We recently connected with Bill Wesley and have shared our conversation below.

Bill, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?

I was initially interested in developing a polyphonic synthisis system in the 70’s when those did not exist yet. I went to the Project for Music Experiment funded by the Ford Foundation at UCSD at La Jolla California to interest them in a routing keyboard that I had concieved of that would have had 8 voices, each assigned to a monophonic mini moog. They were not interested.
I managed to get into the Navy Instructores electronics course through a friend without joining the Navy which I did under the idea I would not need to beg for help from electronics engineers if I was one. Once graduated I started studying elctronic means for shifting pitch under the idea that if one could make a guitar pedal or audio processor that would play all the octaves of a note the simplest playing would sound like a large orchestra.
I figured out how to do that after about four years but the nessasary elctronics were too expensive to make it practical. I began thinking about the standard keyboard design and how octaves are the best note combination but so far apart we can not reach but one of them, I thought “why not put all the keys for the octaves of a note together so we can play them all at once?” So I came up with the concept of an “octave column”
Then I ordered octave columns in semitone order to arrive at the melody array keyboard design, then I tried octave columns in series of fifths order to arrive at the harmony array design. So I then made a “Harmony Array Mbira” to demonstrate how a midi keyboard should be arranged and started work on this patent:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6501011B2/en
After that the harmony array mbira attracted much interest in its own right such that I’ve been living off the proceeds for over 20 years as many famouse performers use the instrument. This TEDX talk then happend:

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I provide a theoretical frame work that may be used to devise any number of acoustic or electronic musical instruments. These are designs that optimize an instruments timbre, performance ergonomics, emotional expression capability and capacity to exemplify music theory. I have used this frame work to devise a large number of unique instruments that each offer the composer or performer many advantages over conventional instrumentation.
I devised the instruments in order to provide myself with the optimum tools for live performance and for deliberated composition since I am also a composer performer, but unfortunately for the world musical performance does not pay the bills despite the rave reviews that I get.
The new musical model that I devised seems to have additional utility beyond just the advancement of music.
The emotional effect of the notes in the harmony array configuration forms PATTERNS that can not be seen in the standard keyboard arrangement for the notes, or in any other arrangement for the notes
These patterns may offer us clues into the dynamics of emotion through the study of the dynamics of music. Through the harmony array note arrangement music may be used as a template by which to model the operation of emotion so that we might better understand how our own feelings work!
Charles Darwin used facial expression to study emotion, but we also use “tone of voice” (as well as tempo of voice so music of voice) to express emotion while speaking, so such speaking music may be an equal or better indicator of emotional states hence a means to study the physiology of how emotions interact.
It is also possible to contrive acoustic or electronic musical approaches based on the derived emotional theory and so circumvent the usual objective abstraction of music theory so as to substitute a more subjective music theory that can directly address what is felt instead of only addressing what is heard.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Society can best support creativity by preventing bullying of any kind. Since creativity depends on individuals respecting their own individuality society must prevent groups from disrespecting individuals for their individuality, which is no easy task. Humans are pack animals but packs don’t innovate, human society is set up for packs and not for individuals which acts against the creative impulse, without the celebration of diversity there is little creativity. With so much focus on consumption as validation of status there is little room for creation as validation of status. If consumption is the goal and monopoly the means that’s a one two punch against creative aspirations, so the best means of ensuring a steady supply of creativity is to encourage people to value creation over consumption and to value opportunity over monopoly.
Since nearly all adds are about encouraging consumption and not creation and nearly all opportunities are about getting a job and not about starting a business there is little incentive to be creative.
Creative individuals are inherently disruptive so the potentially disrupted do not value them, rather you must be a fighter by nature or you won’t make it, no one in authority is likely to roll out the red carpet for you although associates may see the value and help. this means you must be both artist and scientist to the point that you are very sure that you have something to offer no matter what anyone without understanding says to discourage you, you know your course both subjectively and objectively because you’ve done your homework.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I wanted to be a composer performer when I was 12 years old, to the point the school music teacher took me to all these great concerts in her off time. I wanted to learn music notation but no one had time to teach me so I taught myself by ponderously going through many books I could barley understand. I’m dyslexic so this was much harder for me than it would be for most people. After a while I became confused about the reasoning behind music notation. I was teaching myself to play the keyboard so this quickly turned to bewilderment with regard to the rational for the way the black keys and the white keys are organized. and why black keys should have two names and not one.(B sharp or C flat for example)
I went to some very good keyboardist friends as well as to the writings of famous keyboardists and they said the keyboard was designed the way it is because notation is perfect. Still perplexed I read about the development of notation and they said that the perfection of notation was proven by the design of the keyboard.
After years of trying to sort it out it boiled down to perfectly circular reasoning, so then I realized that the people I was relying on did not know what they were talking about, they were all just assuming perfection for the simple reason that if we use it we prefer to think of it as perfect, so for selfish reasons.
I begin to think then about how to redesign the standard keyboard so that really might achieve some degree of perfection,. It took me about 6 years to figure it out in my early 20’s. The intent was to deliver to myself the ultimate live performance device to astound my audience.
Ironically I now deliver such devices to others while my own music goes ignored when it should not be, its both appealing to the masses as well as unprecedented so not at all something that should have been ignored, but it admittedly would be disruptive so I can see why I’d be shut out..

Contact Info:

• Website: www.arraymbira.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bill.wesley.array
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-wesley-0a027570/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/arrayist
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@billwesley
• Other: TEDX talk https://youtu.be/SU2JztST_TY?t=7 Patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6501011B2/en

Image Credits
Imogen Heap is shown with me in my personal photo and also in another photo playing a harmony array mbira