitchen is a good thermometer.

I have a few, including an infrared heat gun that measures surface temperatures. You can never be too careful when it comes to checking the temperature of your oven, the surface of your frying pan, or bread as it cools down.

So, when my favourite butcher listed a new smart thermometer for sale, I paused only because of the aforementioned price. Then I ordered my Meater+.

Using Meater+

The device looks like a regular cooking thermometer without the dial or digital readout. More like a stainless steel pencil. It comes with a faux-wood box that houses a Wi-Fi transmitter and an AA battery for recharging purposes.

Pairing Meater+ to your phone is easy using the companion app. It works over Bluetooth. The charging box extends the range by connection with your Wi-Fi, so you don’t have to leave your phone next to the oven or BBQ.

Before cooking, you insert the device into the thickest part of your meat, choose a cooking option on the app, and get to it. The app tracks the temperature inside the meat and the ambient temperature inside your oven (smoker, or BBQ), and projects an estimate of the remaining cooking time. You can adjust this based on the desired level of doneness and the app make recommendations you can follow.

Cooking with Meater+

My first cook was the aforementioned chicken. Prepared and pre-marinated from the excellent Farmison butchers in Yorkshire, this is a treat I’ve oven roasted a few times in the last year. But I always wanted to try cooking it in the smoker. So, with the smoker warmed to the manufacturer’s recommended temperature for smoking chicken, and with a good pile of applewood chips to hand, I drove the Meater+ deep into the thigh of the bird and put it in the smoker.

The result was nothing short of sublime. Well cooked, yet tender, with the flavours of the meat and marinade still there and not overpowered by the smoke. Delightful.

The second cook was more of a challenge: BBQ brisket, low and slow. I’ve had inconsistent results with brisket, because getting the first stage right requires careful attention. You want to cook the meat until it’s done, then take it out and wrap it up in paper and foil before finishing it off. In theory, it’s about 4 hours for each stage. But it’s always different, depending on the piece of meat, the way your smoker is behaving, the alignment of the stars, and countless other metaphysical variables.

This is where Meater+ excels itself. It prompted me at the perfect target temperature for the first stage – 45 minutes earlier than anticipated. The Meater+ also made it clear the smoker was running hotter than I’d set it. Turns out I’d forgotten to open the vents during the smoking process. After the second cook, I once again had fantastic BBQ.

The third test was a favourite: home-smoked bacon. Since the bacon is already cured, you’re just making sure it’s cooked through. You want it to reach the right temperature and that’s it. Again, perfect results.

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Cook Well By Not Checking Often

There’s an adage in BBQ: If you’re lookin’, you ain’t cookin’. I’m not one for homespun clichés, but this one makes sense. Repeatedly opening and closing the door of your BBQ, smoker or oven interrupts the cook, as the temperature falls then slowly rises again.

With smoking in particular, it also means your clothes and hair could easily start to smell a little too much like the meal you’re trying to cook!

Not anymore. Meater+ is an excellent buy for anyone who wants to cook precisely. It’s a pure delight for temperature geeks or anyone who wants a little data with their main course.

While it’s easy to focus on the promise of things like smart cars, devices like Meater+ show the promise of tech-enhanced tools for everyday life.

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Make Time For Optimism

It’s time to choose another seasonal theme. For winter, my seasonal theme was ‘make a map.’ I wanted a better sense of where I was after a year in isolation and various forms of lockdown. Map-making was my response to this general malaise, the languishing, which many of us have felt in the past year.

Now, as winter slowly gives way to spring, I need something that compliments the yearly theme of ‘Imagination.’ It’s mid-May, wet, and barely 11˚C. But, I’m picking Optimism as the theme, because in this moment it feels right to reach out for some hope.

We Need Some Optimism Now

Okay, we’re still in the midst of a pandemic. Two weeks ago was the worst week so far for new cases of Covid-19, driven by the horrific rise of new infections in India. In places like Australia and Japan, there’s deep frustration with the slow deployment of vaccines.

Here in the UK, the end of another successful lockdown, combined with a strong vaccination programme, is providing a lot of hope. And in the US, where the vaccination programme has been even more successful, there’s even more cause for hope.

The situation is better for many of us, but not for all, and there’s still a long way to go.

We risk collective and systemic burnout if we don’t allow ourselves to feel some optimism.

Optimism and Imagination

I chose the yearly theme of Imagination because last year was so heavily focused on just getting through this pandemic that it felt hard to imagine things ever getting better. Sure, we knew we’d eventually get through this. But imagining that future – bringing it clearly to mind as a mindset amid the fog and confusion of this crisis – felt hard.

That’s not to say your imagination will work only if things are going well. Bitter disappointment and difficult circumstances can fuel our imagination. But even in those situations, imagination works as long as we don’t give up on a better tomorrow.

Optimism and Creativity

Every creative act is an expression of optimism. Why would we pick up a brush, or camera, or musical instrument without any hope that someone would experience something as a result? Even the angriest and darkest work carries with it a longing for connection, a cry for love, a hope for meaning.

Optimism also embodies our need to believe solutions are possible. In this way, optimism is essential to problem solving. It’s impossible to fix something if we don’t believe it can be fixed.

Optimism and Habits

Habits are something we’re often thinking about here. We choose and stick to our habits because we’re optimistic they will be good for us.

Whether it’s getting better sleep, exercising and eating well so you’ll feel better, or learning and reading so you’ll have better ideas, optimism is just another word for better.

Implementing Optimism

Bringing optimism into our lives requires making some choices in relation to our mindset, or schedule, and even how we live. Optimism is as much an orientation as a belief, or even a feeling.

In particular, optimism is an orientation towards the future and the possibility of improvement. So, whatever tools you use to bolster your mindset, write hope into them and hold space for optimism.

One thing I’ve found particularly powerful is to schedule time for optimism. For me, 11am and 5pm are the bleakest hours, the moments when I’m most prone to lose hope, to feel like the day is not going well or has failed to live up to expectations.

It hasn’t quite evolved into a full-on meditation, at least not yet, but I make a moment to hold space for optimism. I imagine some specific part of my life and just let myself believe it could work out for the best. Importantly, this isn’t a prayer, it isn’t a wish. I think about a scenario in my life – my work for the day, the dinner I’m going to cook that night – and just let myself imagine the best likely scenario coming to pass, given the current circumstances. I won’t write a Nobel prize-winning poem or cook a Michelin-starred meal today, but I might make something better than terrible in either effort.

Increasingly, it feels like optimism isn’t something we work ourselves into feeling, but something we make room for, so it can grow.

“Expectations, gentle reader, expectations must be controlled. They must be handled firmly or they can crush hope. Manage your expectations for your own happiness.”
– Gary Rogowski

Realistic Optimism Or Optimistic Realism?

Being optimistic isn’t about rejecting all negativity. We need to be emotionally agile enough to cope with criticism, disappointment, and failure. Moreover, trying to ‘push’ negativity away can be stressful.

This often comes from unrealistic expectations. We expect too much happiness. We wish we had only positive emotions. Optimism isn’t the opposite of negativity. Optimism is a bias towards believing in the possibility of a good future regardless of how we feel in the moment.

Introducing a bias towards optimism is a realistic way to hold onto hope. So, instead of always asking ourselves what could go wrong, we also ask, what if it goes right?

We aren’t trying to quench optimism by making it ‘realistic’. We’re grounding our optimism in reality, in the possibilities in front of us, in the hope we feel when we feel it, and in the knowledge that dire circumstances can, and often do, improve.

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Finding Calm With The Layers Of Sound Meditation

Last week I attended the beautifully named Revolutionary Love conference. It was three days of talks around the theme of having the courage to imagine solutions to some of our most intractable social problems, especially around climate, gender, identity and race.

It was inspiring stuff. But also a little bit anxiety-inducing, as is sometimes the case, when we try to imagine how to work towards making the world fairer and more just in our lives and through the things we need to do.

So I welcomed the sight of a short talk on the final morning called Movement for the Movement led by Bianca Michalczak. In the space of a few minutes, over Zoom, Bianca led us through a mindfulness exercise called Layers of Sound. It’s similar to other mindfulness exercises that help ground you in your present moment. I wrote about one of my favourites, a quick, three-question practice, in a post called A Mindfulness Exercise That Helps Me Everyday This practice is different and beautifully calming in its own way.

Layers Of Sound Meditation

Sit with your palms facing upwards, or, if you can, lie on the floor with your arms out to the side. Close your eyes. Allow yourself to focus on what you can hear. Breathe in whatever way feels natural and relaxed.

As you do, start to focus first on the sounds you can hear outside in the distance. This could be children playing, construction, passing traffic, the call of birds, or the wind in the trees. Don’t categorise or label the sounds. Just listen, as they rise and fall, or drone on.

Now move your focus onto sounds inside your building but still some distance away. This could be the sound of a washing machine or voices in the next room. You’re listening to, and becoming aware of, the separation between inside and outside, between the building you’re in, and the environment beyond it.

Next, as you continue to breathe deeply, bring your focus into your room. What can you hear now? It might be the buzz of a light, or the whir of a computer fan. What sounds can you hear immediately around you?

Now, finally, focus on the sound of your body. Listen to your breath. And any sounds you notice. Perhaps the grumble of your stomach. Or the sound of your joints as you shift in position. Whatever you hear, keep your focus on listening to your body, for a few more moments.

Mindfully Embracing The Sounds Around Us

When we come to meditation, we think we need to block out the world. We assume, wrongly, that some kind of Zen will meet us, but only in total silence.

However, the most powerful mindfulness experiences, the ones that bring the most calm and creative freedom, involve embracing the reality we find ourselves in. This includes the sounds around us. Even the noise. Perhaps especially the noise.

Because what we’re trying to address is our own reactivity. Our misguided belief that calm, happiness, and peace can come into our life only if we create perfect conditions for them. If that were true, then would we ever experience calm, happiness, or peace?

The layers of sound practice also helps to slow our mind. I’m reminded of Wendell Berry’s words about how our minds are meant to work at the speed we walk and no faster than that.

“Our senses, after all, were developed to function at foot speeds; and the transition from foot travel to motor travel, in terms of evolutionary time, has been abrupt. The faster one goes, the more strain there is on the senses, the more they fail to take in, the more confusion they must tolerate or gloss over—and the longer it takes to bring the mind to a stop in the presence of anything.”
– Wendell Berry

For a few moments we can pause to be present with our moment, calmly aware of what is immediately around us. Then we’re more ready to move towards whatever we need to do to make our lives better.

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What Is Spatial Audio

“You’ve never heard music sound this good.” The hype felt familiar. A new tech product being described by a zealous tech fan. Not that Apple’s new headphones don’t sound good. But this kind of hype makes me wonder how many $500 headphones the tech bro has listened to.

Still, there’s something going on with this and other Apple products, something we’re going to hear a lot more about if the rumours about future products are true.

Spatial Audio

So, let’s take a moment to consider what Spatial Audio is, how it makes movies and music sound good, and where this tech might be taking the future of sound.

Understanding Spatial Audio

Back in early February 2020 I was traveling through Japan. Schools where already closed and precautions increasing. With the risk of a pandemic looming, I started to think about how it might affect me. One concern was my plan to rebuild my studio might be put on hold. And I was tired of not having a space where I could practise guitar.

So, while traveling in Japan, I picked up a pair of Boss Waza-Air headphones. You plug your guitar into a wireless transmitter and put on the headphones, and it sounds like you’re in a studio playing through a real guitar amplifier. Other products do similar things. But what makes Waza-Air special is the headphones have gyroscopes in them and use special audio processing, so as you move your head, your relationship to the amplified sound changes.

There are similar products that also sound good. But they always feel like you are listening to guitar music. The Waza-Air sounds like you’re in a room with an amp. You can put the amp behind you, as if you’re on stage, then when you turn around, the sound now faces you.

That’s spatial audio. It’s pretty magical.

The History Of Spatial Audio

Attempts to create a more three-dimensional sound go back over a hundred years. Binaural devices were developed initially to help industrialist Alfred DuPont hear more clearly in board meetings, and binaural was also used to detect the location of planes and submarines.

By the late 1930s, Bell Labs had developed a system which captured sound using a dummy human head that mimicked the way we hear. It could create recordings that tracked movement around 360 degrees of the headphone-wearing listener’s perspective. They also developed a multitrack audio system that could replicate multidimensional sound in a cinema setting.

The Audio Engineering Society has a technical group for Spatial Audio, and their archive of papers tracking modern developments in spatial audio goes back to 1999.

The Technology Of Spatial Audio

Two key technologies shape how spatial audio is implemented today: impulse responses and multi-channel audio.

Music is typically available in two channels (called stereo). You listen with two speakers, or the two sides of a pair of headphones. You hear sound in front of you, or to either side of you. Some home and car systems have 2.1 channels, which means an extra speaker for low frequencies (a subwoofer), in addition to the regular pair.

Cinema systems evolved to have more channels, which allowed film makers to create the feeling of sound moving around you as you watched a movie. These extra channels gave the film sound designers the ability to not just locate a sound to the left or right of a listener but also behind them, in front of them and even above them. First a centre channel was added, to make speech stand out more. Then this new 3.1 system evolved into 5.1, then 7.1, and now Dolby Atmos gives filmmakers up to 128 channels to work with. Today’s new cinemas typically have a 7.1.4 configuration, with seven speakers around the listener, four above, and one for low frequencies.

While multi-channel audio allows you to locate a sound in your listening space, impulse responses make it possible to change the sonic characteristics so it sounds like a different space entirely.

A speaker and a microphone can map a room and the way sound behaves within it. The echo of a cathedral or concert hall can be digitally reproduced. Or the dull-sound-absorbing qualities of a radio studio can be applied to a recording.

You can even sample the sound of a room you’re in. By inverting that sound and playing it back through a pair of headphones, you cancel the background noise.

The Appeal Of Spatial Audio

Think about sound in a video game. Your game’s character is walking outside on gravel. They open a door. Then walk into a room with hard concrete floors. The sound of the footsteps needs to change – not just because our steps sound different on gravel or concrete, but also because sounds outdoors behave very differently to sounds indoors.

The quality of audio is central to the experience of visual entertainment like games or movies.

Why do the Academy Awards for sound design and editing so often go to films about conflict and war? Getting the sound right for fast-moving objects, and people moving amongst them, is tricky.

Any sound out of place pulls you from the reality of the scene. Sounds need to move logically, even as the camera pans or as characters move around.

There’s a scene in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma where some of the characters are on the rooftop of their home in Mexico City, washing clothes. The camera does a full 360-degree pan to show other people in the neighborhood on their rooftops doing the same thing. As it does, the sound follows the camera movement. You feel as if you are in the scene, on that rooftop, looking at those people as they go about their chores.

In a cinema with a surround-sound setup, it’s a magical moment. But without the sound behaving in such a three-dimensional way, it wouldn’t be as powerful an experience.

The Challenge For Spatial Audio

Music is multichannel formats has never really taken off. There were attempts a few years back to sell CDs in surround sound years before there was quadraphonic audio, which promised a surround-like experience using four speakers (the hi-fi in my childhood home was a Pioneer Quadraphonic system).

This highlights a quirk in consumer behavior – people’s unwillingness to pay more for better sound. Consumers are prepared to upgrade their screens on a regular basis, 1080p to 4K, LCD to LED to OLED. But they’re far less likely to upgrade their sound. Few consumers are willing to spend the cost of a TV on a pair of headphones, even though the sound quality will be stunning.

Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us. The first CDs sounded worse than vinyl. Eventually, CD quality improved. Then MP3s came along and CDs sounded worse again.

This is the challenge for companies making audio products. Consumers seem unwilling to pay for significantly better sound. But good audio quality makes music listening so much richer and is integral to the experience of visual entertainment like games or movies.

The Possibility Of Augmented Audio

There’s been a lot of buzz around augmented reality. You hold up a smartphone camera (or look at the world through smart glasses) and digital features are superimposed over the image of the reality around you. Pokémon go was an example of this. A few years ago, an app was released that allowed you to find the train station exit you wanted just by holing up your phone and following the arrows – useful for making your way out of somewhere like Shinjuku station, with over 200 exits, 35 platforms, and more than 3.5 million passengers a day!

A similar thing can be done with audio.

Imagine yourself trying to listen to a conversation in a noisy environment. Maybe a loud restaurant, a busy conference, or even a crowded train station. What if your headphones could listen and separate out the sound of the people close to you and filter out the noise in the background?

This feels as urgent now as it did for DuPont in his boardroom nearly a hundred years ago.

The tech that makes spatial audio possible can also make this kind of augmented audio possible. And while $500 for a pair of headphones might seem expensive, it’s nothing compared to the cost of making a physical space sound good.

The Cost of Good Audio Environments

I spent nearly as much as the cost of a small car on sound treatment for my studio in Tokyo. This didn’t make the room “soundproof” as most people think of it. But it did make it sound very good. Quiet, when nothing was playing. Super detailed, when the music started. And that wasn’t a lot of money for sound treatment. It was the basics.

But this is the thing about good sound: you start with the room. If we built offices and classrooms properly, then we’d start with making them acoustically optimal for the most important sound in them – the human voice.

But it would make building more expensive.

Many of the spaces we live in, work in, and travel through are far from optimal. They are noisy. They make for poor spaces to listen to music in, watch films, or sometimes even have conversations.

So it’s not hard to see why high-end headphones and spatial audio could be popular.

I would guess that’s what Apple are betting on. Given how important good sound is. And how joyous and liberating music can be.

The post What Is Spatial Audio appeared first on Fernando Gros.

The Pandemic One Year Later

“Restaurant menus are gone forever.” My daughter was chatting to me about what might change permanently as a result of the pandemic. She explained how restaurants near her college had done away with menus as a way to increase the safety of diners and staff. Tables instead had a QR code, which you could scan to read a menu and, in some cases, order straight from your device.

Who’d have thought that restaurant menus would be a casualty of this pandemic? Or that QR codes would suddenly become indispensable?

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about what a post-pandemic world might look like. It’s time to reflect on how things have changed.

1.

As I write this, I still haven’t been vaccinated. And given the UK has taken the political decision to space out their first and second vaccine doses, I won’t be fully vaccinated until well into the summer. This tempers any prediction about how and when all this will end. Summer 2021 will be more like summer 2020 than summer 2019.

“East Asian states that had lived through the SARS and MERS epidemics reacted quickly when threatened by SARS-CoV-2, spurred by a cultural memory of what a fast-moving coronavirus can do.”
– Ed Yong

Here in Europe, the prospect of a third wave looms. In North America, the situation seems a little better. The risks are far lower in most of Asia, but there’s uncertainty when international travel will resume.

If this is a three-act play, then we’re still somewhere near the end of the second act.

2.

A recent survey found that 41% of employees are looking to change jobs as a result of the pandemic, and 46% are looking to change where they live.

Forcing employees to work from home has disrupted established ways of working. This was something we thought might happen. Many people have enjoyed the flexibility that comes with working from home, the ability to organise work around family, exercise, or time in nature. Increasingly, the ability to offer work from anywhere, where employees chose their location, will be desirable.

Not everyone has benefitted from this trend. For some people, the lack of separation between work and home, especially the responsibilities of parenting, has been exhausting. And not all employers have adjusted well to distributing work fairly or keeping all employees feeling engaged, supported and informed.

3.

We’ve been through a harsh and sudden sorting process. For some, life is better than ever. For others, the future feels bleak.

Some businesses have flourished. The online food suppliers I shop with have grown and evolved spectacularly in the last year, with better service and a larger range of quality products.

But when the high streets open again, many shops won’t be lifting their shutters. And while my football club is about to start selling season tickets once more, some fans will not be there to retake their seats.

4.

On the level of mental health, it’s been a trying time for all of us. This is natural, a result of dealing with uncertainty, stress, and grief. Unfortunately, mental health has often been weaponised, especially by those who want to deny the seriousness of the pandemic, or the need for lockdowns.

Thankfully, this has been met by a countervailing force calling for kindness.

Everyone I speak to has cut people from their professional and social world. We got a once-in-a-lifetime window into people’s souls. People couldn’t hide their harshness or selfishness, and empathy shone through from those folks who were compassionate and understanding.

5.

The angst of this moment has also made us increasingly impatient with other forms of injustice. In particular, we’re seeing a focus on injustice that manifests as violence, especially racial violence and violence against women. We’ve reached a point where people will, quite rightly, be satisfied only by a systemic change that is demonstrated in different legal and political outcomes.

Of course, there is resistance – often fuelled by populist politics – which argues these changes are not needed.

When we look at the demographics for that claim, that men don’t need to change their behaviour, that racism isn’t that big a problem, it does seem to overlap with those who also deny climate change and also don’t want to wear a mask.

What they have in common is an inability to see themselves as a vector of danger. It’s the social equivalent of the drunk driver who can’t see how their enjoyment of alcohol poses a threat to others.

“Broadly, we find that men and women who embrace masculine norms of toughness are equally likely to feel negative affective responses toward the idea of wearing masks, even after accounting for other predictors such as partisanship and ideology.”
– Carl L. Palmer and Rolfe D. Peterson

6.

At this point, the lazy move would be to flex against social media and its pernicious tendency to sort us into ideological silos. But I’m more optimistic about social media than in a long time.

In particular, I’m thinking of the rise of social audio, very much a product of the pandemic. Our isolation has spawned a powerful corrective to the algorithm-driven ills of the internet.

What we find in social audio is people longing for connection, the warmth of the human voice, and the way the human voice often reveals a person’s heart more than their words and images.

7.

Twitter cancelled its troll-in-chief. Late in the day, and perhaps after the damage had been done. But the effect was nonetheless palpable, like an overgrown garden that was suddenly and aggressively weeded.

Misinformation still abounds. But we’ve fine-tuned our approach to news, driven by the need to get accurate information about the pandemic. We’re demanding more accurate information in other parts of our lives as well.

“Clear distribution of accurate information is among the most important defenses against an epidemic’s spread.”
– Ed Yong

And this includes accurate representations of people’s lived experiences. History is course-correcting again towards authenticity, earnestness, and kindness, again.

8.

It’s been a year without so many things, including colds, sore throats and upset stomachs. As we began to understand how the diseased moved in different spaces, we started to wonder about the health of living and working with poor air circulation. Now every space has a question mark hanging over it.

We’ll return to some spaces more quickly than others. Some may be redesigned b the time we return. We’ve already learnt to appreciate parks again. We’ve had a year without pubs, and that might make us reconsider the role of alcohol in our social life. We’ve learnt to cook for ourselves like maybe never before, and the delivery of dining experiences to our home is more satisfying than takeaways ever were.

9.

We’ve deepened our relationships while also pruning our social world. Many people rejoice at the demise of networking events and office drinks and the freedom to use that time on relationships that matter more.

And while facing the morning commute after a holiday was a thing to joke about, facing a commute after a year of working from home might be the most unfunny of shocks.

There’s a lot we’ll have to adapt to. It might feel uncertain and scary at times. And we’ll be armed with a deep experience that tells us it doesn’t have to be the way it was. We can live and work differently, maybe even radically differently. Within this truth, there is great freedom.

10.

The worst thing we can do is go back to normal. We’ll get normality rammed down our throat, especially by marketers wanting to sell us products from companies that didn’t (or couldn’t) adapt to changing consumer preferences. But normality isn’t something we should strive for.

Our world was broken, unjust, unsafe, and headed for climatic catastrophe. The pandemic lifted the veil on all of this, gave us time to pause and consider, and narrowed the world so that we had to talk to our nearest and dearest about what mattered the most.

We must remember the successes and the failures, and make time to grieve and remember the suffering. Our cities are full of moments to fallen soldiers and heroes of past wars. But, more civilians died here in the UK during this pandemic than in all of World War 2. They deserve a monument. And, we should name buildings and streets after the scientists who created our vaccines.

What we need right now is optimism and openness grounded in compassion and understanding. Many of us have spent the past year rethinking our lives – now it’s time to redesign the way we live.

The post The Pandemic One Year Later appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Time-Tracking With Timeular

February was a rare perfect month: four weeks, with every week starting on a Monday. Apparently, this happens only once every 200 years.

So, in addition to tracking master habits, I decided to try another experiment: time tracking. I’ve done this before. With a paper and pen. But habits are best tracked automatically. So I bought a Timeular time-tracking device and used it to track my working day for five days a week, across the four weeks of February.

Using Timeular

Timeular is an eight-sided device that looks like a giant gaming cube. It’s as big as an orange. Timeular connects to your iPhone, iPad or computer via Bluetooth. You can programme it so that whatever side faces up sets a timer to track your activity. It’s pretty easy to do. As you go through the day, turning the Timeular from one side to another stops and starts the timers. Then you can open up the app and look at your day, with a breakdown of each activity and where your time went.

When the tracker changes to a new activity, Timeular notifications appear on your iPhone or Apple Watch. Opening the app lets you see the current timer and how long it’s been running. You can even add a tag or mention to the timer to identify the activity further.

Timeular works well with very few glitches. When changing activities, it’s best to pick up the device and place it down rather than trying to roll it from one side to another. One time I left the timer running all night; then, when I opened the app and tried to delete the last entry (no, I hadn’t spent 16 hours writing in an all-night marathon), I lost three days’ worth of data. Apart from those glitches, it has worked flawlessly.

Choosing Your Activities

The purpose of time-tracking is to see how you spend your time. You might need to bill clients accurately, for example. For me, the exercise was about understanding where my time went. And why I felt like I was wasting some of my days.

I was curious how much of my day really went into activities like cooking and getting stuff delivered to home. These were the big changes as a result of the pandemic and working from home.

I was also interested in unscheduled time, the black hole of doing non-work stuff during the day, like doom-scrolling social media or daydreaming with guitar catalogues.

The first category I chose was unintentional. I’d suggest you start with that too. Wasted time – it’s the thing most of us want to control.

The other seven will depend on how you spend your days. For me, they were writing, coffee breaks and eating, cooking and household chores, digital communication (email and posting to the blog), mail (including ordering groceries, receiving deliveries, breaking down boxes for recycling), exercise and walking, and other creative work (like music, calligraphy, etc).

Analysing The Data

Timeular gives you two main ways to look at your data. Calendar opens a day to a screen view of all the blocks of time throughout your day. Insights lets you choose a selection of days and then see totals for each activity, along with trends like number of time entries and how they break down by length.

What I noticed was I was certainly spending a lot less time in the mornings writing than I wanted to. Most days didn’t look like the blocks I had planned. And I was writing in the late afternoon to make up for that, which explains why I often felt tired and rushed as the day ended.

Surprisingly, I wasn’t spending anywhere near as much time on deliveries each day as I thought. This just proves that perception isn’t always reality. The resentment I had towards Covidtime delivery routines was out of proportion to the inconvenience they caused to my schedule!

Timeular And Time Intentionality

Being more intentional about my mornings, together with being kinder to myself about the doorbell ringing with another delivery, made a big difference to my state of mind.

These kinds of marginal improvements can be powerful over time. Timeular is like having a time-tracking coach working with you, clipboard and stopwatch in hand, observing and making you aware of areas where you can improve.

The critical thing is to feed Timeular honest data. As with anything, don’t lie. If you’re trying to write but really sitting on the sofa sipping coffee, then turn Timeular over to the coffee break activity. If you’re scrolling through Instagram, then admit that you’re in unintentional territory.

Using Timeular In the Future

Timeular feels easy to use right now because I’m not travelling. I haven’t even been to a cafe in nearly a year. If you work at the same desk, or at a limited number of locations in the same building, then Timeular is relatively convenient to use.

I’m just not sure how well it would work in regular time if Timeular became another somewhat bulky thing I had to carry with me.

Potential inconvenience aside, I love having this data. Time tracking is best when it’s as easy and frictionless as possible. And using Timeular is pretty frictionless. I’ve learnt things about my habits and routines this month and been able to make important changes to how my days are structured.

At least for now, Timeular feels like a good investment. Only time will tell how I feel about Timeular once we can all travel again.

The post Time-Tracking With Timeular appeared first on Fernando Gros.

The Problem With Social Audio

I’ve been experimenting with Clubhouse for a month now. I’ve also been given access to the Twitter Spaces beta. Meanwhile, Instagram has added a new feature – live rooms – which allows up to four users to talk together. The Social Audio trend of live conversation is gaining momentum.

All of these platforms are cool. There are reasons to be excited about them. I love all the innovation. But there’s a problem as well. Time. More specifically, time as a limited resource.

Social Audio Versus The Temporal Wall

Most articles on this blog are about a thousand words. I’m asking you for 3–4 minutes. But if I read those words to you, it would take more than 10 minutes. And if I tried to cover off in an interview or conversation all the ideas that have been carefully condensed into a tightly edited article, then it would take half an hour, at least.

The wonderful thing about Social Audio is the intimacy and warmth of the human voice. But the problem with Social Audio is how inefficient the human voice is for relaying information.

Of course, we don’t always maximise efficiency when consuming entertainment or ideas. We read books instead of watching films. We listen to interviews instead of reading transcriptions.

But Social Audio takes something that takes seconds and minutes – reading a tweet, looking at an image, following a topic – and expands it into a thing that can consume hours.

Invest Your Time Wisely

I’ve always advocated for investing time in social media wisely. It’s a good way to meet interesting people and attract attention to your work. But when I check in on people about their social media habits, I’m alarmed to learn how much time they invest in these platforms.

If you’re reading this blog for the first or the hundredth time, please, let me be clear: I don’t want you to spend hours every day on social media.

In fact, I don’t want you to be on social media every day, either. The time you spend on social media, for any of the ideas I suggest, should be measured in seconds and minutes per day, never hours. And the breaks you take should last for days and even weeks.

For example, I compose all my tweets and Instagram captions in Bear. Typically, when I log into Twitter, I’m only looking at replies to my tweets, or tweets from a small, private list of people. I seldom look at my main feed or trending items. I open Instagram only if I have something to share, and then I post and spend maybe a minute or two looking at people’s images.

And, typically, I take a break during advent and Christmas, sometimes going on an extended break or into a “post-only” mode. That I didn’t do that in 2020 probably explains in part why I was feeling so burnt out recently.

The most productive people I know have pretty clear rules around how they use email. We should have similar rules around using social media. And if our rules feel too cumbersome, then it might be time to quit some platforms or stop using social media altogether.

The Notifications Trap

Clubhouse turns on notifications by default on your device. It tries to ping you every time someone you follow opens a room, joins a room, or is speaking. Twitter Spaces requires you to have the Twitter app installed. Spaces appear at the top of the main window (in the Fleets section).

It’s understandable that both apps use attention-grabbing strangles to get you participating in audio chats. But it’s something we have to manage, and there aren’t easy solutions.

Moreover, Twitter hasn’t yet given us details of how they will manage the notifications we do need – about the presence of unsafe accounts. At present, there’s no way of knowing whether a room you join or speak in has people you’ve blocked or muted.

Twitter is building this beta in public, with staff joining spaces and hearing feedback. I feel there will be solutions for this. But we don’t have them yet (I’m going to say more on this in my next Amplifier newsletter).

Of course, Social Audio is new. But given how many people struggle already with social media, from limiting the time they spend on it to coping with the effects of toxic behaviour, this new dimension needs us to be willing to impose some personal boundaries.

The Social Audio Vortex

What does this all mean for Social Audio? It could be the introduction to your next best friend or business partner. Or it could derail you mindset and productivity. It feels like the paradox of social media amplified.

The best Social Audio experiences are like attending a conference or a book launch or public interview. But a lot are nowhere near as interesting or insightful. Which, of course, makes sense if you’re listening to live and unedited content.

And many default to an hour and often go longer, which is a big investment of time.

Maybe you can trade time from somewhere else. Clubhouse instead of radio. Twitter Spaces instead of podcasts. That could work. Challenging the default and creating shorter format rooms and spaces could also help.

Where’s The Fun In That?

It’s no coincidence that Social Audio grew in popularity during this pandemic. I’ve heard over and over again on these platforms that people welcomed hearing human voices, away from the pressure of Zoom and online meetings.

Social Audio is a reaction to isolation and loneliness.

For me, it’s been the first opportunity in over a year to casually discuss art, film, music, or travel with anyone outside my immediate family and closest friends, replicating a little of the cafe or lounge room experience.

We think of time differently when it comes to hanging out with friends compared to doing email. This can blur our thinking about something like Social Audio or any kind of social media. Especially now, when real-world, in-person interactions are rare or simply unavailable.

During my discovery phase, exploring Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces, I invested around 10 hours a week trying to understand Social Audio.

That was fun.

It gave me a good insight into how people use the platforms.

But it’s totally unsustainable.

Now, I’m down to about 3 hours per week. It’s a nice change from playing with the Nintendo switch, watching so much TV, listening to so many podcasts, and the limited suite of entertainments I’ve enjoyed in the past year.

But, once Covidtime ends, when cinemas, gigs, galleries, restaurants, and travel – sweet, sweet travel – all start asking for time in my schedule, I won’t be sacrificing any of them to open a room or join a space.

This means the clock is ticking for Social Audio to prove it has something to offer beyond being a cure for loneliness.

The post The Problem With Social Audio appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Music Writers’ Exercise

“They just don’t make music like they used to.” Is there a more tiring refrain?

Sure, music genres change and evolve. And, the sound of music is different from decade to another, driven as much by changes in technology as any shift in fashion.

But, every year, there is so much good new music released. Pick a genre, pick a style, hell even pick a favourite era and you can find new tunes to enjoy.

Doing The Music Writer’s Exercise

This year I decided to give the Music Writers’ Exercise (#MWE) a go. It’s a month long challenge that ran during February. Every day listen to an album you haven’t heard before and write a one tweet review. It’s a great way to immerse yourself in new music and as the name implies it’s a demanding writing exercise as well.

Writing tweet feels easy. It’s only 280 characters maximum.

Hitting all the beats required in a review, in such a short space, which of course has to include the time the album and the name of the band or artist, is far from easy.

A good music review tells introduces the genre and style of the music. And also says something about what makes it distinct in that genre. The review needs to tell you something about the choices the artist has made. The kind of lyrics. The instruments played. The way they were arranged. And the review needs to give you a sense of what the music might be similar to and why you should be enthusiastic to listen to it.

All of that in only 280 characters. The exercise is quite the challenge.

Focussing On New Music

To choose the albums I looked at Jazz and Soul playlists on Apple Music as well as best album of 2020 lists from music publications and news websites. I made a page on Notion to keep track of the selections and limited them to albums available on Apple Music (simply to make life a little easier for myself.

Here are the 28 albums I reviewed during the month together with links to Apple Music if you want to take a listen for yourself.

Run Home Slow by The Teskey Brothers

Music | Spotify

Buoyant, rootsy rock that ventures towards retro soul territory. Skip the arid moments of faux Gospel & linger on the Phish meets Leon Bridges vibe. The Teskey Brothers hail from Melbourne but this album is made for a US road trip.

Muse by Alycia Bella

Music | Spotify

Longing and unrequited love floats through the air carried by sublime vocals and minimal beats in this debut album. A delicate collection of songs that feels made for summer nights pondering what you want from life.

Something To Say by Cory Henry

Music | Spotify

This album is every bit as funky and well-crafted as you would expect from Henry. But, the hopeful and socially aware lyrics are the real surprise. Think Innervisons-era Wonder, Sign o’ the Times Prince, or even Gaye’s What’s Going On.

Letter To You by Bruce Springsteen

Music | Spotify

There’s genius in making the familiar seem fresh through close inspection. Grief and regret manage to reveal warmth and insight in these songs. Is hopeful nostalgia a thing? If it is then this album is its soundtrack.

The Call Within by Tigran Hamasyan

Music | Spotify

Evocative and constantly evolving jazz for listeners who crave intricate rhythms & surprising twists. Hamasyan successfully blends jazz & rock with folk motifs. If you’ve ever wondered what piano-Djent sounds like this is for you.

Good Days by Chicago Underground Quartet

Music | Spotify

Beguiling atmospheres and danceable grooves aren’t what we expect from free jazz. But they’re here to enjoy. Dense without feeling cluttered, rich without losing a sense of either rhythm of harmony, and deeply satisfying.

Transcendent by AANMI with Davóne Tines

Music | Spotify

Features a collective of composers yet still retains a rich shared aesthetic. This is classical chamber music thats far too intimate, urgent and raw to be assigned to background duties. It will demand your full attention.

An Atlas Of Time by Wang Lu

Music | Spotify

Blending traditions in classical music can be a recipe for cliche but Lu’s compositions here resist that. Organic yet challenging, this album explores place, history, and the role of sound in forging memory of lived experience.

Breathe by Reena Esmail

Music | Spotify
These piano chamber compositions draw from Indian folk music & feature stellar playing violist Vijay Gupta. Lush & cinematic, these beautifully ethereal pieces will appeal to jazz & world music fans as much as lovers of modern classical music.

Soul Awakening by Brandee Younger

Music | Spotify

These tracks are full of the harmonic and tonal complexity of the harp, which is front and centre here, supported by soul-tinged grooves & cameos by various artists including Ravi Coltrane. Warm, enchanting late night music.

Fly Moon Die Soon by Takuya Kuroda

Music | Spotify

Blending elements of Afrobeat, post-Bop, and the funkier side of Hip-Hop this album skilfully creatives a forward-thinking cosmic jazz soundtrack for lovers of complex rhythms, well-structured arrangements, and great horn riffs.

Untitled (Rise) by Sault

Music | Spotify

Sault are a mysterious yet prodigious group – 4 excellent releases in less than 2 years. This album presents as electrónica with hits of disco & 80s pop but it has the soul of socially restless punk. Protest music you can dance to.

All Rise by Gregory Porter

Music | Spotify

The most golden male voice in Jazz is back with a collection of ambitious originals. Gregory’s voice soars over the orchestration. Made for what was meant to be a year of touring big venues around the world this is an instant classic.

Home Truths by Catherine Britt

Music | Spotify

Country music’s at it’s best telling raw stories and this album is full of them. Refreshingly these are full of Australian references – imagine if The Chicks had hailed from down under. Made for a road trip though the gum trees.

The Striped Album by Cory Wong

Music | Spotify

Full of great beats, sharp horn lines, Wong’s famous precise and sinewy guitar parts and supported by some great vocal and solo cameos this album is treat for fans of 80s funk and the Minneapolis sound.

APKÁ! by Céu

Music | Spotify

Deeply layered, emotive, late night music, tinged with rich electronic timbres and of course Céu‘s gravity-defying voice. The music here is cosmic, at times almost pyschadelic, but yet familiar without falling into nostalgia.

Fake It Flowers by beabadoobee

Music | Spotify

Fans of mid 90s post-grunge alt-rock will find a lot to love on this album full of guitar-driven hooks. Several songs could’ve featured on coming of age movies from that era. Put on your oversize flannel, turn up the volume, and enjoy.

Who Are The Girls? by Nova Twins

Music | Spotify
Muscular and mesmerising this album is a tour de force of distorted and heavily effected guitar and bass sounds paired with vocals that cover all the ground from raw punk to urban funk. A manifesto for the future of rock.

Omega by Immanuel Wilkins

Music | Spotify

Widely hailed as one of the best jazz albums of 2020 this urgent collection of tunes lives up to the hype. Ferocious and focused playing embodies all the tragedy and yearning for hope we felt in that most chaotic year. A masterpiece.

Right Now by Willie Jones

Music | Spotify

Ever wondered what Country music would sound like if it had more soul and R&B influences? Then this album is for you. Familiar country tropes mix with relaxed electronic beats & a vocal swagger that’s instantly engaging. Familiar yet fresh.

Out of Dust by Laila Biali

Music | Spotify

Sonically ambitious, richly layered, and exquisitely produced. This album captures the extraordinary breadth of Biali’s talent as a singer, songwriter, and musician. Elegant pop-tinged jazz that rewards careful listening.

Little Big II Dreams Of A Mechanical Man by Aaron Parks

Music | Spotify

Simple motifs evolve in ever-shifting, cinematic ways. Nothing feels rushed or cluttered even as the rhythms become more complex. Fans of exploratory guitar & every flavour of keyboard will find much to enjoy.

Source by Nubya Garcia

Music | Spotify

A brilliant, almost encyclopaedic musical journey. Garcia’s playing is assured and full of emotion, equally at home soloing over Caribbean, Latin, or straight ahead modern jazz grooves. Constantly surprising and always delightful.

Omoiyari by Kishi Bashi

Music | Spotify

Uplifting and delicate arrangements contrast with morally reflective lyrics on this elegantly beautiful album. Proof that there’s more ways to respond to injustice than simply anger and outrage. A pop-folk soundtrack for social change.

Daylight Savings by Surprise Chef

Music | Spotify

Fat keyboard sounds and cleanly picked guitar lines fill this album of instrumental pop-soul. Feels like the lost soundtrack to a 70s arthouse road movie. Never feeling rushed or busy this is a journey fans of Khruangbin might enjoy.

PYJÆN by PYJÆN

Music | Spotify

Horn led high energy acid-jazz fills this 7 track debut from this London quintet. With rhythms that range from 70s style jazz-funk, to Afro-beat and heavily effected guitars the vibe is will appeal to fans of Scofield’s Uberjam efforts.

On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment by Ambrose Akinmusire

Music | Spotify

The perfect expression of the way this moment is asking us all to consider our identity and the injustices we see. A profound jazz statement from an artist who is fully embodying their artistry.

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