I defined art as part of a class assignment-- this is what I wrote
I think that art is one's means of getting their own ideas out there in the open because they think that it's worth sharing them with the world. If I think it's a good idea, and would make for something cool, then chances are other people will as well, because everyone is similar in some regards, and one of them is there is a sort unspoken list of what would be a neat idea worth exploring and what wouldn't be. Some people have different opinions on both of these lists but there's a general consensus.
When it comes to art, it can be a really good way of solidifying ideas that have taken form, but haven't quite set yet, they're not tangible. In my experience, I'll have a good idea for a short little ditty, but it's not a fully formed idea yet, it's just a melody, or just a bass line, the other instruments and the percussion usually are just background noise, all fuzzy and "sedated", they're not really there, yet, and they won't take shape until I'm at my desk and the melody or bass line has already been completed, because from there I can use that as my base point to sort of reach out and grab ideas as they pass, like a small planet that I can pull little bits of asteroid down to and fertilize the still-molten planet, get an ocean going. By the time everything's been put into place, there's an atmosphere, some nice little plants, some grass, an ocean, some trees, and clouds floating by-- a lovely little self-contained song with plenty of things to make it an all-around solid work.
That's the finished form of an idea that started out as merely a short progression that I pictured as some mere lavender MIDI blocks in a row, and now that it's fully formed, I can share it with the world, and they have the chance to gain the feelings from that finished project that I did from the initial unknowable, foggy idea for a tune that I had in the beginning, because they have all the bits and pieces placed before them. It's sort of like providing context for what is an emotional moment in a movie for you to someone who's only just walked in. ...only tons more effective, because music is a lot more direct and easy to get into than character motivations and plot points.
()
I remember this melody, heard in the marimba line, came into my head while dozing, a perfect four measures of melody. In its dream-like form, it was much more modern-sounding, and it had no accompaniment, only a form of reverb. However, once I placed it in, when I had transcribed it, it sounded alone to me, and boring, and as soon as I'd played it back and realized this, already tons of areas of my brain began firing off, scribbling down little ideas, chucking them left and right, and some of them made it to the 'factus' stage, while others were binned, lost to oblivion. I remember I had the marimba, and then I added the vibraphone you hear in the left ear, which went through some changes, after the bass line, which is actually a voice clip of a girl saying "Okay", lowered to pitches that sound completely different to the source-- all of the instruments are of a low Hertz rate due to their size, being from a Game Boy game, but the ideas, the ways of working around the limitations and finding new and unique ways of applying the game's myriad of sounds presents hundreds of opportunities, and just as many ideas as to how I can execute an idea for an instrumental line. Finding different combinations of instruments from the relatively limited amount of choices to find what meshes the best while also sounding sufficiently like the style of music it's trying to employ, or embody, rather.
While this part of the process is by no means the universal bit, the part where the brain gets a kick out of coming up with all sorts of ideas as to how one can achieve the vision they have for a project, realizing the idea fully, knowing at a certain point, on some primal level, that yes, they've done it, give or take the little tweaks and corrections, that this is the realized idea, this is the fully completed edition of the idea, that is what is to be published to the world to hear, for unlike the barebones melody that prompted us to begin the project in the first place, this is a pleasing outcome, that we would enjoy listening to. ...THAT is the part that I feel is universal, that feeling of knowing you've achieved a level of translating your idea to reality that conveys what you had in mind to the best of its ability, that lives up to your own reasonable standard, and can convey to the audience what it is you believed about your own idea.