Music is a strong educative tool and can be lifelong learning and self-improvement tool.
What does the image above sound like?
A bunch of 0s and 1s? How does that translate to music? Just read along and you will hear it soon.
Let’s just back track on how I got here.
How music has become a tool for learning new skills and experiementing.
In 2013 when I still lived in Austin, Texas, I watched this 7min+ YouTube video of Nigerian producer and musician Jesse Jagz making a beat on his keyboard.
Up until that point, I had spent a few hours here and there sampling music, manipulating sounds, and trying out music production software, but it never really stuck as a habit.
As Jesse Jagz created rhythms and melodies with a keyboard, quite similar to a keyboard that I had in a closet in my apartment, I couldn’t peel my eyes off the clip.
The combination of the hardware — MIDI keyboard, the music that was being made, and the person making it, a Nigerian like myself. It was very empowering.
I believed I could do something similar. In my head, something clicked in that moment. I was like, This is what I’m going to be doing.
I got home that evening, unpacked the keyboard, and started making music seriously.
Years later, with more musical gear including a lot of wires that I couldn’t tell you what they are named and my main instrument of choice, Native Instruments Maschine, music has become my therapy.
It’s a process of growth and development, a craft that involves personal therapy.
Similar to how I would sit in my room in Ikeja (Lagos, Nigeria) to listen to music in times of unease in my teenage years and seek the comfort that my stacks of CDs brought, making music later in life brought a more fulfilling form of therapy — a therapy of self-improvement.
For the love of the process
With a brief stint of failure with my business in the summer of 2015 and the minimal impact at a factory in Ghana during my MBA internship, I felt lost.
The second year of business school seemed like I was in some form of warped reality.
I had just spent two months with skilled artisans who growled about low and sometimes unpaid wages and back in Palo Alto and I was surrounded by seemingly happy, bicycle-riding students talking about innovation and deployment of huge amounts of capital needed to fuel this innovation.
There seemed to be a disconnect somewhere.
I went to a place that brought me comfort in times of confusion and despair — making music.
During my time in business school, I made beats at night when I had some free time or as an assignment for one of my music classes.
The process of making and the iteration was a way for me to explore sounds while exploring my own internal thoughts and feelings. Before business school, I had released two mixtapes, THE CONSTITUTION and THE METAMORPHOSIS.
During my last two quarters at Stanford, I started compiling my third mixtape — INTERPRETATIONS.
It was a representation of where I was mentally: a little disjointed, somewhat confused, and chaotic.
It represented the conflict I was experiencing with songs like “Under the Influence” and “Get it Together” — a hodgepodge of different sounds.
I spent time collaborating with some of my classmates on the songs, making deeper connections with them.
We created tracks about the drive to succeed on “extrapreneurs” and being broke graduate students seeking any form of income while throwing jabs at California’s vegetable-eating culture on “Salads In My Pockets” over samples from Fela Kuti’s “Water No Get Enemy.”
The entire process was an outlet for me.
It was a way to express things I couldn’t express by just using words.
It was also a challenge.
I wanted to make something that was better than the last two projects that I had made. Until I put it out on SoundCloud, I remained in a state of therapeutic self-improvement.
Redemption
Nine years after getting inspired his youtube video, I met up with Jesse Jagz in person at a hotel in Lagos while I was researching how music could be used to solve community issues in my book — PRESS PLAY.
We spoke about making music and art mainly for the love of the process.
“The secret is . . . art for the sake of art. It’s like you have to be your fan first. If it doesn’t sound nice to you. If it doesn’t do something to your emotional inside. Don’t put it out”
Jesse Jagz said.
Not making music for the validation of the external world, but for internal validation of expressing yourself.
In an effort to develop their vessels, the conduit through which your art is created, musicians make art for themselves, and this art sometimes just resonate with other people when they share it with the world.
Musicians can choose to make music for selfish reasons.
A lot of the musicians talked about the love of the process, the process of making something new — of getting better.
The process of making music is sometimes driven purely because the maker wants to listen to what they made — not for the external validation, but for the internal fulfillment of making tangible what you feel and conceive on the inside.
Stimulating New Neural Pathways
As I continued to put together insights on the impact of music on personal growth for — PRESS PLAY, I got the opportunity to interview Nneka — a Nigerian artist renowned for her soulful voice, diverse lyrical style laced with political topics.
In our email interview, I asked her about the role music plays in continuous development, and she reminded me of how music sends out vibrations, activates certain frequencies in our brains, and builds new neural pathways.
“Music boasts immune system, lowers stress levels and more. It is also used in meditation a lot also to help with anxiety or depression. if you are less stressed then your brain is less stressed and can take in ‘stresslessly’ ‘stressless’ information. Neuroplasticity is the process of allowing yourself go within to build new neural pathways between neurons and synapses and hereby training your brain to feel good when building those new pathways might seem a bit uncomfortable in the begin- ning just like learning a new instrument but with consistency and joy, all becomes one.” — PRESS PLAY, Ch 13: Self-healing process lovers.
Nneka is actively on her own journey of self-improvement, development, and discovery.
She can be seen playing around with a new form of expression in charcoal drawings.
Seeing artists such as Nneka continue to evolve is just a testament to the growth mindset that can be fostered by musicians and artists.
This same growth mindset is employed by entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, athletes, and inventors to solve problems and develop products, tools, and services that add tremendous value to our community.
Making music is an iterative process.
It’s just like prototyping new ideas and testing out new combinations.
It is this process of playing with new forms that spurs the solutions to newly identified problems.
Growth Mindset
It’s the curiosity and the love of the process that keeps the brain activated.
It allows new pathways to be formed, new connections to be made, and new solutions to be thought of.
It is the process of continuous creation that develops a mindset of growth, in which one is willing to deal with the pains and obscurity that come with doing something new.
As I watched that video of Jesse Jagz that evening in Austin, it took me on a journey of self-discovery and improvement.
Over the years, through music, I gained the confidence that I could learn anything I wanted to.
It is the mindset that has taken me to release three mixtapes, make countless unearthed beats, start my own business, tinker with different service offerings and products, improve my sales and marketing skills as an entrepreneur, learn how to write a fictional story, learn the process of publishing my first book (a bestseller ;=), and now how to make music with code.
Music-making is a therapeutic space for tinkering away, for following your curiosity.
It equips you with a mindset to learn how to get better at anything you set your mind to, a mindset that can be applied through any practice — with business, through a song, a scientific breakthrough, or a new genre of music that you’re creating.
Music gives you the space to develop and heal yourself at the same time. It supercharges our internal creative confidence through discipline, focus, and confidence while providing outlets to deal with stress, anxiety, and pain.
Music was the gateway for embracing my growth mindset.
The Evolution: Listen to the code
Now back to the music and the code from the beginning of the article.
After I published my book and we all became locked indoors at the beginning of the pandemic, I started learning about how music can be used to teach computer languages and unleash a new form of musical expressions.
With the programming language — Chuck — musicians can find a new way to express themselves while learning how to code and computer programmers can learn how to make music.
Here’s my progress so far —listen below to hear what it sounds like:
Still some ways to go….but it’s a starting point.
Music is a strong educative tool and can be lifelong learning and self-improvement tool.
I am very curious how the interaction between music’s strength for emotional communication and self-growth, our continuous advancements in communication technology, and the speed of information-transfer in our growingly-connected world can be used to galvanize empowerment and collaboration at scale to radically disrupt the biggest challenges in the world.
Spurring creative confidence in individuals and collectives to innovate solution that builds global equality from the expected to the most unexpected parts of the world.
