You start playing music by copying other people's sounds. Soon it starts to soak in and you can't copy the sounds you hear without shaping them yourself. This is the first glimpse of your style.

Many hours of practice later, you can free yourself of the copying and start to wander around. This wandering becomes the fulltime approach. As you wander, your inner controlfreak comes out–to limit, constrain, censor, and mess with your pure wandering. Whether you're feeling free or obliged to imitate something else, like it or not you're creating something new.

Curtis Roads says at the beginning of his Composing Electronic Music:

To be a composer means that one enjoys solving puzzles of pitch, rhythm, sound color, phrase structure, and process, but also questions of taste and feeling. To be an electronic music composer, however, requires a particular disposition because of the unique predicament of this medium.

When I'm at my most free, I have some kind of thing I want to solve in a piece music, like there's a problem at hand. I want to cause an effect to occur. It's not always so thinky as I'm making it sound here–sometimes it's just repeated jamming until I / we feel like I/we have arrived somewhere.

I think I'm still learning to wander in this world that academia calls "Electronic Music", and anyone under 40 is just going to call "Music". I'm still learning how to back off the overwhelm I feel with options when I start Ableton and instead, just play. I'm still learning how to push past an hour of playing with the same idea. I'm still learning how to be a producer / engineer and a *writer / composer / player all at the same time.