Daily Inspiration: Meet Spirah

Today we’d like to introduce you to Spirah.

Hi Spirah, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My music journey started with singing and songwriting as a way of healing through hard times. My mom said I sang before I spoke, but my entire adolescence this was a way to get back to myself through difficult emotions and to self-soothe. I liked to write poetry and stories in the sense that I could rewrite anything that I was going through with a silver lining, to write my own story.

I even invented a language of secret characters when I was young to replace a traditional alphabet so that I could encode my songs for no one else to see. I never felt as though I wrote my songs though, I always felt like they were written through me with me from the source as a receiver. I just hear what’s in my head and find a way to channel it. It was never something I shared, always done in private reflection until I had some great friends push me to share my voice as much as possible.

At this point, I became fascinated with music production but I had a narrative in my head that I was not technologically inclined. I worked with other producers such as Bass Physics and Sodown on early songs as Carly Lynn and these songs did well.

It took me a few years to build the confidence to jump into production myself and this happened when I changed the narrative, I told myself which was that I was tech savvy and I could do anything I set my mind to if I sat with it long enough. It became a game of discipline. I wanted full stylistic control of my sound and to not get stuck in any genre. I had hundreds of songs written that needed a backbone or canvas, so being able to compose everything was necessary for my process.

Spirah was conceived as I aligned to newer genres in my production. This name came from the root Spir- breath or life force and I loved this word as a personification of it. Breath was always my most important tool for anxiety and for activating the fullness of my voice. It is a tool for meditation and centering on the present moment. Spirit, aspire, respire, inspire, conspire. All aligned. At the time, I was also working in respiratory science so this all aligned.

Outside of music, I am a bioengineer with a diverse background in optics, neuroscience, chemistry, and physics. The worlds of music and science always drew beautiful parallels for me. Both were the closest I could come to magic. Approaching everything through this lens made me more proficient in both things.

Now, I work in optical engineering and the parallels between music have helped me deepen my understanding in so many ways. Everything goes through the same pipeline – waveform generator/oscillator to filters to phase masks to amplitude/frequency modulation to readout on oscilloscopes. Light and sound are both waves, so they can be treated pretty much the same (except light is also a particle but we don’t need to get into that).

I became obsessed with music production and it’s been the most fun thing in the world and where I can go no matter what. I released my first EP in 2018 and started performing djing. Since then, I’ve made hundreds of songs I am very excited about, but I am in a process of perfectionism and quality control to dial in every component of my mix so that when I am ready to start releasing, I can be ready with a ton of ammunition delivered most properly. I recently went through an intense period of grief with the passing of my love, New Light.

His creation process always fueled me and it was the best way to connect by making music together. Part of my story includes honoring his legacy through my music and through collaborating with his unfinished projects and letting them see the sun. With this being a huge motivator to continue for him, I also was frozen for a long period where I stopped djing or making music for anyone else but him and me. Most of the time I was just totally incapacitated from work dealing with the most intense emotions.

For this period things were so low I didn’t think I could make it from moment to moment. I stopped enjoying music, and couldn’t enjoy anything. But I needed it to cope and release. I wrote a lot of darker sadder music, although that has always been the undertone of my music as I usually arrived here to resuscitate myself after a period of pain. A lot of my recent music has explored these existential themes of grief, loss, and love, and where we connect inside these themes. I still feel I communicate with him through my creation process and channel him. Forever will be my Whys’z and a reason I have to know love and honor that. (I use this whys’z because that was his alias and a big spark of Why I create but you don’t have to say that I’m being cryptic). It’s been a few years and I am getting stronger, better, and ready to keep releasing and performing after integrating everything experienced in this night of the soul.

My style is ethereal, dark, multi-genre singer-songwriter electronica. I make trap beats, garage, hip hop, bass, dnb, and all electronica in different blends that retain my airy beautiful style. My favorite thing about music is helping someone else to heal by relating to something I’ve written. Lyrical music transcends words to convey so much emotion and if anyone else is coming to my music from a place of heartbreak, loss, love, self-growth, etc. they may feel what I feel and be able to release this through emoting it. I love hearing someone say it helped them through a hard time, anxiety, etc., and made them feel more empowered. That’s what it’s all for.

Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
There have certainly been some life-altering moments that set me back for long periods. But these moments also drive me deeper to continue to connect.

Grieving my late partner was one which is incapacitating in a lot of ways and stole a lot of my motivation or joy for things for far too long. I am thankful to those who helped me to find joy in this again and come back to myself. I treasure our collaborations though and all his musical equipment I still use, which feels like a spiritual experience to play on.

I struggle with the social ladder games and fitting into a mold. I do DJ, but at the end of the day the music I make isn’t always to get party to, I’d rather it makes you feel something. I struggle with the ego aspect of this industry, the struggle to make a profit, and all of the usual stuff. Honestly, I struggled witnessing a drug epidemic pass through my favorite community and it has made me jaded recognizing the abuse that takes place. It can take the ones you love and it’s not worth it. It doesn’t seem real or like anything to worry about until it’s all too real. And now it’s hard not to see this aspect everywhere I look and resent the way people have tied our art community to dependency on something else for it to be enjoyed.

Lastly, there are ways I do feel as though I have struggled as a woman in the industry. Mostly have mostly noticed how easy it is to gain respect, surprisingly this is a huge contrast from STEM where even though it is a male-dominated industry it is now shifted to be merit-based and I don’t have to play ego games to get respect, it is inherent to my work. There is some looming intimidation factor with male perception of a female making music that does take some strength to push past. But at the same time, I love being underestimated and I kind of get a kick out of the fact that people are caught off guard.

I certainly have had some condescending experiences in professional settings at shows, etc. which honestly sabotaged whole sets because of mistrust that I knew how to work my equipment. Witnessed people less competent with equipment trying to give me lessons on stage in the middle of my singing and mixing, which made it impossible to deliver my words to the audience. In the end, though my femininity is an advantage and is vital to my sound. And I know I deserve respect based on merit so I don’t sweat disrespect unless it’s interfering with my work.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I got a B.S. in biochemistry with physics, math, and neuroscience minors. I worked in respiratory medicine for a few years – hence spirah. I then worked in bioengineering of a lung-on-a-chip model using a 3D bioprinter to make accurate culture models of an air-liquid interface for scientific research. These lung models then could be used with smoking robots (study effects of smoking) or viral aerosolizers (study covid).

I then moved to get my Masters in bioengineering with a specialization in optical engineering. I worked in an optical lab building a miniaturized high-resolution microscope for live neural imaging. This is the field that has most excited me in scientific pursuit, as it mirrors sound design so well. I feel as though I thrived in this field because I already understood all these waveform manipulations from music. As well as the signal processing of electronic instrumentation used in electrical engineering.

Building microscopes is just a matter of illuminating something with a light source (laser in this case) and then treating the light selecting for geometry, wavelength, phase, etc. to shape the wave on the way to the sample. The image is collected here and returns the geometric wave-shaping path to detection, in this case, photon counting. I designed some software to reconstruct the image from the pixels as well from scanning mirrors moving a focal point and automated the moving mirrors and photodetector with frequency modulation.

My move from chemistry to engineering was also thanks to my music journey, as I discovered my love for building tech in building a custom PC. The further I got into learning engineering I had toying with building custom music gear as well as microcontrollers like Arduino. Just simple things like using an ultra-sonic range finder to sense distance and map parameters of music to that such as pitch or volume. Or a simple knob made on wearable clothing to control any parameter in Ableton from 0-127. This could be reverbing amount, beat repeat amount, a filter sweep, any dry wet, etc. And then embedded into jewelry. Another conception is flex sensing for hand gestures. Total gear head I’m sorry for the intensity of this dive I know my work is kind of nuts and it bounces all over.

I never had any formal education in music. I’ve just learned from friends, YouTube, tinkering, reading, etc. However, I believe that my science and physics background make it a fun vantage point to understand music fundamentally. I’d still love to keep expanding here. I finished my Masters and am onto new horizons in microscope engineering, but I am constantly excited to return to music and begin to put more into it and emphasize music education.

So maybe we end by discussing what matters most to you and why.
People. Community. Love. For music if it helps people, it’s doing its job if it can transmute an emotion to be released and move into something more positive, that’s the goal.

I want us to all be living in the best way, loving, growing together, and creating. I just want to help people and love people who feel alone going through something difficult.

Contact Info:

• Website: linktr.ee/spirahvocals
• Instagram: instagram.com/spirahvocals
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@spirah5803
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/spirahvocals