“I Don’t Know How to Talk About Music” — Why You Actually Do

If you’ve ever caught yourself saying “I’m not a musician, so I don’t know how to talk about music,” you’re not alone.
Many of my clients start our first creative meeting with that exact phrase. But here’s the truth: you do know how to talk about music. You just might not realize it yet.

Music is storytelling through sound. It’s emotion, texture, movement, and space.
You don’t need to know what a diminished chord is to describe what a scene should feel like. When you say, "It should feel like light breaking through clouds" or "This character's theme needs to sound uncertain but brave" or "I want it to feel warm but lonely," you're already giving me musical direction. Those descriptions tell me about tone, color, pacing, and harmony in your own words.

As a composer and music designer, my job is to translate ideas into sound.
When you talk about color, I think about timbre and instrumentation.
When you describe texture, I think about layering, reverb, and rhythm density.
When you talk about emotion, I think about key, mode, and phrasing.

For example:

“This should feel dusty, like the desert at dusk.”
That tells me we’re probably leaning toward lower frequencies, softer percussion, and a warm tonal palette — maybe acoustic guitars, soft pads, or wind instruments with breathy textures.

You didn’t have to say “use a low-pass filter and a minor 6th interval.” You communicated the heart of the sound, and that’s far more valuable.

Think of music as another actor — a character that interacts with your world.
It can whisper, shout, comfort, or deceive. If you describe how that “character” behaves, you’re already helping shape the score.

Tell me about the arc. Does the story begin with stillness and end in chaos? Does the world feel mechanical, sacred, or human? These clues give me a musical roadmap that technical terms never could.

You don't have to speak theory to collaborate effectively. What matters is communication of intent—what you want players to experience. So next time you sit down with a composer for the first time and are tempted to say "I'm not a musician," start instead with "Here's what I want the player to experience."

That's the perfect start to collaborating with a composer.