Hello, it's your host, Andrew here. If you're enjoying Send Me to Sleep so far and you'd like to help support the show, the best way to do that is Send Me to Sleep Premium. Over there, you'll get ad-free episodes, as well as access to all of our bonus episodes. You can find a link to a seven-day free trial in the description notes. Thanks so much for listening, and here's just a few ads before the show begins. You know, in jazz, there's

an expression, and I'm not quite sure who to attribute it to, but within the jazz circles,

there's this expression that goes, it's all about the notes that you don't play.

And I'm not sure back when I first initially heard that phrase,

I truly understood the meaning of it.

And that was until I experienced it myself.

And now I wouldn't call myself any kind of proper musician,

but I do like music.

I am musical, and I make music often.

And the experience of having the idea to instead of continue to add notes to a melody to, a melody or a composition that you're working on.

And having that inspiration to take a note away as a means of improving the composition.

And then when you play it back

and you realise the power And then when you play it back,

and you realise the power that comes from the pause,

it's like a paradigm shift.

I think when that happened for me it truly was a new way of not just thinking about music, but thinking about the world and the way I interact with it.

Hello, my name's Andrew Andrew and today I'm going to talk about the Japanese concept of Ma. And if you've never heard of it before, the idea at first glance is rather simple.

An attempt at a literal translation is something like emptiness or negative space or pause or break.

But when you look into it and when you begin to see around the periphery of what is actually quite a complex

quite a nuanced idea you'll begin to see that it really is something that's quite difficult to describe in words

and much more easily understood by experiencing the power of it. And this is why I use the example of music and jazz and

the notes that you don't play.

...