The Senses

One day i was watching MasterChef US reality show on TV. It was the first season of MasterChef US.  Among the elimination rounds, there is one round where the MasterChef candidates were served a dish (at that moment, the dish was some kind of soup). They had to taste the dish and then guess the ingredients mix. In front of them are plates of various kind of ingredients and they have to guess correctly about 10 from 24 ingredients that were used in the mix. The 3 judges (Gordon Ramsay, Graham Elliot, and Joe Bastianich) then determined whether the participant's guesses were right or wrong.

At that time, in my mind i was thinking ""How the hell it can be done ?""How possible it was to identify the ingredients used, one by one, from the dish that had been mixed ?". I was considering that a normal person (including me) would not be able to identify the ingredients that many. Mostly we may identify ingredients that dominated the taste or had prominent taste among others. I thought it was impossible to  disjoint the taste and identify the sources.

But there is something i realized when i was exploring the music. When i am exploring the music, i try to listen carefully to the melody sources and eventually i will recognize approximately what musical instruments were played. It was a similar job to the people who taste the dish and recognize the ingredients. We might be unable to guess all instruments and ingredients correctly and but at least we could describe how the big picture was drawn.

So, what differs these things ? I think it's the role of senses. Everyone who were dedicated to their work, were actually optimizing their senses. Not to mention that they are also sharpening their other skills, but it is how particular senses played an important role for particular jobs. People who work on music were optimizing their sense of hearing while the chefs were utilizing their sense of taste. If we look further, these (and other) senses were also working on other fields, such as hunters optimize their sense of sight to recognize their prey between trees.

Regarding this role of senses, those people who do the job usually require and utilize multiple sense, rather than one sense only. Beside optimizing their sense of hearing to analyze the sound harmony, an orchestra conductor may also use their sense of sight to detect any faults. Chefs may also use the sense of smell to explore the dish, but there is always one sense that play an important role for particular jobs. For special case when this dominating sense did not work well (e.g disability), other sense would be required to cover its role. It was like a piano player regularly uses his hands to play the piano, but when facing disability, if the person had strong passion, it was not impossible that he/she were still continuing his/her piano playing using his/her feet. 

This is how i view how particular sense were contributing in particular activities. They played an important role to people in making creations.

So, can you name any more jobs that identical with particular senses ?

Amethyst

The song 'Amethyst' was originally composed by Japanese Musician Yoshiki Hayashi for his legendary band, X-Japan. The song was regularly played as opening scene of every X-Japan concert. As the song flows, the X-Japan members will enter the stage one by one or in group. The classical nuance, combined with elegance, played important part in describing the magnificent concert.

The song was developed by multiple classical instruments. I arranged the 6-minutes composition with basic orchestral sections : Strings, woodwind, brass, and percussion. The base of this arrangement was taken from Amethyst piano scores by Yoshiki, combined with all that i caught from my hearing.

Begun calmly by several instruments, mainly by strings. The flow of the song filled with fluctuating mood. Some parts were filled only by a few instruments, while some others were build by many and various instruments.The final part was the climax where all sections had their roles. Overall, the flow was escalating and rose-up when reaching the ending.

The classical elegant nuance was describing something precious and elegant. It illustrated how Yoshiki associated X-Japan with the Amethyst gem. It is something i also want to present in this arrangement of mine.