The Making of Arrival: My Foray into Music

Learning how to produce music has been on my mind for close to a year and I finally set aside the time and space to make it happen. My first song has finally been released and I put probably 150+ hours into composing this piece and learning all the technicalities in making it happen. 

This really was an insane labour of love and probably one of the most hardcore projects I have ever taken on, which is why I decided to document it in detail here!

Here's the link to the track - you can also download the song from this link: https://soundcloud.com/henrychim/arrival

Best looking album art. Ever. 

Henry the.... Musician?
I was first inspired to make music during my time in India. It was probably the spiritual pinnacle of my life and amazing music just started entering my head out of nowhere. The music in my head got so much more beautiful and real during my 10 day silent vipassana meditation in Nepal. I would hear music in my head and be able to direct it, almost as though there was a musical conductor inside my head who actually knew what he was doing. Solely by picking an emotion I wanted to transmit, I would hear the music change direction and begin channeling that emotion. It was incredible.

I knew I had to learn the tools and tricks of the trade so that the world could enjoy what I was hearing inside my head. It took almost a year to finally set aside the time to do justice to this hobby. At the same time I was thinking about making music, I met a German DJ named Ulf who taught me my first few tricks in Ableton Live in Kochi, Kerala. 

To this day, I still hear beautiful tunes in my head but they sound nowhere near as good as when I was at my spiritual pinnacle in South Asia. 

Inspiration for Arrival
During the Partner Gathering, which was a send-off of sorts for the Global Fellows in NYC, I was quite sad to leave the city and the wonderful community I had around me. My friend and Vancouver+Acumen chapter leader Marica reminded me that rather than thinking I am departing from somewhere, I should think of myself as arriving. With arriving comes new possibilities, adventures and friendships. So I thought about that distinction during the entire flight and my first few weeks of my field placement. I aspired to capture my emotions of arriving to a new place, combined with the cosmic-level craziness that is within the confines my brain, into a song... and the song is called Arrival.

Then I had a dream about 6 weeks about Transformers. Autobots and Decepticons were battling in a giant space crystal and Optimus Prime lost his arm in the fight. He transformed into a fighter jet and started spinning out of control because well, he lost his arm. As he spiraled out of control and started scraping the walls of the space crystal, the scene in my head ended and the closing credits started. I woke up at 4am and hummed the closing music into my iPhone and composed it into the piano solo of Arrival starting at 4:10. 

So... I literally turned my dream into reality! #mindblown.

Fun Facts About Arrival

• I started producing the song in December and made a daily ritual out of working on it all the way to release in mid-February. I would listen to it at work and took notes on what needed to be changed, then would spend an hour at night making the adjustments. I would then listen to it again before bedtime, take some more notes, and spend an hour in the morning making more tweaks. So making this song was an iterative 2 hour daily process for over 2 months.
• It's almost 10 minutes long with over 40 layers of instruments and sounds. Every single note, melody and sound was meticulously selected, placed and perfected from scratch
• The voices in the song are from the real Apollo 11 landing recordings. So the song is featuring my boy Buzz Aldrin. Also grabbed a few sounds off those recordings like the space beeps.
• My room mate in NYC, John, had to put up with a couple months of my epic snoring. One night he decided to record my snoring just to show how ridiculous I was. I used a vocoder to turn my own snoring into a musical instrument which I proudly call the "Snorecoder 3k". You can hear it coming in and out every second or so starting at 2:30. There are 6 snore variants used for the instrument. 
• I made this song on a used 13” laptop that I bought 5 years ago from Ernst & Young for $50
• The Ableton file takes 10 minutes to open and also crashes every 20 minutes or so, and this is after I took my computer to Lahore's Hafiz Tech City to pick up some upgrades from this fascinating laptop graveyard full of parts that I could adopt as my own. 
• The music file uses 2.5GB of RAM. Each layer needed to be "frozen" as I went along to save CPU so each edit I made also took about 5 minutes of rendering time. Needless to say, the final mile of finishing this song was the most painful experience ever
• In case I didn't hit the point home.... Arrival has completely pushed the technical limits of my laptop. It only exports properly from Ableton like 1 in 2 attempts and otherwise crashes! I'm never doing a 10 minute song on this computer again.
• In contrast... the album art took me only an hour of screwing around in Photoshop and actually turned out better than I had hoped. Goes to show that creative processes are a complete crapshoot.

Nerdy Facts About Producing Music

• Figuring out chords and melodic progressions is actually coming to me quite naturally. Usually stuff comes into my head during my meditations and I'll just plug it in to see how it sounds. The harder part though is understanding the physics and technology behind music.
• I downloaded 1,000 music tutorials from YouTube totaling 110 GB. It was a good call because YouTube is banned in Pakistan. These videos were invaluable for learning the technicalities of music production.
• Layering melodies together is really really hard. You have to balance so many things like octaves, frequencies and stereo width to make sure each sound punches through clearly. Otherwise things just get cluttered and sound muddy. The best description I heard is that producing music is like sculpting a sculpture. You really have to carve off what isn't needed using equalizers for everything to balance and be aesthetically pleasing. 
• There's this tool called compression which was tough for me to learn but incredibly powerful. Basically, when a piano key is struck, there's the mechanical sound of the key and initial hit followed by a beautiful resonance. Well if I want more of that resonance and I turn up the sound, the initial sound gets way too loud. What compression does is use math/physics to bring down the initial hit so I can bring up the resonance without screwing things up. It's way awesome and brings life to so many different sounds.
• Mastering music is also really hard. Usually producers send their mixes to a mastering engineer who does engineer the track to make sure it sounds clean in many environments. I learned to do this on my own and that took about a couple weeks. Even getting the song to be the same volume as other stuff in my iTunes library is an effort in itself. I spent some time pulling my favorite songs into a spectrum analyzer to understand how professionals master music. I learned about what different frequency curves look like for different genres and how the pros handle decibel levels throughout their tunes.
• AMC's Director of Development, Amjad, is an audiophile and has like a collection of the best headphones ever. He's been lending my different headphones over the past couple months and I've now listened to Arrival on like 8 different headphones, each run highlighting something different that I needed to tweak in the music.

What's Next?
Phew even documenting the journey to date took a lot of work. I don't know what drove me to put in that much energy into this project. Maybe you can call it passion.

Now that I have learned the basic tools of music production, the sky is the limit. There's so much more to learn, especially as I branch into more genres, but I feel good about my foundation. I want to make at least one electronic dance music and one hip hop song over the next year, and maybe even try producing unplugged acoustic music on my guitar. 

I can't wait to see what else I find and create as I continue down this road. For now, I need to turn off my brain and take a break from anything to do with making music. Time to watch a Michael Bay movie...

Inequality: It’s Built Into Human Psychology

We can’t handle choice and unfamiliarity. 

Try this: name 4 social networking sites. Or 4 hip hop artists. Or 4 brands of sports cars.  Or 4 makers of phones. Or 4 international non-profits.

The first 2-3 are easy. The 4th is a struggle. Our minds drop off the cliff when it comes to its natural retention of more than 3 data points in any given category. We stick to our 3 favorites of just about everything: beer, jam, star employees, gadgets, musicians and authors. Our entire thought processes and decisions are made largely through our confined window of familiarity into the world.

Our politicians are manufactured on this phenomena. Arnold Schwarzenegger rose from action hero to governor of the largest state in America. Imran Khan, Pakistan’s revered cricketeer who brought home the world cup in 1992, is a serious contender as the next Prime Minister of his country. 

Our celebrities are manufactured on this phenomena. Many of the most popular musicians don’t even produce their own music. They are the brand and face of a well-oiled industrial machine pumping out what people are familiar with.

Our businesses are manufactured on this phenomena. Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, believed that any of his divisions which aren't the best or second best in its industry should be divested his company's portfolio. That mindset was key to GE’s revival from a laggard to one of the world’s most revered companies. 

Choice is so much easier when we put a ceiling on the number of possibilities in our minds. Where we make our choices, our wallets will follow. As the worlds population base continues growing exponentially, wealth and access will inevitably shine itself ever more brightly upon the lucky 3. 

After all, inequality is built into our psyche.

Does choosing a corn cob stress you out?

The Virgin Voyage - Buying and Riding a Motorcycle in Pakistan

I have always wanted a motorcycle ever since I rode a scooter for the first time in Thailand 7 years ago. I still remember the unlimited sense feeling of freedom I felt in the paradise of Thailand's beaches, working my way up a strenuous mountain path to be rewarded with an incredible view and a delicious pad thai. After riding on the back of a few bikes recently and feeling the exhilarating rush of air in my face, I knew that Pakistan would be as good of a place as any to finally realize my dreams of owning a motorcycle. 

My colleague Jamshaid gave me my first and last motorcycle lesson. So the right pedal is a brake, the left pedals are for gearing up and down, the right handlebar is the front brake and the left handlebar is the clutch. 30 minutes and a couple spins around the neighbourhood later, Jamshaid tells me with the authority of a wise master guru "you are ready". Woohoo!

Moazzam, another colleague and avid automotive enthusiast with 3 cars and 4 motorbikes, took me to Lahore's sprawling automotive market to buy my first bike. He worked in the automotive sector for 30 years before joining AMC and knew every single person in the market. It was an incredible place, reminding me of a scene out of the dusty planet Tatooine from Star Wars. There were shops everywhere with people banging away loudly at metal or pouring hot oil solutions to clean out different automotive parts.

I fell in love with the first bike that I saw, a 150 cc Ravi. Moazzam told me maybe I should be less ambitious for my first bike so we moved on. Then I saw her. It was like a moment at a house party where I lock eyes with a beautiful girl who's into me. Her headlight gazed right into my soul from 20 meters away and I was inextricably drawn to her. My love at second sight was a 2012 Honda CD100 with 100cc's of raw amateur-level-motorcycle-power. Moazzam negotiated an amazing price for me and I'll be only paying maybe $10/month of depreciation on it. 

We returned a few days later to drop off my cash and pick up the bike. Moazzam brought his son who was extremely excited to help me drop the bike off at my home. He beamed with joy at the opportunity to ride my bike and offered to buy it from me after I leave Pakistan. In all my excitement Moazzam also

ended up buying a gorgeous 150 cc Suzuki from the same dealer... I might end up trading in my bike to his son and borrowing his Suzuki after a few months!

I scarfed down lunch while catching up with my friend and fellow Bailey before hopping on my bike with the same amount of excitement as when I got my first Nintendo 64. My first challenge was getting the bike out of my uphill driveway. It took 5 frustrating stalled efforts to get my bike out of my house... great.

The hardest part about riding a bike is getting her started without stalling the engine. The clutch on a bike is much less forgiving than that a car's. Not to mention the distraction of cars whirring by inches away from me with the nonchalant flair of the Pakistani driving culture. 

I found myself a nice quiet residential strip to practice launching my bike before making my way out to the main roads. Driving in Pakistan is absolutely insane. Cars don't yield to you proactively. You basically get in their way and assume that they will just move to avoid you. Somehow, the flow of traffic ends up working out in this country.

The relatively empty Sunday roads made for a real fun day to learn how to ride. I fumbled through my gear shifts, feeling an uneasy lurch every time I gave too much gas or didn't release my clutch smoothly enough. There were just way too many data points in my head to process and I reminded myself of the power of emotion and the subconscious. I stopped trying to think my way through riding and started following my emotions. I felt the cracks of the road, the rumble of the engine, the clicking of the gears just before they merged seamlessly with the drive train, and it changed everything - I started cruising effortlessly through the experience.

I floored it a couple times and loved the feeling of the bike's engine roaring between my legs, giving a whole new level of meaning to the word "horse power". As I whizzed by other bikes, sedans, jaywalking pedestrians, rickshaws and donkey carts, I found myself naturally gravitating back to the center lanes of the road where I was no longer scared of being surrounded by traffic. It was a feeling of pure bliss and liberation. 

Along the main roads were all the signs of service to the elites of society - all the western brand names were well represented on the main strips. I cruised by glitzy malls with brands such as Armani and Rolex situated alongside fine Western dining establishments such as KFC and McDonalds. After a good 30 minutes of riding I figured it was time to go back home. 

Lahore is quite confusing to navigate and I found myself taking a wrong turn and going through a narrow dirt underpass under a railway track. I entered a whole other world on the other side of the tracks. Only but a railway track demarcated the division between rich and the poor. There was an entire community created, and thriving, along the other side of the tracks. I cruised by children playing cricket on the streets, teens idling away their Sunday afternoon on billiards tables set up on the side of the railway tracks, and entrepreneurs selling curries out of crude vats of steel off the tracks. 

It was a fascinating slice of Pakistani life that lasted about 2 kilometers before I found a railway crossing to return home. The gates were down and I waited patiently alongside a sea of Pakistani drivers. Acumen says a lot about "standing with the poor" but they never said anything about "waiting to cross a railroad with the poor and wearing a stealth mode bike helmet yet still attracting tons of curious glares from commuters stuck in traffic who don't see a lot of foreigners."

Soon, the gates flung open and traffic started moving. Everyone was honking at each other and maneuvering opportunistically to get a couple slots ahead in traffic. I got my bike started and started the arduous journey uphill through the track crossings while surrounded by many impatient commuters. Talk about a high pressure situation. And I passed the test without stalling.

My new pride and joy. Her name is Da Bang.

What We Did Last Time

It’s too easy to fall into a trap of repeating the past as we create the future. That approach worked last time for me... let’s use it again.

Our commitment to getting stuff done has cultivated bad habits for creation. We don't challenge ourselves to solve problems in new ways because it's easier to simply do what we were told to do last time. We strive for efficiency and chase the path of least resistance based on proven models and approaches. We stop taking risks because we can get to a product that is “good enough” without trying anything new.

As I move forward into my creative passions this year, I find myself constantly compelled to follow my past successes. Harmonizing my melodies in my music based on chords that I know too well. Tying my thoughts together in my writing with logical pyramids. Using the same compositions and processing techniques in my photography. Articulating myself with structure and form rather than raw emotion.

Innovation comes from intercepting that nagging urge to repeat ourselves and replacing it with an authentic pursuit of the art of creation. With every brush stroke should come an equivalent effort to erase the modes we know so well from the past. 

If this post doesn't inspire innovation then... here's a goat in a sweater

If a Tree Falls…

If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? What if the tree was the largest and heaviest of all the trees, crashing faster and harder than any tree before it?

We have more intellectual capacity in our society than ever before, yet the same issues of misunderstanding and hatred between caste, creed and religion continue to burn deeply into our humanity as they have for millennia.

The felling of 12 Parisian trees roared throughout the forest with a thunderous boom that rattled the very roots of its existence. The felling of 2,000 Nigerians trees echoed but only a whisper. The forest did not feel the pain of these falling trees; trees that were of a different color from the other side of the forest, but trees nonetheless.

All the reason and thoughtfulness in the world cannot solve our problems alone because we share in common only our unreasonableness. The common denominator between people is not the intellectual, but the emotional. We may not think the same but we feel the same.

Our greatest writers and philosophers may succeed in amplifying the sound of each and every falling tree, but what have we done to make the forest listen?

So Far Away...

Thoughts racing through my head during a village homestay in rural Pakistan on January 4, 2015

I drew a lottery ticket when I was born into this world. 

I could have been privileged. I could have been a trust fund baby from England. A prince from Dubai. A politician’s daughter from India. An accountant's son from Canada. 

I might never have known about the other side.

I could have been impoverished. I could have been born far far away on the highest mountain. The driest desert. The deepest jungle. The furthest field. 

I might never have known about the other side.

I might never have known that far far away, the diseases that my friends and family die from are easily prevented or treated. When I suffer, I suffer because my father suffered the same. As did his father and his father before him. 

I might never have known that I am considered uneducated. I go to school five days a week and work diligently in my studies. Some days, my teacher doesn’t come to class or he shows up drunk, but that is okay. I can learn from the textbooks given to me that I was never taught how to read.

I might never have known that someone could buy a yacht or own real estate worth millions. Nobody told me that the 85 richest people are as wealthy as poorest half of the world. Nobody told me that a few of them use their money to help people just like me.

I might never have known that I am considered poor. Nobody told me that living on $1.25/day means that I am impoverished. Nobody invited me to that expensive meeting, far far away, to debate the latest benchmark for poverty. 

I might have aspirations to move to the big city someday. My uncle tells me "life is tough in the city but if you work hard you can become successful just like me." I might not get access to a toilet but that is okay. My village didn't have one either. I just want to see the bright city lights. I just want my family to see me rise.

I might hear that far far away people are not like me. When I am happy, I laugh. When I am sad, I cry. When I am angry, I fumble. How can someone from far far away possibly be the same as me?

We are worlds apart.

Terrorism: The Single Story of Pakistan

When I attempt to fathom what happened in Peshawar, I imagine a room full of 141 bright flickering candles being extinguished in one single blow. Why isn’t there more love in the world? The kind of love that can end this madness is the same love that allows us to forgive and understand those who stand behind these atrocities.

To love is to understand, and to understand is to seek truth beyond the single story. Yet, the single story is more often than not how we see the world… Asian students are always good at math. Men are pigs. Colombia is full of drug lords. Indians can only work in IT. IT professionals are socially awkward (see where racism stems from now). Everybody in the “country” of Africa is starving. Corporations are evil. Governments are lazy.

During my career in management consulting, I was told over and over again that I needed to build my brand in one specific area. It’s as though it’s impossible to comprehend that someone can execute effectively across multiple disciplines, so we get pigeon holed because that makes our expertise easier to sell and explain to people. And that is the appeal of the single story - it is easier for us to take in.

When I found out I was Pakistan-bound for my Acumen fellowship, the responses I received from friends were either of genuine concern for my safety or of tasteless jokes about suicide bombers. I’ll admit to sharing a few offside jokes myself. After all, Pakistan is perceived by the West as so backwards and hopeless that inappropriate jokes about the country are made acceptable in our society.  The reality is that much of the world thinks of Pakistan as the prolific breeding ground of modern-day terrorism, as though there is some sort of sick incubator that places a terrorist on every street corner of the country.

Here is my real account of living in Pakistan.

I arrived at the Lahore international airport on November 22 with no idea what to expect for my year ahead. I slightly panicked when I couldn’t find my colleague who was supposed to pick me up. Frantic and out of ideas, I entered a hotel booking office to see if there was a way I could get onto my email. Without any strings attached the man at the agency invited me inside his office, provided his personal Blackberry to check my email, let me use his phone to call my colleague and graciously offered me part of his delicious chicken biryani dinner while I waited.

I had a similar experience during my first fruit shopping experience. Working within the confines of a complete language barrier, I handed a 100 rupee note to my neighbourhood fruit vendor and pointed at his bananas and oranges knowing fully that I was putting myself in a position to get ripped off. I was shocked when my neighbor verified that that I got local pricing on my bag of fruits. I have happily given this fruit vendor 100% of my business since then.

In fact, after three weeks of living in Pakistan I finally got to treat my friends to dinner and even then it was one of the biggest uphill battles of my life. Every single person I have met in Pakistan has been overwhelmingly warm and kind. The worst that I have experienced is paying a rickshaw driver 50 cents above market rate for a lift. This is hardly the culture of a people you would affiliate with terror. I would go as far as to say that Pakistan is the most hospitable country I have ever been to and I am slowly falling in love with it. The rugged nature of Pakistan brings out the warmest humanity in the toughest people I may ever meet.

Terrorism is a brutal reality in Pakistan that paints ugliness on what is otherwise beautiful. What happened in Peshawar was tragic and heartbreaking. 141 innocent people, mostly children, died and those who should be held to justice also perished as part of their plan. In November a suicide bomber at the India-Pakistan Wagah Border killed 55 innocents. I am left emotionally exhausted and saddened when fathoming the hatred behind these actions. In these attacks, the people of Pakistan lost their friends. Sons. Daughters. Fathers. Mothers. Sisters. Brothers.

My brief time living in Pakistan has brought me closer to empathizing with the people of this country. I feel deeply saddened, angry, frustrated and confused about the attack. When I look at my Facebook newsfeed, now filled with updates from my newfound Pakistani friends, I see remarkable solidarity for the victims of those impacted by the most recent attack. I can’t help but look back in shame at my own past perceptions of Pakistan.

As my coworker aptly put it “The US hasn’t had a significant attack since 2001, yet they’re seen as the freedom fighters in the world against terrorism. We are constantly under attack and then we are labelled the terrorists. No, we are fighting the terrorists and we have been fighting them since the beginning.”

December 16 will forever be etched in Pakistan's history as Black Day. It has been remarkable to see the wave of profile photos on Facebook from my new Pakistani friends change to a flat black in memory of those who passed away on this day.

My heart bleeds for the people of Pakistan. Every single day they live with the threat of another attack. They are the victims of terrorism, not the creators of it. What is the price we pay when we look at the surface of things rather than the depth of things? And what other single stories do we have in our heads which preclude us from truly understanding each other? I hope that as the world watches the people of Pakistan stand in unison to mourn for their country, we can all start finding the courage within ourselves to change our single story of Pakistan and to appreciate the courage of each Pakistani child that continues showing up every day for class.

And what about the single story of a terrorist? He’s a lunatic. A murderer. The cancer of society… But at one point, he was just like you and me. He was once an innocent child of the world gazing outward with curiosity and love. Then something deplorable happened that convinced him the only way forward is to murder innocent people. We want to bomb him out of his hole but the much harder answer to seek is to truly understand him. Is he actually just like you and me? Is it possible that if we went through the same experiences in life we would turn out just like him… and does that end up making him a victim too?

I wish it were as easy as replacing all the hatred and misunderstanding in the world with love. The cycle of change starts with each and every individual. As for me, I have to find the courage to ask myself the hard questions and stop accepting my own single stories of how I see the world.

Let’s start with this story of Aitezaz Hasan, a brave 15 year old boy who gave his life in January to stop a suicide bomber from attacking a school:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-25663992

Here is the TED talk that talks about the danger of a single story and inspired my thoughts for this blog:

http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en

May the victims of Black Day rest in peace.