Carlynn Crosby shares how a second-grade writing assignment sparked her lifelong tendency to follow her creative instincts—prompt or no prompt. She and Tyler talk about the joy (and occasional embarrassment) of early school writing projects, and how those experiences shaped her voice as a writer today.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

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Dropped into grad school at the University of South Florida, Tyler Kline realized he’d been composing under a rock. He recounts an overwhelming first semester of unraveling old habits, absorbing new ideas from composers like Stuart Saunders Smith, and even delivering a commission that backfired—before a “poop-in-a-group” moment launched a voracious dive into contemporary music. The crash-course transformation still shapes the way he writes, learns, and pushes forward today.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

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micro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

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Joshua Mallard discusses how his background in contemporary classical music — particularly as a flutist — informs his approach to scoring video games. He explains how extended techniques and concert-hall aesthetics can surprise and engage game audiences, and shares why the divide between concert and game music might not be as wide as it seems.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.

Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.

Follow us on Instagram @loose.leaf.transmissions.

micro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

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Caterina Schembri talks about discovering composition before she even knew how to play an instrument—a late start that came from a broader hunger for creative expression. She describes how Debussy’s piano music opened something in her, giving her a sense of color, atmosphere, and possibility that she felt compelled to understand from the inside. Those early years were a blur of theory lessons, piano practice, and first attempts at shaping harmony on her own terms. Even now, she still begins at the piano, letting harmony lead her thinking—a trace of how she first entered music by intuition, curiosity, and sheer momentum.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.

Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.

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micro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

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Gabriel Bolaños centers his work on timbre, particularly the ambiguous zone where an oboe in its high register stops sounding like an oboe. Because this threshold is subjective—dependent on listener experience, acoustics, variables beyond control—he saturates pieces with multiple layers of timbral ambiguity so that if one element fails, others carry the effect. Collaborating with performers, he seeks sounds unusual enough to notate reliably without becoming recognizable performance practice. From there, he builds structures: harmonic progressions made from timbre, sudden interruptions instead of gradual morphing. Microtonality emerged from spectral approximations of frequencies but now lives in his intuition. In Slew, quarter-tone-flat guitars surround audiences with overtone series that cohere and separate like waves. He pushed the piece to extremes—no compromises—making it visceral enough that even unfamiliar listeners could feel its intention, like Xenakis. Ambiguity, he insists, preserves magic; recognizability kills it.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.

Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.

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micro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

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Hannah Boissonneault reflects on the evolving attitudes toward genre and identity within classical music — and how her own experience in academic spaces revealed both barriers and opportunities. She shares how supportive mentors and collaborative communities helped her break away from rigid definitions of what a “composer” should be, and how that shift opened up a more expansive, personal, and integrated creative practice.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.

Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.

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micro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

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Shruthi Rajasekar reflects on growing up in a deeply musical household shaped by her mother’s work as a Carnatic vocalist and collaborator across cultures. She and Tyler talk about the intersections of Indian and Western classical traditions, early encounters with instruments like the cello and clarinet, and the way curiosity and openness became part of her musical DNA.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.

Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.

Follow us on social media @LooseLeafTransmissions.

micro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For Graeme Shields, composing started as play—long afternoons with friends huddled around the family computer, experimenting with Finale and discovering the thrill of sound on command. Those early experiments evolved into something more intentional: arranging, composing, and eventually finding community at the Junior Composers Institute, where he met living composers and heard his music performed for the first time. A conversation about how curiosity becomes commitment.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.

Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.

Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissions

micro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.