Tomorrow never knows

Product asked eight practitioners: has technology advanced or undermined creativity in music?

Murder on the dancefloor

My initial reaction was to say ‘Yes! It has done both’. From the fuzzbox that gave us the riff for ‘Satisfaction’ to the sequencer which gave us the reams of sterile ‘typewritten’ music of much of the 80s… but then again gave us modern masterpieces like ‘Trans Europe Express’ and ‘The Man Machine’. So,when I think of it, technology is neutral. Creativity comes from the artist. Unfortunately, however,technology encourages people to think they are musically creative because they can use it to cover up their lack of musicality and the utter absence of any alpha waves in their brains. You could call it karaoke creativity. The democratisation of creative technologies has confused people. Say instead of giving everybody a computer you gave everybody a gun. Sure there would be a couple of gifted individuals who could shoot like the lovechild of William Tell and Annie Oakley but think of the senseless loss of human life. It’s the same with creativity in music. For every bedroom Beethoven there are millions of musical mass murderers. Likewise, the genius of Grandmaster Flash needed the technology of the turntable but the turntable itself had no creative potential until he applied his unique creativity to its existence.

Alan McCusker-Thompson, director of Funky Star Creative Management, a Glasgow-based artist management company. http://www.funkystar.co.uk

New gold dream

Creativity will always exist; it’s a fundamental human drive. Some find it hard to release this creativity and technology can be a great liberator, particularly for the enabling of more abstract impulses or even for helping to transmit accidental impulses of creativity.

But, at the same time, technology can act as a shield or a mask that allows the creation of ‘end product’ but disguises the fact that the perpetrator lacked any creative impulse besides the desire to simply ‘produce’. This second condition has led us to the current state where we are drowning in product and too much time is spent trying to wade through all these transmissions to find the gold at the core.

Keith Mcivor, also known as JD Twitch, one half of Glasgow’s Optimo (espacio) http://www.optimo.com

Song for whoever

The penny whistle, the drum, the sound recorder and the computer are all technologies, tools that can be used with greater or lesser degrees of creativity. I am a technofan, so if the camps are being delineated, I’ll pitch my tent in the technopark, with the freedom to go out into the wilds at will. In my camp I hope to meet intrepid adventurous types, open minded folks not adverse to gathering round the campfire of an evening to sing a song, but equally happy to sample it, bend it, shape it and share it the morning after. Yay for the internet and web 2.0, yay for the homegrown label that can carve out a niche for itself internationally because we can find it. Yay for the sound recorder that lets me catch a sonic moment. Yay for the computer that lets me explore the material nature of sound and even create music with my two finger keyboard skills and beginner clarinet player glee. Yay for the radio. Yay for the phone. And yay for all the fading technology, which in fearless, creative, musical and experimental hands led the way.

Zoë Irvine, sound artist, lives and works in Scotland. http://www.dialadiva.net /
http://www.magneticmigration.net / and http://zebraphone.blogspot.com/

To read this article in full buy the current issue of product - The Technology Issue.