Why we make music
- Uji
- Apr 15
- 6 min read
Last Sunday I played a DJ set at Bioferia (a sustainability fair here in Buenos Aires). It was a beautiful autumn afternoon, the sun dropping behind the buildings, warm but not too warm, that particular Buenos Aires kind of day. And I found myself standing behind the decks, looking out at the scene, really looking, catching multiple things happening simultaneously. A couple dancing with their eyes closed. A group of friends laughing, others with huge smiles. A kid of about six, completely lit up, who had made it onto the stage and was dancing nonstop. Strangers exchanging glances. A woman making up her own melody over the music, others clapping along to the rhythm.
What a scene.
And in that moment a very clear feeling arrived: this is why I do what I do. That precise moment, and everything happening in the crowd, confirmed my choices and the whole long, winding path I had to walk as an artist to get there.
I've been making music professionally for over twenty years, almost forty since I picked up my first instrument. There were periods when the path felt obvious: the ambition of my early years meant I never rested, and along the way the stages got bigger, the collaborations more interesting, the world kept opening. But there were also periods when doubt won out over certainty. Music I never finished, shows played to empty dance floors, insecurity, drama, not enough money, too many hours.
With time I learned I wasn't alone in this, that for most artists who've been walking this road a while, you never arrive at a place of absolute security and certainty. It's hard to be an artist: to be committed to the work and at the same time generate income, to stay grounded and at the same time live in wonder. But the truth is that clarity and doubt never cancel each other out, they coexist, two faces of the same deep question: what is music actually for? What am I doing when I make it? Who cares?
I spent years asking those questions not only personally but as a researcher, looking at what different cultures have understood about why humans make sound. What I found is that there isn't one answer. There are many motivations, and most of them live inside the same artist at the same time.
There's the motivation of craft, the pure pleasure of solving a musical problem, finding the right texture, the transition that lands exactly where it should. There's the motivation of expression, the need to say something that doesn't fit inside language. There's the motivation of connection, the desire to touch someone, to not be alone in whatever you're carrying. There's the motivation of survival, money, career, the professional machinery of sustaining a creative life. Motivations tied to ego, to seduction, to being seen. And then there's something harder to name. Something closer to obligation. The sense that this is simply what you are, and not doing it would be a betrayal of yourself. A feeling of mission, identity, and destiny all tangled together.
In the end, it's all of them, in different amounts, at different moments. And they shift. The ones tied to external recognition are real but fragile, they depend on markets, on algorithms, on an industry that is always looking past you toward whoever just arrived. I've watched very talented artists hollow themselves out chasing those motivations past their natural lifespan. And I've watched others (most of them) quietly keep making music in circumstances that offer no external reward, simply because they couldn't stop.
On a personal level, I believe we as human beings have a need to express ourselves. The imaginary, interior, emotional, intellectual world needs to come out, to connect with the world around us and with other people, to be validated, to become real. From the most basic "I'm hungry, mom" to the sharing of our thoughts, our ideas, our individual process. And that's where music takes on an even larger dimension. Music is a language capable of expressing things that words often cannot. It expresses the unnameable, the immaterial, the fleeting. A chord can sometimes hold a grief or a deep joy that words can't reach. And what I find most extraordinary about this is that everyone (whether they've studied music or not) can feel and interpret music through their body and their emotions. For those who study and dedicate themselves to making music, learning this language is learning to say things that are intangible but true. Dedicating a life to knowing and mastering the language of music helps me personally to express the unnameable, and at the same time to generate feeling in a wider audience.
What happened the other day, for me, is one of the deepest motivations, and it doesn't have that much to do with me. I love how music stains reality, how it can generate a multiplicity of experiences, all united by the same vibration in the air.
That moment when a shared sound organizes multiple private realities into something coherent (a crowd, a feeling, a collective presence in the same breath) is something music does that almost nothing else can. It's not magic, exactly. It's more like a fundamental property of what sound is: it moves through bodies, it bypasses the analytical mind, it lands in places that language can't reach. Every culture that has ever existed has made music. Not all of them had writing, or agriculture, or money. All of them had music. That tells you something about where this lives in the human animal.
There's a way of thinking about the musician, one I've encountered in different forms across West African, Andean, and Javanese traditions, where the artist is understood not as a performer but as a channel. The music doesn't originate in you; it passes through you toward the community. Your job is to be practiced enough, open enough, present enough to let it through cleanly. From that perspective, the work isn't about building a career or expressing yourself. It's about becoming a better vessel.
I don't hold that belief literally or in a purist way. But I think it contains something true about what the best moments in music feel like. Standing behind the decks the other day, watching people dance as the sky went gold behind the buildings, I wasn't thinking about myself at all. I was just part of something that was already happening.
The frustrations, the doubt, the sessions that go nowhere, they aren't the price you pay to get to the good moments. They're part of the same practice. Moments of clarity don't erase the difficult parts. They contextualize them. They remind you that the struggle isn't separate from the meaning. In some ways, it is the meaning.
That might be the deepest answer to why we do this. Not because music is ours. But because for a few minutes, when everything aligns, it belongs to everyone.
A practice
Before your next session, before you open your laptop, before you touch an instrument, take ten minutes and do this.
Sit quietly and bring to mind the first time music truly touched you. Not a song you liked. A moment when something happened in your body, when sound reached somewhere it had no business reaching. It might be from childhood. It might be a concert. It might be a song playing in someone else's house that stopped you in the middle of something else.
Stay with that memory for a few minutes. Notice what it felt like physically, where in the body, what quality of sensation, what it made you want to do.
Then ask yourself honestly: is any trace of that feeling present in what I'm currently making? Not as a style or a reference, as a quality of intention. As a reason.
You don't need to answer right away. Just let the question sit alongside your work. Sometimes the most useful thing a question can do is refuse to be answered quickly.
What's in the ecosystem
I've been going back to recordings of Ali Farka Touré, particularly the sessions with Ry Cooder on Talking Timbuktu. There's something in the way Touré plays that feels like exactly what I was trying to describe: music as channel rather than performance. Nothing ornamental. Every note load-bearing.
Rereading The Mysticism of Sound and Music by Hazrat Inayat Khan. Written over a century ago, it describes sound as the origin of all creation and music as the most direct language toward the transcendent. It resonates with everything I tried to say in this essay, but from a completely different tradition.
I'm starting to put together a new live set. I feel the need to break from what I've been doing and find a new way of expressing myself.
At EchoSystem we've just launched our on-demand music arrangement module. If arrangement always felt like that mysterious part (that alchemy of taking an idea and turning it into something complete), this module works through it step by step. Available at echo-system.xyz.
Whatever brought you to music, that complicated, not entirely articulable thing, it was right. Even if it's changed over time. Even if you've lost the original shape of it. The fact that you're still here, still making things, means you're still in conversation with that first impulse. And that conversation is the work.
Uji
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