Music and Inner Focus — Working Document (Patrick's voice + source threads)

Music and Inner Focus — Working Document

Raw material for the Music and Inner Focus blog post. This holds Patrick’s personal throughline (in his voice, for the article to be written in the first person), the three source threads with curated quotes, and the cross-reference map to Baseworks. Draft from this.

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Part 1 — Patrick’s voice and experience (the spine of the piece)

The article is written by Patrick, in the first person. The cross-reference to Baseworks runs through his own life as a musician, an athlete, and an artist. The throughline is perception, and how playing music, and before that competitive sport, shaped it in ways that reach out into life, nature, and things that are not obvious at first.

Music shapes perception, in more than one way

Having played music for many years, I draw a lot of correlations between the experience of playing and how it shapes perception. Perception-shaping can mean several different things at once: how one articulates and understands music, how one interprets its nuances, and how that interpretation extends outward into life, nature, and other things that are not so obvious.

Cycling came first: pain transferring into flow

For me, music was an extension of an earlier experience as a competitive cyclist. I trained with a club in Eastern Canada. The guys I rode with were all older than me, more like mentors, so part of it was camaraderie. Out on the road the training was genuinely difficult, but there was so much in the experience of riding against the backdrop of the nature we were in. There were shifts from challenge into something close to a flow state. Even when the times and the metrics were not especially fast, there was a transference where the pain seemed to dissipate. What remained was the immense, hyper-focused reality of the ride and the connection with the elements around me:

• the pavement we were riding on
• the sunset in the distance
• the trees along the side of the road

Into music: the crowd, and forgetting what you look like

When I moved into music, initially as a vocalist, the interaction with the crowd became important in a way that connects directly to Angine de Poitrine. The crowd’s support is not only there for the music. With Angine de Poitrine it also carries the pride of a band from Québec reaching this kind of international success, and it carries something that reads as non-conformist: there is no face and no fame attached to the outcome, only the experience itself.

When I performed on stage, I thought very little about what I looked like. There was a point in the transference, from being able to remember the lyrics, to being able to present and perform the song, to embodying the meaning in it. That meaning came both from the concept in the lyrics and from the cathartic expression of the experience itself.

What Baseworks was always about

The development of Baseworks was never about creating something perfect. It was about giving people the opportunity to repeat certain tasks that could reveal something hidden in the task. What gets revealed might relate to physical capacity. It might be a kind of emotional clarity. It might be an organizational advantage in how the brain processes and solves problems. These are the things that inspired me, and Baseworks came through as a cross-section across my experience as a musician, an athlete, and an artist living through different kinds of things over a lifetime. See Iterative Refinement, Reverse Engineering, Emergence.

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Part 2 — Source thread A: Angine de Poitrine

Full record: angine-de-poitrine-interview-transcript (Aucard de Tours podcast, 2026-02-26).

Timing peg (verified 2026-06-30): ~70,000 people at their free TD Stage / Place des Festivals show, Montreal International Jazz Festival, Saturday June 27, 2026 — the festival’s largest turnout since Stevie Wonder in 2009. Festival director Maurin Auxéméry called it “a defining moment in the Festival’s history.” Crowd wore polka-dots and flashed the triangle hand-sign. (We use this as a scale signal only; we leave aside the crowd-density / medical-response angle as off-thesis.)

Key threads for the post:

• Anonymity as the way in, not the thesis. It began as “pure mischief” (pure espièglerie), a prank on their hometown crowd, and the meaning emerged afterward through doing it. “It’s fun that we’re anonymous: we can stand in the crowd, we blend in with everyone.” Separating the human being from the cultural product lets every interaction stay rich, instead of “always the same loop, socially.”
• Costume as deliberate constraint (the strongest literal parallel). The papier-mâché heads blind the players. “The handicap has just appeared.” They write the pieces without the costumes, then practise into the constraint until they can play the repertoire blind, by feel and muscle memory. “Ultimately, everything is done through the doing. It’s a matter of practising.”
• Structure over surface. Techno-like “in the structural construction of the pieces, not in the timbre.” Loops with intentional build-up, repetition that moves forward.
• Micro-tonality as friction and resolution. “The notes between the notes.” Splitting a note in two. Drawn in by “the closeness of the notes, the friction, the novelty it brings.”

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Part 3 — Source thread B: Jacob Collier — “5 Levels of Harmony” ft. Herbie Hancock (WIRED)

Source: https://youtu.be/eRkgK4jfi6M (15:41, WIRED, captions). Collier explains one concept, harmony, at five levels of increasing complexity, to a child, a teenager, a music student, a professional, and finally Herbie Hancock.

Why this video matters here: it is a live demonstration of perceptual resolution. The same stimulus is perceived at very different granularities depending on the listener’s training. This is the clearest external mirror of sensory resolution we have.

Key quotes (approx. timestamps):

• [00:23] Child’s definition: “it’s when people sing together and it sounds nice.” Collier: “100% correct.”
• [01:20] “Harmony is about injecting melody with emotion, so that ultimately you leave home and you return home and you’ve learned something along the way.”
• [01:49] Major vs minor: “the feelings are different, right… it feels like dark and spooky… this one’s happy.” Emotion is perceived, not merely heard.
• [05:20] “The amazing thing about harmony is that it exists in nature.” Overtone series above, undertone series below: “when a tree grows in nature you have the branches which go upwards and the roots which go downwards.” (Ties to Patrick’s nature/cycling imagery.)
• [05:55] “People think the solution comes when we add more notes. I think people forget that you can work with the notes you already have, by just rearranging them.” (Resolution comes from refinement, not addition.)
• [07:22] “Sometimes the paralyzing thing… there are too many options. That’s when it becomes super important to be aware of what you want to say emotionally.” (Intention guides perception and choice.)
• [11:58] “Music is not different from life… that’s probably the greatest attraction to those of us who play music.”
• The Herbie / Miles story [12:10–13:00] — the gem in the mistake. Herbie felt stuck in a rut. Miles Davis said something he misheard as “don’t play the butter notes.” He had heard “bottom,” but the misunderstanding led him to ask “what are the obvious notes?” (the third and the seventh), and to leave them out. “It changed everything for me from that moment on… I wouldn’t play the voicings I play today if that had not happened.” Discovery arrived through the error, through application rather than rehearsal.
• [09:57] “If you read the rule book, that’s not in it.” Beyond the conformist rules.

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Part 4 — Source thread C: Jacob Collier — “How Jacob Collier Reinvented The Guitar” (Paul Davids)

Source: https://youtu.be/WknTbYOet4c (40:52, Paul Davids, captions). Collier could not connect with the standard guitar, so he designed a five-string, mirror-tuned instrument that fits how he hears and imagines.

Why this video matters here: it is the same shape as Angine de Poitrine’s costume and as Baseworks itself. A person reconfigures the constraint so that what was below perception becomes available, and the deeper result emerges through doing rather than design.

Key quotes (approx., transcript-cleaned):

• The internal model precedes execution: “I could always play guitar in my head even though I couldn’t play with my fingers… I was playing this in my head for so many years before I could play it in real life.” (Movement/sound simulation; cf. Spatial Awareness.)
• “I follow my ears much more than I follow my technique.”
• The standard guitar “messed with my mind… my brain wouldn’t get inside the tuning.” His ears “were attracted to sounds I had not heard before,” and standard shapes were ones “you hear all the time,” so there was “no way in.”
• “If you don’t like a rule, tweak it.” Redefining the instrument to suit perception rather than conforming to it.
• On technique: “There is no objectively good technique for everyone,” though there are “core principles that help general people get onto the horse.” (Cf. the Baseworks balance of individual sensing within shared principles.)
• Joni Mitchell: her unusual tunings “evoke a spirit which would guide her towards a song… she didn’t know any of the chords she was playing, her fingers would just find this stuff.”
• “As soon as you strum the guitar it evokes a sort of emotion and you’re there.” Sound to emotion, immediately perceived.
• Just intonation: “I tune the third down to be in just intonation… so it hits the soul.” Micro-tuning for an emotional/perceptual result (direct rhyme with Angine de Poitrine’s micro-tonality).
• “I normally get more interesting results if I’m not trying to control [everything].” Openness to what the experience reveals.

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Part 5 — Cross-reference map to Baseworks

Source observation	Baseworks concept
Same harmony, perceived at five different resolutions (child → Herbie)	Perceptual Skills, sensory resolution: granularity of perception varies and is trainable
”The notes between the notes”; just-intonation third “hits the soul”	Sensory resolution in another modality: finer discrimination yields more meaning
Costume blinds the player; play by feel and muscle memory	SENSE-CONTROL-ADAPT (CONTROL → SENSE): “the movement is the tool; the sensation is the goal”; practising without visual feedback
”Everything is done through the doing”; meaning emerged after the prank	Emergence, Iterative Refinement: depth that surfaces through repetition, not top-down design
Collier redefines the instrument to fit how he perceives	Reverse Engineering: reconfiguring the task so hidden structure becomes available
”Work with the notes you already have, by rearranging them”	Refinement over addition; Form practised more deeply rather than added to
The gem in the mistake (butter/bottom notes)	Repeating a task to reveal something hidden; not about perfection
”Music is not different from life”; perception extends to nature	Perceptual skills transferring outward into daily life
Thinking little about appearance on stage; embodying meaning	Inner attention over external form; “not what you’re doing but how”

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Part 6 — Open discussion points (Collier perception)

For discussion with Patrick before drafting:

1. What Collier perceives while playing, versus what each of his interlocutors perceives (the child, the student, Herbie). The gap is sensory resolution.
2. The mistake-as-discovery ethic (butter notes; “not trying to control”) next to Baseworks as “never about perfection.”
3. Whether nature imagery (Collier’s tree of overtones/undertones; Patrick’s pavement/sunset/trees) becomes a connective thread or stays light.
4. How much of Patrick’s cycling/flow material opens the piece versus sits mid-article.

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Part 7 — Patrick’s expanded framing (the conceptual core)

This is the deeper theme of the article. Music is one lens onto it, not the subject.

Limitation as the interesting part, not the obstacle

In the practice, when a limitation is noticed it tends to get framed predominantly as a limitation rather than an opportunity. This parallels the mistake idea: a lot can be discovered within a limitation, if one is willing to set aside the assumption that physical practice exists in order to transcend limitations. Transcending limitations is one byproduct of Baseworks, not its purpose. It is far more interesting to understand and work within limitations in the practice itself, and then, for those who want to go that deep, to use that as a reference point for the kinds of limitations met across a whole life.

Those other limitations can be anything: not having legible or neat handwriting, or not being able to manage time as effectively as others. Many of these ideas fall inside the constraints of social and cultural norms, which matter, because we have to navigate a world that is in many ways built on perfection and structure as the goalposts people align their lives to.

The biggest success is moderating on the fly

In the practice we always want to make clear that the most interesting part is working within one’s own physical and energetic capacity. If something is difficult to understand, or physically impossible to achieve, the biggest success in Baseworks is learning how to immediately, on the fly, moderate the level of intensity or change the approach to a movement. See Intensity Modification (IM for Form: stop or adjust at loss of control; self-paced, perceptual clarity over performance) and the ADAPT pole of SENSE-CONTROL-ADAPT. This is one of the hardest things for people to grasp.

Where people miss it: when they cannot do something, they tend to give up rather than find another, manageable way through the task. The unspoken discovery lives inside finding that manageable path. And because the structure is in the method, proficiency builds, and the method can then carry more layers of complexity over the top of that structure.

Why Collier and Angine de Poitrine resonate

Collier is, by most measures, a genius, the kind of musician people aspire to match. What makes his points land is that they are honest and human. The same is true of Angine de Poitrine choosing that nobody knows who they are: with no superimposition of character, history, fame, or ability onto the performer, the audience gets a different filter through which to perceive the experience, beyond what a conventional contemporary music experience would be.

On practice itself: when Collier says he does not really practice much, that is not quite true. If he wants to realize something about what he does, he will work on it for hours. The difference is that, rather than drilling a scale, his practice becomes pursuing something that inspires him to know more about what he does. That reframing of what “practice” means is directly relevant to Baseworks.

Between the notes, and the difficulty hidden in simple movement

Both Collier and Angine de Poitrine point to what is between the notes (micro-tonality). In Baseworks, through the continuity of very simple movement, one comes to understand how difficult it is to move at all, even though what we introduce is deliberately simple. People sometimes complain that the movements seem not appropriate for them. A lot of the time, the point is the opposite: if something seems difficult or hard to grasp, that is actually good, and it is something to work toward. There is no agenda to push anyone to physical discomfort. See Communicability (the bottleneck is perceptual, not linguistic) and Form.

The vocabulary question (Herbie and Collier at the end)

The closing exchange between Herbie Hancock and Collier, “where do we start and where do we end,” is really about whether they have the vocabulary to communicate an expressive outcome in music. Movement has the same problem, made worse because so much of movement practice fixes only on the physical view of movement. Our interest in Baseworks is to challenge the perception of what a conventional movement practice is: not only health, wellness, and physical proficiency, but where a person begins to piece together a physical practice against the backdrop of the subjectivity of their own life experience. That life experience is layered with many facets: personality, psychology, morphological output in interaction with the world, the seasons, nature, the cities and countries and cultures one is in, the societal and ideological backdrop, and so on.

Multi-domain by design

Although the article is written in the first person and uses music and performance as its primary reference, music is only one example. The same realizations show up in architecture and in other art forms: artists who discover, sometimes by mistake, unique and interesting ways to express the work without always needing to name the outcome in advance. Modern art and art criticism often read work against the contemporary education built around art, and some art-school curricula are genuinely built on letting the process reveal itself through the idiosyncrasies of non-thinking rather than thinking. The article should leave room to pull in one or two of these non-music examples.

Accessibility and essence

Although these ideas run deep, it is fundamentally important to make the article as easy to understand as possible, while keeping the essence distinct to what our objectives are in Baseworks.

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Related

• What’s Between the Notes — the published article drafted from this working doc
• music-and-inner-focus — originating idea
• music-and-inner-focus-source-transcripts — full source transcripts (both Collier videos) + research concept index
• angine-de-poitrine-interview-transcript — full transcript + translation
• The Six Principles · Perceptual Skills · SENSE-CONTROL-ADAPT · Iterative Refinement · Reverse Engineering