When making a board game, how do you turn meaningless objects into things that inspire laughter, cooperation, backstabbing, or even table flips? That's the subject of my talk at last night's International Game Developers Association Twin Cities meeting. I also talked about what I learned in designing and art directing my game Four Humours.
St. Thomas professor Dr. Vanessa Cornett-Murtada specializes in teaching piano, creativity, and performance anxiety reduction techniques. In this episode of Composer Quest, Vanessa shares some tips on getting past mental blocks as a composer, and she explains how hypnotherapy can be helpful in reducing stress, increasing productivity, and sparking creativity. She also explains why Brahms is her favorite composer.
Musician, neuroscientist, and author Daniel Levitin has brought music psychology to the masses with This is Your Brain on Music and The World in Six Songs. For today's episode of Composer Quest, I got to interview Dan about why humans evolved to be musical. Dan also shares songwriting tips he's learned in talking with Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Sting, Stephen Stills, and Victor Wooten. In the second half of the episode, you'll hear Dan perform a couple of his own songs, including an exclusive debut of his new song "The Hole Inside My Head."
I put out a challenge to my composer friends and podcast listeners to join me in writing music inspired by fortune cookies. Here's the album we came up with.
Composer Richard Russell is a philosopher at heart. In his mission to become a better composer, he went back to school to study the big questions surrounding aesthetics, music, and beauty. He has dug into both existential and practical composing topics in his podcast Creativity and Composition (one of my favorites). I'm pleased to bring you this Composer Quest podcast interview with Richard, in which we discuss everything from feminist musicology to Plato to getting performance royalties from ASCAP.
I'm thrilled to bring you this incredibly comprehensive flow chart of my advice on making a living with your art.
I was opening some fortune cookies for the Fortune Cookie Songwriting Quest, and I realized they were speaking to my inner N64-playing child.
In my latest podcast episode, I talked with neuroscientist Wilma Koutstaal, who studies creativity. After our in-depth conversation about how to think creatively, we joked about how everyone wants things boiled down to a few easy tips. So here are seven ways to get your creative juices flowing.
Cognitive neuroscientist Wilma Koutstaal studies and teaches about creativity at the University of Minnesota. In this episode of Composer Quest, she shares words of wisdom with all of us who want to be more creative. We talk about how to to get unstuck from writer's block, how to move between abstract and detailed thinking, and how to avoid procrastination.
In this video, ambient music wizard Brian Eno explains his creativity-provoking pack of cards, called Oblique Strategies.