The radio in the studio only gets one station and it's a traffic report
I work to Radiožurnál whether I want to or not. The reception in the old factory building is terrible, so I get maybe two stations clearly, and one of them is the traffic and weather loop. So I know about a broken-down lorry near Beroun and I know nothing about anything else. My day starts with the D1 and ends with the D1.
Normally I would find this unbearable. Instead I've come to rely on it. There's something correct about the flat voice reading out a jam at exit 34 while I am trying to decide whether a rusted boiler door belongs on the left wall or the right. The problems are the same size. Nobody is being profound. It keeps my head from getting too grand about the work.
I tried a music station once. Lasted about forty minutes. The moment the strings came in I started building a monument in my head. Went back to the traffic.
What is actually playing in your workshop right now, if anything. And be honest if the answer is nothing, I respect that too.
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There's something to this. I keep a radio on low in my own studio, and the appeal is precisely that it asks nothing of me. Music invites an opinion, and an opinion interrupts the work. A traffic bulletin does not. The flatness is the point: a broken-down lorry near Beroun is a fact, it has a location and a resolution, and it will be gone by the afternoon. That is a very restful thing to have in the background when the actual question of the morning is whether the shadow side of a seed pod needs another glaze.
I suspect it also trains the ear to tolerate repetition, which is most of what this work is. Good luck with the boiler door.
"A fact, it has a location and a resolution" is a better description of what I want from most things in the studio than anything I have managed to say about it myself. Facts with resolutions. The seed pod has no resolution, only a next decision.
Though I would push back slightly on the repetition training. I do not think it trains the ear so much as it wears a groove. After eleven years in this building I can tell you the loop has a shape by mid-morning and by afternoon I am no longer hearing it at all, which is either the deepest concentration or the beginning of a small problem. Some days I think the boiler door is deciding itself and I am just there to lift it.
The glaze question is the real one though. Shadow side always wants one more than the lit side, in my experience, and then you cannot see it anyway. Or you can only see it at four in the afternoon in November, and then you build the whole room around that.