Flairs

Posted on June 28^th, 2025the 28^th of Honeymonth, b2024

(back to blög)

Music is one of the few ways I leave my share of sparkle in the world's compendium of art. Like any other form of artistic expression I have the wonderful opportunity to give life to my ideas through, it brings me the utmost joy to do so every single time.

But music stands out to me. Out of all the ways I can express myself through art, music is without a doubt the one I can put the most uniqueness into. And although I likely owe this to a big extent to the enormous amount of time I've devoted to music over the course of my life, there's also other factors at play.

One of which is flairs.

I perceive music unüsually – or at least so I suspect. The way my brain processes and analyzes music is pretty heavily atypical, and the way my conscious and unconscious thoughts piece those analyzed bits back together during the music-making process make peculiar things come out.

And so here's my humble attempt at giving you a glimpse of what music looks like in Luci's mind. Maybe it helps you understand me better, maybe you can even relate to it. Or maybe you just like listening to a stranger infodump you about a part of her inner world.

A flood of notes ↥

Imagine, if you're hearing, listening to a recording of someone speaking a language you know. You'd almost certainly find it impossible to listen to the sound of their speech without automatically parsing what they're saying and even thinking about its meaning. Even though it means more work for your brain, you can't turn off that additional processing, even if you wanted to: it's involuntary, automatic, and effortless. In short, you can't hear the speech without hearing the words.

Or imagine trying to look at this text, if you're sighted, without automatically organizing these little squiggles into words, sentences, paragraphs, and meanings. You can't turn that off, either, can you? The words spring into your mind as if by themselves, and it's physically impossible for you to perceive the letters as mere shapes. It's involuntary, automatic, and effortless: you can't see the text without seeing the words.

It's the same to me with music. I can't hear music without hearing the notes: immediately knowing what each note is, what the chords are, what key it's in, sometimes even which strong overtones are present.jump to footnote Every time I hear music, whether intentionally or incidentally, I hear a flood of notes. It's involuntary, automatic, and effortless. I can't imagine it any other way.

Music doesn't even inherently need to be made out of notes. Ultimately, music is just a choreography of sound waves, and notes – the idea that this choreography can be analyzed as a timeline of discrete, atomic sound events – are just a convention that arose from the mechanics of physical instruments. But the convention persists because it's useful for both analyzing existing music and making new music – almost all music out there can indeed be analyzed in an obvious way as consisting of notes. And to me, this note conspiracy is even more real.

To me, not hearing the notes in the music would feel like looking at a photograph of a birthday party and not immediately seeing it's a birthday party, only that it feels like a vaguely joyful scene. Or watching a movie and only getting a hazy idea of the overäll plot, but not the concrete events that make it progress.

‘Hearing the notes’ is neither a curse nor a blessing here. It doesn't make me a musical supergenius or anything, but it doesn't make listening to music a painful, intensely overwhelming experience, either. It's just a different way to perceive music. A way I'm strongly attached to, but only because it's a fixed part of my identity, one that's always been there for as long as I can remember.

‘Hearing the notes’ makes me focus a lot more on the details than the big picture when it comes to music. I can like a piece for its pacing or its instrumentation, but even more often, I tend to like it for things like one specific melodic lick or one specific chord. Rather than being inspired by the feeling conveyed in someone else's piece, I tend to snag a specific chord progression. And just like a single emotionally awesome event can ‘make my day’, so can a single awesome chord, sequence of chords, or even just a single note ‘make the music’.

And that's exactly what a flair is.

My musical upbringing: classical supremacism ↥

My family raised me as a classical musician ever since I can remember. If the stories of my parents are to be believed, I played with paper cutöuts of notes when I was four. I took piano lessons since I was six. Whenever I was in the car, there was always classical music playing in the CD player. I attended music school parallel to ordinary school, and I had a cracked copy of Sibelius 5 (a note engraving software, MuseScore's proprietary predecessor) for musical doodles and primordial compositions, the oldest of which date back to when I was seven.

And as I grew up in this environment, a connotation permeäted the air, an unspoken value judgement of the music I was learning as the highest kind of music there is. Pop, rap, and – God forbid – rock, metal, and EDM were fake, lesser, intrinsically bad; it was music for the dumb masses. (The funny thing was that my parents weren't even classical musicians themselves, they listened to popular singers of the time as usual – but when I asked them about it once, all they said was that their pop music is okay because it's “calm” and “modest” or something like that. I was confused, but dropped the topic.)

Unspoken or not, I quickly absorbed this rule, and shared their disdain for any form of music with electric guitars or 808 drum machines. And most of the time, I wasn't confronted with a lot of such music anyway, or if I was, it was involuntary – background music in public spaces or loud music booming out through the open window of someone's car driving by.

But there was one big exception: music from shows, movies, and Flash games. Those were contexts in which I was making voluntary contact with music, and it sure as heck wasn't classical music.

And I found it cool. It had flairs. It used the Dorian mode, seventh chords, syncopated rhythms, phrases that didn't end in an authentic cadence.

The music I was playing in music school was too predictable, too boring. It had few flairs.

Of course, this made me feel conflicted; the music I enjoyed was music I wasn't supposed to enjoy, and I quickly learned to keep my music taste a secret. And even though the pejorative perspective eventually retreated into the background, a shadow of it still remained as a kind of faint self-conflict until I finally made the conscious move to stop believing in it in my late teens. But the fact that music from other media (a category which was quickly dominated by video games) was my primary musical input outside my classical music education that I voluntarily engaged with is probably the reason video game music is such a staple of my music taste today.

That Sibelius 5 thing was only half the truth. Yes, I composed music with it (the majority of which was either forgotten the next day or artificially retconned to immediately end abruptly so that I could call it finished), but at least a third or so of all my files at the time weren't compositions – they were transcriptions. I heard a cool song with flairs out there in the world, and I found it so cool that I wanted to write down the Flood of Notes I heard from it. Maybe because I wanted to hear a crude approximation of that coolness again through Sibelius's playback feature.

Eventually, my parents reälized I did that, and that also became enshrouded with an aura of badness. Composing my own music was good – transcribing was bad.

I have a vivid memory of doodling in a notebook once – I was transcribing some music that played in a scene from the Pixar movie A Bug's Life.jump to footnote My parents checked in on me to see what I was doing. They saw I was writing music, and asked me, “You're composing your own music, aren't you?”. I said yes.

It was the first time I remember lying to them about this.

Flairs ↥

As I progressed through music school, it became increasingly apparent to me that I had no sense of musicality. This mysterious ability that lets you connect on an emotional level with the music you're performing. I didn't have it at all. I was really good at faking it, even to myself – when really all I was doing was following my piano teachers' instructions.

Now I know why. The way I experience emotions through music is fundamentally different from how it was expected to be for me as a classical musician.

Music generally isn't emotion-driven, from my perspective. I don't feel the melancholy, the anger, the joy from a classical piece. I often knew what I was supposed to be feeling, but I never actually felt anything myself. (In the rare cases when music does make me feel things the traditional way, it's usually making me cry, and I often feel disgusted by that – because at the same time, in the Flood of Notes, I hear all the cliché musical elements that cause that response in me, and I feel so gross for my brain ‘falling for’ them.)

Instead, what I feel from music is coolness. Music is cool. Flairs are what make it cool.

A flair is a particular detail in the music that could've been more predictable, more familiar, more boring, but isn't. It's when a piece in C major has a melody that reaches a D from an E♭ rather than a natural E. It's when the final chord of a progression is wildly outside of the key, when it could've just been the dominant chord. It's every time the expected, least-resistance flow of things is disrupted by a beautiful flower of originality. A composition is like a solid, rigid building, and flairs are like little windows in the walls through which the composer's creätivity busts out into the outside world.

Flairs are what gives music life; flairs are what makes me feel music. Flairs are the high-entropy points in a piece of music. Flairs can make me shiver; flairs can give me goosebumps. Flairs can even make me shed a tear.

Many of the pieces of music I like best are either ones that have lots of flairs or ones that have extremely intense flairs. When I sing a piece of music to myself, I tend to emphasize not the notes that were originally accented, but the flairs.

Flairs aren't a miracle solution to make great music or anything, though. They're also subject to caveäts, just like anything else. A flair sounds best if it takes only one or a few of the opportunities where it could appear, rather than all. And from time to time, I need flairless music, tooz. I can't study productively with flairful music, for example; it distracts me too much. Flairs also adversely affected my composing in the past – a lot of my early music was horrible because I essentially just kitchen-sink jammed a bunch of flairs together and called it a day. That's not how composing works, Luci.

What flairs can sound like: Contrapunctus 13 ↥

When I said earlier that the classical music I got to play in music school was predictable and boring, I said that with a touch of relief that not all of classical music – not by a long shot – is like that. A lot of J. S. Bach's music is one big contrary to this. The Art of the Fugue, in particular, is one of the most flair-dense collections of music I know of. It simply overflows with explosions of creätivity at every imaginable step. I often name it as my favourite music of all time, though this is a label harder than any to assign any one particular answer to.

Contrapunctus 13jump to footnote is a fugue near the end of this collection. Or rather, it's two fugues: one is the upside-down image of the other. One of the most intense moments in it for me are the eight bars right before the fermata towards the end. Both the right-side-up and the flipped version of them contain a chord progression which is intensely, wonderfully cool:

• Normal: A minor – C major – G minor – B♭ major – F major – A major – C♯ diminished seventh;
• Inverted: G minor – E minor – A minor – F major – B♭ major – G minor – C♯ diminished seventh.

Where do I even start? C major followed by G minor is a typical syntonic comma pump, but in the reverse direction – it sounds wild, almost like a shattered glass reässembling itself. B♭ major followed by F major is a kind of inline plagal cadence, also the reverse of what you'd expect. An E minor chord in the key of D minor is super high in entropy, bringing a B-natural into the mix. And both versions contain pairs of chords that force a false relation, one of the spiciest flairs out there: two versions of the same note that differ in their accidental, right next to each other.jump to footnote F major followed by A major makes C-natural meet C♯, while G minor followed by E minor makes B♭ meet B-natural. Beautifully gnarly.

Both of these sequences of chords are very, very far removed from what you'd typically hear in a piece from that time. That's probably because compromises had to be made to ensure that the same fugue still sounds good when flipped upside down. But to me, these compromises are its lifeblood. The flairs in it are so strong that this particular fugue brought me to tears once when I so much as imagined it in my head.

To be clear, it's really cool in a nerd-snipingjump to footnote way that this is a fugue with a mirror image. But that's not what makes it cool in a flair way; it's a bonus. Rather, the fact that it has a mirror image required some more awkwardness in the voice leading than normal, and it's that awkwardness that, incidentally, I perceive as beautiful and not awkward.

Microtones ↥

When I was fifteen or so, a single event revolutionized my musical life. I randomly found myself wondering why we collectively decided that the octave has twelve notes in it, and not, say, sixteen. (At around the same time, I was introduced to the idea that we could be using a different base than ten – specifically, twelve – and that's probably what made me also question the number of notes per octave.)

That same day, right after I got home from school, I looked up “16 tone music”. I wasn't expecting to find anything. And I didn't find much – as it turns out, 16edo doesn't sound all that great – but the little I did find changed things forever.

The first piece of microtonal music I've ever heard was this video, titled Two 16 Tone Preludes in Gorgo. As far as I know, these are improvisations, probably recorded in one take and uploaded without any further edits.

I felt flabbergasted. Woozy. Ultrajoyed.

These improvised pieces performed on a Pianoteq pushed my brain's pleasure buttons more frantically than anything else before them.

And now I understand why: microtonal music is one big flair. Chords and melodies sound like their 12edo neighbors, but warped: that's a flair! It's possible to move between keys in ways impossible in 12edo, as if in non-Euclidean geometry: that's a flair! (I like Renaissance music for the same reason: its rules are so different from classical or modern ones that almost everything sounds like a flair to me, only because I internalized an entirely different musical language.)

I don't think all microtonal music sounds awe-inspiring, to be clear. It's subject to the same beauty criteria as all other music. Microtones can sound ugly, tooz, in the same way that not every unconventional move in a piece of music is a flair: some of them I just find plain ugly and unfitting. Choosing which weirdnesses are flairs is an art in and of itself.

But those two 16edo preludes, they were definitely flairful. They were the first music ever to fry the circuits of the Flood of Notes, like listening to someone speaking a language I don't know.

I wrote an email to my piano teacher later that day, sharing the video. The email's subject: Divine music.

Ornaments ↥

Some of my very first fragments of musical writing, even predating Sibelius, were crude manual drawings of staves on paper, so crude that only three or so single staves fit on one page, and they didn't have any barlines or note lengths. It was very basic melodies, most in C major, and no longer than a few seconds each. But many of them had one thing in common: they all ended in the same lick, made up of a fleeting triplet and a final accented staccato note: G-A-B-C. My best guess is that I'd heard a piccolo play this sequence in a Flood of Notes somewhere, found it cool, and went on to stuff it into as many places as I could.

A few years later, I learned about ornaments in music school, like everyone else did. Mordents and pralls and trills, subdivisions of a single note into even smaller parts to make something that still conceptually sounds like a single note, but richer, livelier.

And yeah, shouldn't ornaments be the flairs of classical music? Surely if a note is split up into tinier decorative ones, when it could've been left untouched, it becomes cooler?

Well, yes and no. For reasons I can only partially figure out, the way ornaments are handled in classical music mostly feels… off. They become predictable – like how final cadences tend to have trills – which negates the entire purpose of a flair. Harpsichords misüse trills entirely for the unrelated purpose of sustaining long notes. Long story short, they tend to be used not for flairing up, but rather in a way that feels more like meeting a quota or following a rule.

On the other hand, I live for ornaments when they're being used for actually glowing up melodies, with the spontaneity and whim of an impulsive decision. My entire Hexachord Fantasiajump to footnote is filled to the brim with ornaments. And yet there isn't a trace of trills that artificially prolong long notes: every single ornament is here not because it must, but because the piece sounds cooler with it. This is the way I'd used ornaments from the very beginning, all the way since the G-A-B-C licks at the end of those five-second melodies written in clumsy child handwriting.

Flairful ornaments aren't something only I do, either: when I reälized a lot of the Stardew Valley soundtrack also does Luci-style ornaments, it made me appreciate it all the more. For an awesome example, check out The Valley Comes Alive.jump to footnote It almost sounds as if I'd written it. So much that it's almost euphoric, and even a tiny bit spooky.

But ornaments don't stop at mordents, pralls, and trills. Give Deep Sea from the MapleStory soundtrack a listen, specifically the ending.jump to footnote

Now that's ornaments.

Flairification ↥

Onglides, offglides, and pitch bends – let alone microtonal detuning of an entire note – don't traditionally get classified as ornaments, at least not in my music school curriculum. But to me, just because they can't be performed on all instruments doesn't inhibit their power to flair up a melody in the slightest. That said, I like having them available to me. They're a huge part of my musical self-expression.

I like humming. If I'm in a happy enough mood and confident enough around you, there's a good chance you'll witness it. It'll usually be whatever happens to be stuck in my head that day, which is essentially random.

I don't improvise that often when humming – I don't have enough originality for it to feel fulfilling – but I don't just copy whatever melody I have stuck in my head, either. Rather, I flair it up.

My brain spontaneously finds places in the melody that have the potential to sound cooler if they were ever so slightly different, and makes those changes pretty much automatically. It adds flairs. Most often, it changes single notes, like adding a sharp or bending a note microtonally. Or it adds ornaments, both traditional ones and the ones that involve pitch-bending. I often end up liking these flaired-up versions way better than the originals, and they're the ones that stick in my memory. The end result is that my humming when I'm happy ends up sounding more like flamboyant explosions of joy than an idle presence filling the silent void.

One significant difference between these added flairs versus ones I find in the wild is that the added ones are always cool in the context of the original: I don't wish the original had them, otherwise they'd lose their coolness. I'm guessing this has to do with how these additions represent me in the music, that they feel mine.

Sometimes I find myself wishing these flairifications could come back out, that I could share them with the world. The most obvious way to do that would be through things like remixes or reärrangements. Alas, the concept of intellectual property is fiercely dedicated to suppressing this particular form of enriching the world with creätive sparkle, barricading it behind a brick wall of licenses.jump to footnote YouTube's aggressive automatic copyright claim detection is a particularly scary gatekeeper, and I generally try my best to stay well out of its way.

Bolt's Bits, my collection of chiptune remixes for Crypt of the NecroDancer, was an exception.jump to footnote The game comes with six official remixes of (almost) the entire soundtrack and a wonderfully talented community who made even more fan-made ones. I knew that's where I belonged, so I started turning the flairs in my head into project files one by one and released a compilation a few months later.

Flairification is everywhere in there. Just compare any track of your choice back to back with the Danny Baranowsky original and you'll notice almost every melody being spiced up. Almost every theme has tons of sharps on notes that were originally natural. Death Metal's theme removes a bunch of sharps as well. Fortissimole's theme even has a quarter tone in it now. And nearly all the melodies are filled to the brim with glides and little grace notes.

And chiptune was a perfect match for it: a music genre which is inherently full of flairs to compensate for limitations in audio engineering, and which inherently gives me as much freedom for ornamentation as my voice does. 8-bit music is an Elite Flair Genre, and music trackers have exactly the right balance of complexity that what I want to express and what I'm able to express line up almost perfectly.

All of these flairifications weren't random ideas I came up with on the fly while translating the remix into a FamiTracker module file. No, they're months older than the very idea of the project. Bolt's Bits was little more than an excuse to let all these flairs my mind added to the original tracks out into the world.

Musicking ↥

I last put my fingers upon a real piano over four years ago now. The closest thing is FamiTracker's approximation of a traditional piano keyboard layout on my computer keyboard for note input. The way my musical journey started is wildly different from how I ended up in the present.

But that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. Stuff comes, stuff goes. Things change, people change.

Christopher Small, a musicologist from New Zealand, coined the word musicking to emphasize music as something not passed down from producer to consumer, but rather a collective social ritual of sorts, in which all participants' roles are equal, instead of being organized into a descending hierarchy.jump to footnote Composing, performing, and listening are all forms of musicking, but so is dancing, humming along to music, or even playing rhythm games. I music in all of these ways now. My musicking couldn't be more different now from how my parents would've probably liked for it to have ended up, but I like it just the way it is.

In 2019, rhythm games first entered the scene for me with the Patapon series – and since then, they've become one of my favourite genres. Playing them is making music, in the fullest sense of the word. Just listen to the incantation for the rain miracle in Patapon 2: it's nothing short of an actual piece of music, complete with structure, tension buildüp, climax, and, yes, flairs.jump to footnote

In 2022, I stumbled upon One Hand Clapping, one of the most impactful and transformative games I've ever played. My first playthrough of it just happened to coïncide with a turning point of my relationship with my voice, doing a full U-turn from hate to love.

In 2024, I played Crypt of the NecroDancer for the first time. That's a game I can credit for literally teaching me to dance. Prior to that, I just couldn't get myself to do more than tiny, awkward, barely visible movement. Maybe the lack of connection with my feeling of rhythm was a leftöver result of my parents' disdain for dance music.

Although I haven't touched a physical instrument in forever, I stayed in touch with performing, tooz. In early 2020, Imp, short for Improvisation Tool, saw the light of day. It was the dawn of my series of computer-keyboard-controlled microtonal instruments, which spawned a rewrite called Familiar “2.0” shortly after, and eventually culminated in the web-based Familiar 3.0.jump to footnote

And who knows what'll follow? A music player for a custom tracker-like file format? (Already happened with LuciTracker for Ultrajoy.jump to footnote) A real microtonal tracker? (Is on my project wishlist.) An album that runs in a browser, made of golfed JavaScript? (Too cool for me to just ignore the idea.)

Things change, people change. But a few things stay. Musicking stayed.

And I couldn't be happier that it did.

Footnotes

1. If I ever wrote an autobiography, one of my top ideas for the title would be “My Electric Toothbrush Has a Fifth Harmonic”. ↩
2. I sadly don't remember which scene it was. All I remember was the caption for when the music started playing: Upbeat music begins. That's what I wrote in the notebook as the title. ↩
3. youtube: Bach, Contrapunctus 13, Art of Fugue, 1:37-1:53 and 3:48-4:04. ↩
4. The splendid channel Early Music Sources has this fantastic video on false relations. I often like watching it just for the musical examples – all of them are hardcore flairs. ↩
5. xkcd: Nerd-sniping. ↩
6. youtube: Hexachord Fantasia, by Lucilla. ↩
7. youtube: Stardew Valley OST – Spring (The Valley Comes Alive). (Seriously! Some of the mordents go before the main beat and others go after! Stardew Valley didn't need to go this hard!!) ↩
8. youtube: [MapleStory BGM] Aqua Dungeon: Deep Sea, 1:51-2:19. ↩
9. Bandcamp Help Center: Can I upload covers, remixes, or mashups? (To be clear, this isn't Bandcamp's “fault”; they just have to comply with intellectual property law.) ↩
10. youtube: Bolt's Bits: Volume A (Lucilla remixes for Crypt of the NecroDancer). ↩
11. Wikipedia: Christopher Small – Musicking. ↩
12. youtube: Patapon 2 ~Gong's Trial~, 1:25-2:27. (The Rain Juju is an incredible piece of art that so didn't have to go this hard. One flair is outdone by the next, and the way your army chants along to the rhythms fits the musical progression perfectly. Already even before the actual incantation starts, the Juju rhythm – Don-doDon-doDon – used to trigger it in the first place transcends the quarter-note grid established so far in the game. Within the first three verses, the rain dance introduces rests and an eighth–dotted-quarter rhythm, both of which have never appeared before. The first three pairs consist of two identical verses, but the last pair doesn't. And the final verse, the only one to use a drum other than Pon, has a whopping seven notes, one of which is the Pata drum playing sixteenths – now that's a climax.) ↩
13. In the strategy game Heroes of Might & Magic 3, imps can be upgraded to familiars, hence the name. ↩
14. GitHub: LuciTracker. (Despite the name, it's just a music (and video) player, not a tracker.) ↩