The Effect of Tools On Creativity

 

 

Tools are the most basic form of technology, but tools can very often be confused with creativity, or obfuscate creativity. In music, focusing on the gear and the sounds may result in a good piece of music, but creativity doesn’t require that many tools—at least in the beginning. I write exclusively on an acoustic guitar, and sometimes a bass—anything that doesn’t have to be plugged in. Technology is in the service of creativity once the original idea is being shaped. You might have an idea for a sculpture, make a sketch, acquire the materials, then specific tools may be needed as the piece takes form. 

The greater the specificity of the genre the more creativity will be at the service of technology. Certain genres of music have equipment requirements, but in my view, the creativity should be less tool-dependent—unless you start with a particular tool and find materials to use it on.    

8/26/2022

[8/26/2024: Imagine every adult in the US was given some kind of a tool, as they would have been sent a COVID test–and everyone started to use it at the same time. This is what LLMs and AI generators are. They’re making mostly the same things based on the built-in affordances of the tool. They’re “in the box” of the tool. If everyone was sent a cheap guitar and a wah-wah pedal, and that’s all they had, everyone would be making those sounds. AI music generators have all the music production burned in as hardware, and the interface accesses only those sounds. It will be interesting to see how the tools get used in ways they weren’t intended, or whether people take advantage of interesting happy accidents in the flow of what they’re doing. There are many examples of using the extremes of something, but the one that comes to mind now is the high organ note at the beginning of Echoes of Pink Floyd's Meddle album. It was only later, after listening to that album for years that it's just a Hammond B3. Playing a B3 in the traditional way wouldn't have included that possibility. Similarly, there are no extreme uses in AI music, or they haven't yet been explored. In the case of Echoes the title made it possible to make that sound].

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From Assembling Tomorrow: One major problem in how we create is using the wrong thinking tool at the wrong time. Sometimes we get tangled up in cause and effect when we should really be searching for similarity. Other times we're noticing dazzling patterns when we really need to tell a story of why they matter. The way we make sense of things sets our course.

As you approach anything you are trying to understand, start with what you think you need to reveal. Use your ways of thinking as means to navigate rather than inadvertently letting their byproducts, whether wonky stories or phony patterns, navigate you instead. In a world of staggering sameness, we need tactics that leave room to morph, change, and pave our own ways.