We recently connected with Eric Lennartson and have shared our conversation below.
Eric , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
I see myself as a mostly self taught person, especially considering a lot of my current artistic output. I have very little formal training in programming and music tech in general. A lot of what I do with oscilloscope music & art involves learning about various mathematical concepts, computer graphics algorithms, and then applying them to a digital signal processing perspective. I learned from books, and some tutorials online, and studying other people’s code when I had access to it. So in that sense, I’m someone who is entirely self taught. I don’t consider that to be entirely accurate though, because even though many of these technical details are things that I had to learn on my own, I also went to college and have a BFA and MFA in music performance and composition. I had lots of incredible classmates and teachers help me to develop my musical and artistic abilities. Those sorts of skills are hard won for anyone whether or not you go to school and I’m very grateful for the education these people helped me to attain. The things I learned in school weren’t necessarily directly applicable for understanding code or algorithms any better, but it was very much responsible for my ability to take these dry technical things and make art that I’m proud of. Knowing what I know now, I’m not entirely certain if there is a way I could’ve sped things up. I would definitely have taken some classes in computer science and electrical engineering too perhaps, but I wasn’t interested in those things back then. It’s certainly easy to look back and say, “oh yeah, if I knew what I was going to be doing now, I could’ve gotten there by doing x, y, and z two or three years sooner.” I think that kind of thinking tends to forget that I’m not the same person I was then that I am now. That’s been part of my journey as an artist, you don’t know what skills are going to be useful, and you don’t know that what you find interesting now is going to be what interests you later. The most essential skill has definitely been my ability to research, as well as taking the information that I find and applying it in radically different contexts. If I couldn’t’ve done that, I don’t think I would have gotten very far at all. Especially as someone with no formal technical training doing technical things, I often have very clear ideas in my head of what it is that I want to do, but figuring out how people that have been formally trained actually talk about these things, is much more difficult. In that regard, I think the biggest obstacle for me has really been that the skills to make oscilloscope music & art are so interdisciplinary, that it’s hard to find all the relevant information in one place. In order to be good at this you need to have a strong technical skillset, so things like programming, and mathematical knowledge are important, but you also need the ability to create interesting visuals and write music as well. None of those are easy, and people often spend their whole lives studying only one of them. I’m often using these ideas in nonstandard ways as well, so sometimes I’ll find information on how a particular algorithm works, but there is basically no information on how to translate that into oscilloscope music, so I’m on my own more or less in that respect. It’s getting better as the art form gains more popularity and public awareness, and I’m working on a tutorial series to try and help people who are curious and want to try it out and get started, but it’s still a bit of the wild west in some sense.
Eric , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
When I graduated from high school, I already knew that my dream was to be a musician. So I went to music school, and worked very hard for a few years to be the kind of player that could get into an orchestra. I thought I would spend a few years on the audition circuit and eventually end up in some prestigious orchestra. But then in 2018, while I was studying abroad in Sweden, I came across an album from an artist going by the name of Jerobeam Fenderson, called “Oscilloscope Music”. He’d created an audiovisual album where it was both music, and drew things on an old piece of electronic testing equipment called an Oscilloscope. I knew nothing about how to make music with computers, or programming, or anything at all really, but I knew right then and there that that I wanted to move away from what I was currently doing and do that instead. I was way to nervous to change majors, I was already on my last year of my BFA more or less, so I did the transition slowly and spent a few years learning these things on my own more or less. There were lots of wrong turns, but by the fall of 2020 I released “10 Million Hertz” which was my first piece of Oscilloscope Music. I had originally meant for it to be an EP with four tracks, but I ended up combining them all into one larger 20 minute piece. Oscilloscope Music is interesting because there’s not too many people I know of that make it on a somewhat regular basis. Each person is really unique too, we might all be making audiovisual art with a direct link between sound and image, but each of us is very unique and has our own approach and signature style. Work involving lasers and an old video game console called a vectrex are some examples. For me, I like to lean into the noisy side of things and make these massive walls of chaotic noise, and abstract imagery. When I perform live, it oscillates between focusing on the visuals and the music. Sometimes I’m more concerned with the way it sounds, favoring the sonic component over the visual, and other times it’s more about the aesthetics of what it looks like than what you’re hearing. Overall though, the goal is to create an experience where you can’t separate the two and together they create a one of a kind experience. I think the main thing that sets me apart from others is the tools that I use and more generally, my approach to making music. I use this software called Pure Data aka Pd, and I didn’t make that myself, but it has this wonderful feature where you can write these add-ons and completely change the way the whole thing works. It’s honestly a blessing and a curse, because sometimes you can get really bogged down in some very hairy technical computer science issues, but mostly I find it to be a blessing. The code that I use to make my synths is entirely my own, and I know how the whole thing works from the ground up. It operates exactly how I want it to, and it’s entirely custom to me and how I think. So that immediately sets my art apart from everyone else, you know, beyond the off the wall thing that I’m already doing, which is to make music that also draws things on obsolete electronics test equipment from the 80s. The other thing that I think that is unique to me is, once I’ve made a new instrument in Pd, is to think about the possibility space that it creates. What I mean by possibility space is simply, what is every single sound this instrument can make? The better the patch, the larger the space, and if I’ve done it well, it’ll have lots of interesting things I can work with both musically and visually; it’s easier said than done. My goal as a performer then is to become familiar with this space, and then when I perform, I can navigate that space in front of people and show off all the interesting things I’ve found. I’m most proud of the wide range that I feel my work encapsulates. I’ve mostly talked about my oscilloscope output, but I also have more traditionally notated music that explores rhythm and duration, I make lots of noisy electronic music that doesn’t involve oscilloscopes, and with my trio (placeHolder) we tend to sit in between many genres of music at once. It’s nice to be able to make many different kinds of musics and not be pigeonholed into any one particular space. Whenever I get the chance to perform, I like to try and do something new as much as I can. I am interested in so many different things, and I can only hope that I get the chance to try them all out at some point.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
– I really enjoy learning new things, as well as trying to see things from unconventional perspectives. I always enjoy thinking about how things work, what makes them tick, and then changing something that feels like it’s taken for granted, or fundamental to how I perceive it to operate, and exploring the consequences of those changes. So being an experimental musician really just fits who I am. I’m not really interested in doing things that I’ve seen done before, that’s not to say those things aren’t valuable, because they certainly are, it’s just that, for me, what I find most interesting tends to lead me towards unconventional music, art, etc.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts this show called StarTalk, which I used to listen to for a while, and when I was in high school there was this one clip that really struck a chord with me; it’s something that I think about often. A listener had submitted a question, asking about the wave particle duality of gravity, and wanted to know, “which one is it? a wave or a particle?” And Neil gave a really wonderful response, which I’ll paraphase here: “it’s a very human thing to say is it this or is it that … these are false dichotomies it can be both! it’s not a fault of the object or the concept, it’s a defect in our language … let things be what they are, allow there to be a spectrum in all that you see.” One thing that I always have to grapple with is how comfortable and familiar experimental creative practices are to me. That just isn’t an everyday person’s experience. I’ve been a part of the experimental music world for many years, and I studied it in school; I understand it very well, and have been thinking about it and working with it for a many years. When I tell people that I’m a musician, they have a certain notion about what I might mean by that. For most people, music reminds them of an orchestra, or a 4 person band, or something along these lines. People are used to music being a certain way, so when I present something that doesn’t really fit into these molds, the first reaction is usually one of confusion. The immediate reaction might even be to declare that whatever that is, it isn’t music. But for me, I really don’t think that the distinction of being music or not being music is important at all. And maybe a bit more controversially, I don’t even necessarily care if what I’m experiencing is even “good” or not. All I really want to see, is someone being authentic to who they are and making sounds that are genuine to them. I love seeing people really go after something, even when it fails. So to that end, I think that the only fair way to approach most any creative practice is on its own terms. If I’m watching someone quietly bow a woodblock for 40 minutes, and I think, “They didn’t even play any notes! That’s not music!” well maybe for this person, that’s not what the piece was really about. Maybe whatever they were trying to express had nothing to do with notes at all. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was music, or maybe it wasn’t. None of that really matters to me; If the person on stage is being authentic, and I as an audience member decide to take them seriously, I’m almost certain to learn something and maybe even have a wider view of the world in general.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ericlennartson.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ericlennartson/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ericlennartsonofficial
Image Credits
Eric Lennartson, Michelle Sevilla