Sonic Revelations, Sonic Revolutions

For this blog I just wanted to comment on the discussion we had on Wednesday.

Among the several things that called my attention, there were to points that particularly interested me.  First was the idea of creativity as something new or as a recycling of old ideas.    Then was the matter about music recordings and how they improve (or not) our experiences as listener and/or composers.

We discussed how we saw the recycling of old music styles, and how it can be argued than now nothing is actually creative or new, as it is all based on something done before.  Then someone said something I thought was interesting in this context.   It was raised that access to music recordings can improve composition, as we can re-listen to cool spots and therefore easily start pointing out to what we like and think could improve a particular composition.   But doesn’t this activity of repeated listening feeds the recycling of music?  If we listen a piece we like again and again (assuming that we don’t get sick of it) wouldn’t we be more vulnerable to end up copying particularities of that piece ⎯hence recycling it?
So, although I don’t think that recycling happens more now than it did in the past.  I do think that recorded music does help with it.     If we only had the chance to listen to something a couple of times, we would have to fill the blanks in cool spots ourselves ergo pushing our own creativity.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 4:18 pm and is filed under alej, creativity, recycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.