I grew up with a recording studio in the guest room, complete with a hi-fi ADAT 8-track recorder, an audio mixing table covered in color-coded knobs, a synthesizer that came with over 300 sound options and a $1,000 microphone my uncle kept in a varnished maple box. It was state-of-the art for the ’90s. I was six years old.

I lived in the room next door to the makeshift studio and in the evenings my mother, a music composition major and an accomplished songwriter, would write and record songs. I could hear the muffled sounds of the piano coming through the walls as I fell asleep, my mother singing along with the music, stopping every few seconds to jot down the newly-written notes into her book of blank sheet music.

My uncle worked for a recording studio and sometimes came to visit us. When he arrived, the music production in our house would suddenly begin to move quickly — my uncle would be over for several weeks, and they had to get the recording done in a short amount of time. I remember waking up at night, opening my eyes in my dark room and hearing the two of them harmonizing in the small storage closet they had emptied out and begun to use as a singing studio.

My mom and her brother improvised and made use of the space and materials available to them: I remember my uncle using a set of pantyhose stretched over an embroidery hoop to serve as a spit screen for the microphone. And many, many hours later, they ended up with several polished, finalized songs.

Their improvised recording studio included an unexpected sound engineer: me. They’d call me in sometimes when they needed another hand to turn the volume knob at just the right time to fade-in and fade-out the microphones when they were busy with the vocals and piano. I would stand there, clutching my teddy bear and feeling terrified, because when I turned it too slowly or too quickly, they looked at me, wide-eyed, and told me to do it again. And again. And again, until I would run scared back to my room after a satisfactory job, and my mom and uncle continued their work.

Improvisation is important when it comes to creating art. Not just in the sense of off-the-cuff solos in jazz (Miles Davis), or in the “random” assortment of objects or paint strokes in graphic art (Jean-Michel Basquiat), but as a way of thinking. Improvisation is less about thoughtlessness and randomness than about knowing the rules and possibilities and stretching them. It’s about creating something out of the materials on hand, be it the circle of fifths and a brass trumpet or a storage closet and a good microphone. It’s about not letting structure or the possession of the “ideal” recording space, musical instrument or art materials keep you from making the art you want to make. Improvisation, in short, is about free-thinking.

A pioneering force of the 20th-century music movement was this urge to break the rules, to re-define the idea of music and what's pleasing to the ear. Take composer John Cage and his infamous piano piece “4’33,” which consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of complete silence as Cage sat there, doing nothing at the ivories. The live audio recording of the piece contains complete silence that quietly bleeds into the sniffling, coughing and sneezing of the audience members as they become increasingly restless when they realize they’re not getting any audible tunes until Cage finished performing his silent piece.

John Cage was also a progressive art theorist who used music to dabble in conceptual art. My mother attended one of Cage’s concerts when she was in graduate school. At the concert, she and a large group of people sat on the floor in a quiet, dark room.