When Coldplay entered the studio to record their Grammy-winning 2008 album Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, Brian Eno, who produced the record, presented the group with a series of cryptic aphorisms and abstract thoughts: Work at a different speed, What would your closest friend do?, Gardening not architecture. These are just a few of the guidelines proposed in Eno’s Oblique Strategies system, a deck of cards he released alongside the artist Peter Schmidt in 1975.

The deck is meant to promote new ways of thinking—to break creative people free from the patterns and standbys that they often adopt when working, which is exactly what Eno proposed Coldplay do in the sessions for Viva La Vida. He had them each pull a card from the deck and work according to its principles, without telling the other members of the group what their card says. It was a way of expanding their minds, of freeing themselves from the ways they normally interacted with one another, and it inspired some of the ideas that led the record to be such a success.

“The chances of you getting a great piece of music [from that process] are quite remote,” Eno told Mojo in 2009. “But the chances of you getting a seed for something are quite strong. You hear a voice singing a single note over a drumbeat and you think… ‘Ooh, it’s not quite the right drumbeat or quite the right note, but there’s something good about it.’”

Coldplay and Eno were far from the first to use this sort of prompt-based process as a way of pushing themselves to try new things. Eno himself had been using Oblique Strategies in the studio since he worked with David Bowie in the late ‘70s. Writers and creators have often looked to Tarot decks as a way of opening themselves up to new experiences, and new narrative possibilities. There is a whole cottage industry of journals that promise to unlock your creative potential. But even if they’re not the first, Eno and Coldplay prove the value of such an approach—following someone else’s guidance, even if it’s abstract, can lead to learning new skills, new approaches, new ways of moving through the world.

That’s been the aim of producer, audio editor, and teacher Sarah Geis since she launched her project Audio Playground at the beginning of 2020. Inspired in part by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher's collaboration, Learning to Love You More, a website that gave creative “assignments intended to guide people toward their own experience,” Audio Playground is a newsletter and website that offers specific “assignments” and invites readers to submit their responses as MP3s that eventually end up hosted on the site. The point, the first installment of the newsletter said, “isn’t to make something good — though fine if you do — but to make something, and maybe even surprise yourself in the process.”

So over the course of the last year, Geis has issued her own prompts like, “make a 1-minute audio tour of a place you know well, for one specific person” or “recreate a favorite scent in sound.” Some of the directives have been more explicit than others, inviting producers to respond directly to an idea, others have allowed more abstract thought. But no matter the prompt, Geis has been surprised by the depth and variety of responses. Digging through the archives of the project, there are field recordings, narrated performances, intense works of assemblage and collage, among all sorts of other forms—and often this all happens in response to the same prompt.

Due to her background in podcasts and narrative audio, she says her project naturally welcomed responses from audio professionals, but that because the prompts are so open, she’s also started to see responses from people who have never made sound work before. “I've had a lot of people who are like, ‘Hey, this is my first time making anything. Here's a voice memo.’” she explains. “Some of those are very beautiful.”

In Geis’ eyes, people have been drawn to Audio Playground, and other projects like it, because it gives some kind of structure and accountability to the creative process. Making something from nothing can be intimidating even for people who have done it their whole lives, let alone people who are dipping their toes into an artform for the first time. She was deliberate, she says, in choosing the term “assignments” for the prompts she gives to her community. “A deadline helps me,” she explains. “I think you do want to feel a tiny bit of pressure, right? I think it’s less an assignment in terms of schoolwork, but more like you're a secret agent. I like the urgency in the word.”

Since 2012, writer, teacher, and sound artist Marc Weidenbaum has run a similarly minded community of musicians and artists called Disquiet Junto. The project, which takes its name from a society Benjamin Franklin founded as “a structured forum of mutual improvement,” is nearing its 500th installment. On each Thursday, a prompt is posted and community members have until the following Monday to upload a piece responding to the directive. (Recent installments include: “Record a 20-second clip of the sounds of an insect that you yourself have invented” and “Employ the Japanese technique of mending broken ceramics as a metaphor for remixing.”

But like Audio Playground, the responses are vast and varied. The 488th entry in Disquiet Junto (prompt: “Do something you’ve been putting off) inspired both monochromatic tape experiments and noirish jazz. The community that’s developed seems to be more about following whatever idea inspires you within the prompt rather than hewing to any specific sound or genre norms. For Weidenbaum, that exploratory nature seems to be part of the point of the project.

“The Junto has been an incredible way for me to explore subjects I normally do through writing, but in a more experimental way,” he explains. “If an idea occurs to me, rather than write about it, I can put the idea into the form of a compositional prompt and put it before the Junto to give it a go, and each week I marvel at the wide, disparate, creative ways the prompt is explored. I am a very curious person, and every week my curiosity is rewarded with more things to be curious about.

Part of the long-running success of the project seems to come from the attention and care that Weidenbaum has applied to the prompts themselves. There are never too many in a row with the same style or bent. Some are more conceptual, like #392 “Compose the national anthem for a fictional country,” while others are more practical, like #336 “Share a piece of music you’re working on in the interest of getting feedback.” Changing up the approach no doubt helps the musicians stay engaged, but it also allows everyone involved to flex different creative muscles, to push themselves in different ways, to always be trying something new. But for Weidenbaum, what’s most important is that people are spurred to action. Whether a prompt deeply resonates with a person or not, the hope is that work gets made in response.

“I think inspiration is overrated,” he says. “I think work is what is important. You can only make music if you make music. You can only paint if you paint. You can only write if you write. In general, you won’t get better at it, or at anything else, unless you do it. And so you do it. I think being inspired really happens in the midst of work, not before the work.”

Weidenbaum’s years of shepherding the project have resulted in a robust and engaged community. The group stays in touch through a Slack channel and a message board, encouraging one another and explaining the processes behind their pieces. It’s heartwarming in a way that feels rare in the currently decentralized state of the internet. So often making music and art can be an isolated process, especially for people who work in forms that might be deemed experimental, but projects like this allow people to connect. They’re able to push themselves but also to get in touch with others who are interested in doing the same. “The single best part of it is the people,” Weidenbaum explains. “I have become aware of so many creative individuals, and had remarkable conversations with so many of them.”

While the approach and aims of Audio Playground, Disquiet Junto, and their predecessors in prompt-based art projects are all slightly different, each of these efforts underscores the obvious benefits of getting involved with a project like this. Even for the most driven, self-sufficient artists, there are always moments where you sit before a blank canvas, or an empty project file on a DAW, unsure of what the next move is. While following other people’s prompts might not generate a whole coherent piece, it might, as Eno said of his work with Coldplay, point you in the direction of fruitful ideas.

Eno once explained that his prompts often pushed him to bizarre places, ideas he would have never thought to touch in his normal processes, which is why he adopted them to begin with. “Partly what they exist for is to break you out of the habit patterns and push you into a different groove,” he told Mojo “Making you do something you wouldn’t have done otherwise.” By making the creative process a social, community effort, projects like Geis’ and Weidenbaum’s only push Eno’s idea further—they allow creative people to undertake bold new journeys, and also to help one another along the way. They’re exploring new worlds, together.

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Audio Credits:

(In order of appearance)

Audio Playground
Dinah Cardin
Cristina Marras
James T. Green
Isabel Robertson
Tina Antolini
Alexa Burke
Claire Miranda
Tal Minear

Disquiet Junto
Jochen Edmund Pendleton
Daniel Diaz
Dirigent
Krakenkraft
Douglas Scott
Ray Cobley
Apan Music
Euclidean