Workshop (PAST): Practice Creativity and Produce Music with More Ease

Workshop was held on August 12th, 2025 at the Recreational Psychoacoustics Lab in Seattle, WA

Description

Let’s explore how you relate to your creative work, not just how you organize it and technically produce it. This workshop is both a facilitated conversation about creativity and an introduction to practical frameworks for making music with greater ease and authenticity. The emphasis will be on creating music authentically and effortlessly – understanding how to relate to your unique creativity rather than force it (to be like someone else’s practice). We’ll start by sharing our creative stories and current challenges, then dive into how to practice creativity with the EASE approach – a fourfold way towards creatively flourishing. We’ll share a little about our processes for creating music. Then you’ll learn a process to organize music production work by what needs attention in the present moment. We’ll explore how different music production tasks benefit from different types of effort, concentration, and decision-making. Of course, we’ll share what software systems we use to produce our music. You might be inspired to consider how your system can better support your creative process and music production tasks. After this workshop, you’ll know at least one path, process, and system for approaching your creative work with less struggle and more flow. Most importantly, you’ll connect with other musicians interested in making music with more ease and creativity.

The workshop will be facilitated by Scott Miles. That’s me. I am no creativity expert. I don’t believe there are experts in creativity since humans are creative beings by nature; we all have the same creative potential, which is infinite. However, some of us certainly think more about creativity, process design, and workflow than others. I’ve been doing that for — geezus — over 25 years as a professor and consultant in engineering, design, and planning. I’ve also been making music for most of my life, having sung in several choirs, learned (or not) many instruments, joined a few bands, started a few other bands, gigged around the PNW, written a hundred or so songs, taken too many hiatuses, and worked with many brilliant people to grow (or revive) my own creative practice. I’m excited to meet more of the RPL community, learn from you, and so grow my own creativity. You can continue to judge me by reading some of my blog posts.