A brief treatise on the advantages of knowing nothing
The first electronic music synthesizer I saw was in college, in a course I took in the studios at Ithaca College. These early synths powered up with an empty ‘patch,’ and required extensive programming and wiring to create any sound. Once we had created our own ‘patches’ the interface used to play the synth was a keyboard. A piano-style keyboard with plastic black and white keys.
Roland JD-800 Synthesizer, one of the instruments I worked with at Ithaca College.
Playing Piano
As we received our first assignment to create a piece of music with the synths, our professor asked us to split into three groups:
All the skilled pianists; if you could play anything by a classical master from memory you were here. This was a small group.
Anyone who had taken piano lessons, or “knew enough to be dangerous.” I was in this group!
Piano, what? If you didn’t know the difference between black and white keys this was you. I was so excited not to be in the newbie group.
The professor proceeded to dismiss the first group: “I’m not worried about you. You know how keyboards are used in western music and you have the technical skill to execute whatever you want to play.”
Then he dismissed the third group: “I’m not worried about you either. These keys? They’re just buttons. Push them. Don’t worry about how pianos are played, instead explore the sounds you get from your own individual approach. There’s no wrong way to make music here.”
Finally, he kept the second group over: “You are going to be the most challenged. You see a piano, when in fact they’re just buttons. You’ve been told how to play the piano, so you will approach it like a piano. Yet, you don’t have the mastery to make your fingers do everything you can think of. Your creativity is already confined by what you think the keyboard can do, and what your hands don’t have the training to do.”
Keyboard skill vs. creativity of output. In this conception low and high skill enables higher creativity, while middling skill depresses it. To obtain the highest creativity either skill has to be maximized or minimized.
The Valley of Mediocrity
At the end of the project, when everyone presented their pieces, it bore out almost exactly like he had said from the start.
The output from the piano-proficient students was evident: they had lots of piano-isms, lots of notes, tended to be faster and very showy.
The pieces from the third group were distinct as well: they were crazy, they were chaotic, they were creative and there was no influence of the keyboard-nature of the interface. They could have been using any bunch of buttons or other input device.
And the work of the middle group, including my own contribution I’m afraid, was as constrained as predicted (*cough* lame). Some broken chords, halting rhythm, simplistic little melody fragments, or in one case a full-blown song melody (picture: picking out the notes from a Disney theme song on the piano by ear). The pieces may have had some element of creativity underlying them, but then had been forced through conceptions of how keyboards should be approached, and executed terribly. One could hear the “sit up tall, two hands on the keyboard” tension more than one could hear the creative flow of musical expression.
Boxed In
Years later I would learn the concept of affordances in interfaces, and still continually wonder: when are I/we in that middle group?
The middle group was unable to get beyond their perceptions of the limitations of the interface (keyboards play notes, they play chords, they’re played with two hands) and get to creative exploration of the whole range of possibilities (press them, smash them, roll a bottle over them). I could not see past the regular ordering of alternating whites and blacks (and years of piano teachers correcting my etudes) and thus my ability to create music was boxed in. I wanted to be in the masterful, first group, when the most creative work came from the unconstrained explorers in the third group.
When do we let our perceptions of the limitations of our tools (the apps we use, the vehicles we drive, the mobile devices we carry, the models and frameworks we employ), prevent us from exploring their full range? Of thinking beyond the constraints we impose on ourselves before we even get started?
If only I could have forgotten how to play the piano for a semester and known nothing of the conventions of keyboards! My creations in that class would most certainly have been different (better? Maybe not, but different for sure).
Dr. Ben Smith is a Data Scientist and thinker, fascinated by the appearance of computers in our daily lives, creativity, and human struggles. He has had the privilege to think, learn, and write at the University of Illinois, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Cleveland Institute of Art, Case Western Reserve U., IUPUI, and at Boardable: Board Management Software, Inc.
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