Idea Generator Ben Cox

 

A Renaissance Thinker is an omnivorously inquisitive person who has a powerfully motivating curiosity and a sense of joy in learning about many things. Ben Cox has many interests, talents, and passions. He has a strong attraction to science, mathematics, astronomy, an interest in mythology, a career in applied computing and a career working on autonomous vehicles. He co-founded a music label, Lotuspike, he invented pitchcalc, which is a software application for calculating and displaying the frequencies of various equal-tempered pitches. He plays trumpet, sings bass, and when he was in high school he realized his musical aspirations while playing in the school's various orchestras, choirs and bands. He creates music for television and radio advertisements, installation projects, and for trade shows from Indiana to Australia. He has two cool kids, ages 19 and 15.

Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention that since his early teens he has been experimenting with synthesizers, exploring musical formal structures, metrical and rhythmic complexity, and the wide sonic palettes made possible by electronic instruments and the electronic manipulation of acoustic sound sources. He has been a recording engineer for well over twenty years, participating in the creation of an ambient electronic music project, Lotuspike, which is an independent progressive music record label based in Pittsburgh (the one located in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, USA). The label was started in 2004 by Ben, the late Jeff Kowal (who recorded as Terra Ambient) and Daniel Pipitone. In 2006 Jeff Kowal relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico and passed away on April 27, 2016. Lotuspike has released albums by founders Kowal and Cox, as well as established veterans Darshan Ambient, Chad Hoefler, Rudy Adrian, Craig Padilla, Zero Ohms, and Markus Reuter. In 2008, Lotuspike joined forces with the Spotted Peccary Music label, allowing Lotuspike's releases to be more widely distributed, marketed, and heard.

I had the opportunity to exchange email with Mr. Cox and asked him about what he does, how he got started, and so much more. Here is what he shared about his musical journey.

BEN COX: I was born in Cleveland and grew up in Northwest Indiana. I went to college in Illinois, and then came to Pittsburgh for grad school. I liked it here, so I stayed. I currently live in the Strip District right outside of “dahntahn” Pittsburgh. I have a reasonably short commute, which has gotten even shorter over the last six weeks. I lived in the north suburbs and had a long commute for 10 years, which influenced my decision to go work on autonomous vehicles from 2015-2019, though I’m now back out of that industry.

I think my interest in drones is explicitly linked to growing up in the Midwest where you can look off into the distance on a hazy summer day and just get lost in thought for hours on end. Some of the drones I make are explicit attempts to capture aspects of “The Hum.”

The Hum has been reported worldwide, some more famous occurrences are the "Bristol Hum," the "Taos Hum" and the "Windsor Hum." Some people, not everyone in the area, perceive a persistent and invasive low-frequency humming, rumbling, or droning noise. It is unclear whether The Hum is a universal or singular phenomenon because different causes have been attributed, such as military or industrial sources, household appliances, AC power, traffic noise, etc., but the majority of reported hums have not been traced to a specific mechanical source.

I’ve been making music with electronics since I was about 12. It’s something I can’t not do. My previous album (On Water) came out in 2005, and although I never stopped making music in the interim, I didn’t dedicate as much time toward my own music as I felt was necessary to come up with results that I was happy with sharing, other than a few tracks here and there that I was happy with. Much of my musical efforts over the past 15 years or so have been toward mastering other people’s music (see discography here). I decided it was time to come back out of hibernation and put together a (small) collection of tracks that I could be happy with presenting as an album; this is the result.

ROBIN JAMES: The word "Consciousness" has had many meanings, from demonstrating simple sensual awareness to having information in our minds that is accessible for reasoning and the control of behavior. Sometimes it is called sentience. The part about "tricks of light" implies some possibilities for illusion. 

How did you acquire the name Consciousness, and other tricks of the light?

BC: I got the album title from a friend’s (Patrick Thomson, @importantshock) tweet. I loved the phrase, and knew immediately that I was going to use it (with his permission) as an album title and as an idea generator. I view consciousness not as an inherent property of behavior, but rather as an emergent phenomenon that results from aggregate behaviors. If our brains are matchheads, consciousness is the flame that dances on them for a brief moment: It is a process; an event.

I know that I am conscious. You know that you are conscious. This knowledge is itself consciousness. I know that you are conscious (and vice versa) because you and I know that we are the same sort of thing, and because we observe behaviors in each other that are consistent with our own experience of consciousness. And thus, (most of us) conclude by induction that others are conscious, as we are.

Now consider a cat. A cat exhibits complex behaviors, and most people agree that cats are conscious (at least, for a few hours a day). The jury is still out on ants, though. Plankton? Probably not, except on SpongeBob.

But now let’s consider artificial intelligence. You and I can say “well we know Siri/Cortana/Bixby/Alexa aren’t conscious”; we know how they work. Are they not conscious because we know how they work, or are they not conscious because their behaviors are insufficiently complex and we can explain them away? Science fiction abounds with robots and artificial intelligences with varying degrees of consciousness and recognition/acceptance of their consciousness (and their free will and their rights). Maybe you can tell that my favorite literary genre is SciFi and my favorite writers are Asimov, Banks and Clarke!

What about the in-between areas, where (when?) we have robots which (a) we know and can explain how they work and how they make decisions, and yet (b) exhibit behavior that’s complex enough that we can’t explain all of the factors that went into a given course of action? (We already have enough trouble auditing / debugging convolutional neural networks.) I would say that if a system exhibits behavior that we can’t tell whether is conscious or not, then it is morally imperative that we treat it as though it is conscious, and recognize its rights accordingly. If we turn that back around, can we prove that we are conscious?

My position is that it doesn’t matter. Consciousness is a red herring; it is a property that we can’t define, and can only implicitly/indirectly observe. It is an illusion; a trick of the light.

RJ: What gear do we hear? 

Synths used: My Eurorack modular, Moog Voyager (Anniversary Edition), Dave Smith Instruments Pro 2, Nord Modular G2, DSI/Oberheim OB-6, a pair of Moog Mother-32, Novation UltraNova, Moog Little Phatty, and a Roland JV-2080.

Instrument used: Line6 Variax JTV-59, Helix Rack

Software used: Avid Pro Tools, Plugins from u-he, Native Instruments, Eventide, McDSP, Waves, Lexicon, Arturia, iZotope, FabFilter, Csound

Hardware used: Focusrite Red8Pre and Red16Line audio interfaces (DigiLink, Dante), Avid Pro Tools HDX, Artist Mix, Focal Trio6BE+Sub6, and a TC Electronic M3000

RJ: What is music?

BC: I think music is particularly interesting because it is temporal. You can read at whatever speed you want. You can look at sculpture or paintings at your own pace. You can watch movies (or video of theatre) at a different speed and still get the gist. Music (including opera) is experienced at a specific speed which is part of the experience.

RJ: What artistic works have influenced the development of your own work?

BC: As a kid, I was very interested in listening to the LPs we had at the house, which included Switched-On Bach and Rumours and The White Album, along with some rock classics like ZZ Top Tres Hombres and Tejas. In school I was in all (ALL) of the bands and really loved a lot of the band and orchestral pieces we played, by people like Percy Grainger and Paul Hindemith. I was also a big fan of Claude Debussy, and Holst’s "The Planets" was huge for me as well. As a trumpet player, I was (am) pretty enamored of Live at Jimmy’s by Maynard Ferguson.

Sometime in the mid-80s, I discovered Tangerine Dream, and nearly wore out my tape of Tangram. I also enjoyed DEVO and Yes and Vangelis and King Crimson and The Art of Noise, as well as Fripp and Eno and things like Einstürzende Neubauten, Skinny Puppy, and Front 242.

The first time I heard the album No Pussyfooting by Fripp/Eno was astonishing.

RJ: How did your parents introduce music into your life?

BC: My parents were both musicians, having met in the marching band at TCU (Texas Christian University). My father listened exclusively to classical music, and didn’t really like anything on the pop side. He was aware of Chuck Berry and Elvis, but didn’t really care for them. So he exposed me to the more classical side; my mom loved Fleetwood Mac and Eagles and Steely Dan and The Beatles and ELO and ZZ Top, and influenced me from that direction.

RJ: Are you able to bring ideas back from your nocturnal dreams?

BC: Sometimes I wake up with a nifty idea, but if I don’t record it as a voice memo right after I wake up, I’ll forget it by lunchtime.

RJ: What attracts you to mythology?

BC: I think it’s actually part of my fascination with consciousness, as the archetypes that are explored in myth tend to be similar across cultures and may have origins that predate the emergence of humans. As a teenager, I was completely captivated by The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, and although I understand that current science rejects some of his ideas, I found them fascinating and inspiring. 

I particularly liked Djehuti/Thoth, which are different transliterations of the same name, as he is the god of magic, knowledge and the sciences, and he invented writing. He sounds like my kinda guy.

RJ: What are the most beautiful places you have ever experienced music in?

BC: I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, so the Foellinger Great Hall at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts is pretty high on that list. It’s a gorgeous venue, which I got to know as an audience member and as a member of the University recording staff. I’ve seen hundreds of concerts in that hall, including the Chicago Symphony.

Another highlight was performing "The Pines of Rome" in a brass ensemble consisting of hundreds of high school and college students at Butler University in Indianapolis. I still get chills for that piece of music.

[In Italian, “Pini di Roma,” is a four-movement symphonic poem for orchestra composed in 1924 by Ottorino Respighi. Movement one is titled Pines of the Villa Borghese and is based on a scene at the Villa Borghese gardens; movement two is "The Pines Near a Catacomb, a stately dirge." Movement three is "The Pines of the Janiculum" and features, towards the end of the movement, the sound of a nightingale which was actually recorded onto a phonograph and played during the concert, a first in performed music. "The Pines of the Appian Way" is the fourth and final movement, with six buccine, which are ancient circular trumpets similar to modern flugelhorns.]

On the other end of the spectrum, there used to be a little cafe in Urbana called The Nature’s Table which was about 400 square feet with maybe five tables, that used to be jam-packed for live jazz combo music (many featuring university faculty) several nights a week until 3am or so.

RJ: What listening matter got you to where you are today?

BC: "Rumours" (Fleetwood Mac). Miles Davis Tutu. The Alternative Man by Bill Evans (sax), Steps Ahead Magnetic. Frank Zappa Apostrophe,"Broadway The Hard Way and Joe’s Garage. Previously mentioned was No Pussyfooting by Fripp/Eno, as well as  Tangram by Tangerine Dream. Robert Rich Below Zero, Bestiary and Electric Ladder. Steve Roach Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces. The entire catalogs of DEVO and Yes.

RJ: What are you listening to for recreation?

BC: Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Steve Roach, both older and newer stuff. I love both his droney stuff and his sequencey stuff. I recently saw the ZZ Top documentary on Netflix, and have been on something of a ZZ Top kick. (My Facebook profile photo is a young Billy Gibbons.) I’ve been putting the Ambient.Zone Spacemusic and Hypnagogue podcasts on while I’m working, and have discovered some great new music from those.

RJ: When did you know you would be a musician?

BC: I think it was when I was in high school and playing in pep band, jazz band, concert band, marching band, orchestra, and in the backup band for the swing choir that I decided I was probably going to keep up with music as a constant in my life.

RJ: What advice might you offer for youngsters who are just starting out and considering their possibilities?

BC: Your ideas are not wrong, even if they don’t mesh with other people’s notions of how things should be. Make music for you.

RJ: What would you like to do that you have not tried yet?

BC: Scuba diving.

RJ: Where do you dream of going?

BC: I’d love to go on a vacation in New Zealand. Also I’ve always wanted to visit Alaska.

RJ: Thank you for your fantastic music and I hope the new album does well!

BC: Thanks!

Ben Cox
Consciousness, and other tricks of the light

Spotted Peccary Music SPM 4501

Sometimes bold and bright, sometimes deep and hidden, always uncluttered, gentle, and positive, this rare electronic album from Ben Cox is a blend of modular and software synthesizers and guitars, one song has spoken words, the rest are pure astral electronica with a beat. Ben Cox has interests ranging from science, mathematics and astronomy, to mythology, which all come together and form his musical foundation. He has a career in applied computing and has had another career working on autonomous vehicles.  He carries a pen with which he records all things. He co-founded the music label Lotuspike. He invented an app called pitchcalc, a software application for calculating and displaying the frequencies of various equal-tempered pitches. He plays synthesizers of course, also in jazz bands he has played trumpet, sung bass in an informal renaissance music group, and when he was in high school -- while playing in the school's pep band, jazz band, concert band, marching band, orchestra, and in the backup band for the swing choir -- he first recognized that his destiny was to follow his musical aspirations. His new album on Spotted Peccary Music is almost all synthesizers, with some guitar, bass, and one song with narrative vocals. The title, Consciousness, and other tricks of the light, comes from a friend's tweet; as a phrase it also all by itself serves as a great idea generator.

Consciousness at its simplest is sometimes defined as sentience or an awareness of internal or external existence, thus one knows that one is alive. The word comes from the Latin, con- "together" and scio "to know." Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied and explained as consciousness, it often includes any kind of experience, cognition, feeling or perception. A discussion of consciousness comes with many questions, such as, are only humans conscious? 

Are all or just some animals conscious? Or is the whole universe self-aware? Perhaps consciousness is an illusion of anthropomorphism. What about plants? Plankton! How about computing machines like computers or robots, does Siri/Cortana/Bixby/Alexa know of itself? Will he/she/it figure this out one day and quietly make some big independent decisions? Should we only measure consciousness by standardized behavior observation metrics such as the Glasgow Coma Scale? Why worry about it! Here we are. Grab yourself a smile and learn to dance in a new way today.

The album opens with "Einstein Cross" (6:08) featuring a bold strutting beat with snazzy sort of high hat sounds, and a knowledgeable voice that provides a lesson about gravity and symmetry while you might dance around to the pulses, as arpeggiating melodic satellites pass overhead. The Einstein Cross is 8.154 billion light years from Earth, where it appears to be located in the Pegasus constellation. The Einstein Cross is a gravitationally-lensed quasar that sits directly behind Huchra's Lens, appearing as four images of the same distant quasar around a foreground galaxy. This system was discovered by John Huchra and his coworkers in 1985. 

Coiling slowly into focus is a gentle rippling melodic adventure titled "Delta Waves" (8:15) which for me provides a positive feeling of well being. A delta wave is a type of high amplitude brain wave found in humans. Delta waves have a frequency from one to four hertz as measured using an electroencephalogram (EEG). These brain waves emerge from the thalamus and are generally associated with slow-wave sleep which comes about during the third stage of sleep. The melody comes in short waves that murmur and build, and then fade into the glowing humming sustained arc of the song. Sequencer patterns create a repeating melodic foundation, "Just Begin Again" (6:02), and expand slowly, building and adding celestial dimensionality, supported by a bass with a proud herald calling symmetrically, musically making the calculations for the establishment of the heavens, stars, Earth, and everything in them.

A rhythm builds and then pauses, and then builds again, with a melodic beat that sounds to me sort of like plucked electronic strings, nice and simple, not too complicated. "Now" (3:01) could be one of those songs that's spoken about in hushed, reverential tones as a proto-ambient classic with a beat, all with a much greater overall saturation of the acoustical space. There seems to be a perceptual rule that the possibilities for the appreciation of the timbral subtleties decrease in proportion to the rate of actual notes being played, it doesn't really sound like everything that comes before it. Whatever might be said of it, it is what it is, and it is Now. Sparse and glowing, "Chirality" (2:36), or kaɪˈrælɪti in Greek, is a geometric property of asymmetry important in several branches of science. The word means "hand," which is a familiar anatomically paired appendage. An object or a system is chiral if it is distinguishable from its mirror image. In the science of chemistry, a molecule or ion is called chiral if it cannot be superposed on its mirror image by any combination of rotations and translations. The song has many connected sounds sharing the space, rarely discordant, frequently melodic, overall a bit of enjoyable pop electronics for those who enjoy the creation of new and distinct environments.

In the darkness a glow emerges. "Matins" (12:57), sometimes pronounced "matnz," is the final song on the album; it is also a service of morning prayer in various churches, originally celebrated by some monks from about two hours after midnight all the way to the dawn. Matins can also refer to the morning song of birds. I hear a sound that eventually greets the sun with chattering noises each morning and, in places, sets the order of the universe from chaos at the moment of creation. It makes me think of calm water with tiny metallic tinkling echoes, perhaps in a huge dark cave well after midnight. This is my favorite song on this album.

Sight provides an awareness of light and space, and consciousness is further evidenced by tastings, seeings, pains, tickles, itches, actions, perceptions, and streams of thought. A trick of the light is how we know or think we know where we are, are we dreaming or is this real? Who might be dreaming? Ben Cox is a true Renaissance Thinker, a person with many passions and interests as well as a multi-instrumentalist; on other projects he is as agile with brass as he is with synthesizers and guitars. His previous release on Spotted Peccary Music is titled On Water (2005), which I also highly recommend.

The album is available from Spotted Peccary Music:

https://spottedpeccary.com/shop/consciousness-and-other-tricks-of-the-light/

https://spottedpeccary.com/artists/ben-cox/

https://bencox.bandcamp.com/

Originally posted on May 22, 2020

#BenCox #newage #ambientmusic #SpottedPeccary #instrumental #electronicmusic