What Music Composition Reveals About Experience Design

I had played the violin since childhood and listened to classical music for years before I began to understand much of what I was hearing. I could love a passage without knowing why it moved me. I could learn the notes without quite grasping how a phrase belonged to the whole.

In 2017, I took Jonathan Biss’s Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas and watched his master classes on the late works of Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms. What drew me in was the possibility of a more active relationship with music: hearing how it was made, and how its construction shaped my experience of it.

As a designer, I recognized something familiar. In both music and interaction, we encounter individual events while gradually forming a sense of the whole. Their meaning depends on their relationships: what has already happened, what we expect to happen next, and what changes along the way.

That is where I find the most useful connection between composition and experience design. Both involve giving an experience a structure that someone else will inhabit over time.

How structure becomes experience

A melody takes on a different character depending on the harmony beneath it. A pause can feel settled or unsettled depending on where it falls. A familiar theme can return after a turbulent passage and sound changed, even when its notes remain recognizable.

The listener carries what came before into what comes next. Composition works with that memory. It establishes patterns, departs from them, and makes a return perceptible. Form gives local events a larger significance.

Digital experiences also unfold through accumulated expectations. A person learns what a system calls things, how it responds to an action, and which changes matter. Repeated patterns help them anticipate what they can do. A departure from those patterns can signal a meaningful change, or create confusion if its purpose is unclear.

Consider an application process. Entering information, reviewing it, submitting it, and receiving a decision are different kinds of events. A review screen gives someone an opportunity to reconsider. Submission changes the status of their work. A confirmation establishes what has happened and what remains to be done. If the interface treats these moments as interchangeable screens, the person may complete the steps without understanding where they stand.

The connection to music is structural rather than decorative. A melody and a form are different materials, but in both cases an event gains meaning through its place in an unfolding experience. Looking only at individual notes or individual screens can obscure the relationships that make the whole intelligible.

Giving important moments their weight

One lesson I took from Biss’s teaching concerned the relationship between momentary character and overall shape. I remember him repeatedly asking students to attend to the character of a passage and to identify the events that mattered most to the piece.

These are connected demands. Each passage needs specificity, but the performance also needs a hierarchy. If every phrase receives the same emphasis, the listener can lose the sense of where the music is going. A beautiful sequence of details may still fail to communicate a larger form.

Design poses a similar problem. Each part of an experience needs care, while some moments require a different degree of attention: making a consequential choice, granting access, submitting work, discovering an error, or recovering from one.

Visual hierarchy is one way to express that difference. Sequence, wording, feedback, and opportunities to pause also contribute. A consequential action may need a clear account of its effects and a chance to review. A routine action may need very little ceremony.

This gives me a more precise way to think about rhythm in interaction. Rhythm includes the density of decisions, the alternation between effort and feedback, and the amount of time someone needs to understand a change. Animation speed is only a small part of it.

The analogy also has a limit that matters. A composer can specify a sequence and a tempo; a designer must accommodate people who skim, hesitate, return, or take another route. The design needs to remain coherent across those variations. Its structure supports the participant’s pace.

Emotional specificity and formal choices

Biss’s teaching made me more attentive to distinctions I had previously compressed into broad descriptions such as beautiful, sad, or intense. A passage might feel tender but uncertain, restrained but urgent, or calm in a way that seems difficult to sustain.

Those distinctions matter to interpretation. A performer who hears quietness as hesitation may shape a phrase differently from one who hears it as repose. Touch, timing, balance, and articulation give the interpretation an audible form.

I see a related challenge in design. We often describe a desired experience as friendly, reassuring, or delightful. Those words offer a direction, but they leave many decisions unresolved. What does reassurance require when someone has made a mistake? What kind of friendliness is appropriate when the outcome matters to them?

In an application process, reassurance might come from preserving someone’s work, identifying exactly what needs correction, and explaining whether a submission has succeeded. Warm language can help, but its credibility depends on the system’s behavior. A cheerful message cannot compensate for uncertainty about whether important information has been lost.

This is one reason I find composition useful as a way of thinking about design. It directs attention toward the formal choices through which an experience takes shape. Emotion can emerge from the relationship between those choices and the situation of the person encountering them.

Neither a musical passage nor an interface determines a single response. Familiarity, culture, memory, and circumstance affect what people hear and feel. Expressive intention gives the work direction; it does not guarantee its reception.

What language helps us hear

Some of the most affecting moments in Biss’s teaching came through his movement between words and sound. A description would draw my attention to a relationship I had missed. When he played again, I could hear it.

Language was helping me perceive. Describing a phrase as hesitant, for example, could make me listen more closely to its interruptions, its timing, or its reluctance to arrive. The word did not contain everything in the music, but it offered a way into it.

This makes language valuable in creative work. An impression can be difficult to examine while it remains vague. Putting it into words gives us something to question and develop. In a design discussion, saying that a transition feels abrupt becomes more useful when we can explain that it asks someone to commit before they have had a chance to review.

Yet language can also narrow attention. Once a passage has been described as grief, it may become harder to hear its tenderness, anger, or distance. A compelling explanation can acquire the authority of the work itself.

My original essay asked whether composers should describe the feelings their music was intended to convey. I am still interested in that question, but I would now distinguish between language that directs attention and language that settles interpretation. A description can invite someone to notice a particular relationship while leaving room for them to hear something else.

Artistic expression can hold qualities together that ordinary descriptions tend to separate. Music can sustain tenderness and unease within the same phrase. Words may help us approach that experience without exhausting it.

Deciding what to explain

That distinction has practical consequences for design. People need clear explanations when they are deciding what to do and accepting the consequences. They should be able to understand what an action changes, why information is requested, and how to recover when something goes wrong.

An expressive experience may leave more room for discovery. In an interactive story or a personal website, an object can invite associations before its history is revealed. Explaining every symbol at first encounter may remove some of the participant’s opportunity to make connections.

These situations ask different things of language. In one, explanation supports informed action. In another, it may offer an optional route into interpretation. The question is what someone needs to understand at that moment, and what they should be free to discover for themselves.

I would approach a form differently from a piece of music. Delaying resolution can be artistically meaningful; uncertainty about whether a form was submitted usually serves no such purpose. The value of the comparison lies in sharpening judgment about sequence, expectation, and consequence.

Making room for interpretation

Composition, performance, and listening also remind me that an experience passes through several kinds of agency. The composer establishes relationships in a score. The performer interprets them through sound. The listener brings attention, experience, and memory.

Design has its own forms of mediation. A design intention becomes a working system through implementation, content, and behavior. The person using it then encounters it under circumstances the designer can only partly anticipate. The roles do not map neatly onto music, but the distance between intention and experience is familiar.

This is where my early interest in music continues to influence my work. It asks me to attend to the shape of an experience and to the specificity of each event within it. It also asks me to listen for what my explanation of the work may have missed.

Learning more about musical structure changed what I could hear. I still respond to passages before I can explain them, but I have more ways to return to them: to notice a relationship, reconsider an interpretation, or understand why a moment seems to carry so much weight.

I want that same attentiveness in design. To understand how an experience is made, to give its important moments their proper weight, and to leave room for another person to encounter something I could not fully prescribe.