Singer, songwriter and guitarist Raul Midon is in Austin tonight for a performance at the One World Theatre. Midon has performed on the David Letterman show, is featured on Herbie Hancock’s “Possibilities” album, and collaborated with Stevie Wonder and Bill Withers.

He spoke with Autumn Caviness for KUT News and ReportingTexas.com about his experiences with Morse code and music, and how they’ve intersected in his life.

Midon:

    I think it’s all part of the same skill. I mean, I think with music you learn to memorize streams of pitches and streams of notes and it’s all part of the language of really being tuned in to audio. I think different people are more in tune with different senses. Obviously, people that see, visual tends to be the first sense that they do. That’s why a lot of times the best Morse code copiers for example, that see also, they don’t write down every letter. They just copy it in their head.

    I’ve always been a little bit different, even in the way I do music. In the music industry, everybody’s looking for the next… whatever, the next thing that was big. Everybody’s actually looking for something different, but they think they’re looking for something that sounds like whatever is big on the radio now.

    One of the big changes in my life, one of the big events, was running into Areef Martin – the great producer in New York City – who heard what I was doing and said, ‘What’s great about this is that it’s different.’ Not, it’s different [and] we need to make it sound more like what’s on the radio. So that was a huge sort of transformative period for me.

Originally from New Mexico, Raul Midon’s sound encompasses an eclectic fusion of soul, pop and alternative genres. He performs in Austin tonight at the One World Theatre for the Texas leg of his world tour.

Midon also performed gave this sneak peek an a new song, that has yet to be titled...

http://kut.org/2012/03/memorizing-music-and-morse-code/

[[ KUT Online Feature: Memorizing Music and Morse Code, a Q&A w/ Artist Raul Midon ]]

autumn