Creativity and Darwinism

[ellijos5]

Hey guys, first I would like to say that I'm new here and have been reading around.  I'm enjoying this site quite a bit and it's refreshing to feel like im not completely alone haha.

Today I kind of had this thought about music (i said creativity cause it could be any kind art) and how it relates to the theory of evolution.  I'm not much into technical details (I don't do much research on things and I'm still in high school) but I am fascinated by the general idea behind theories if that makes sense.  Anyway I know how evolution is a process that lasts years and years and builds in very tiny steps from one thing to the next basically until so much time has passed that the final product almost seems completely different than its original.  I kind of tied this to music thinking about how basically every music is influenced by another and nothing you create can be totally original.  You might hear a chord or a riff (using guitar as example) and might change one little thing or tweak it in a way, and then tweak that, and keep building little by little until you make something that sounds different enough to not be totally copying.  I'm sure there is some scientific name for this, but tell me if its flawed or not cause it feels like this is the only way creativity works, unless you discover by accident, although that could be subconsciously tweaking too.

[HW7]

Music and other art can fall in the category of social Darwinism, in my opinion.  Somehow over century and we have gone from swing being very risqué to stores playing techno remixes of songs about Russian roulette.  As you noted, it never happens as a drastic change.  We went from swing to rock and roll then through the British Invasion and then to punk and now we have metalcore and stuff like that.  However, at the same time we have also gone from rock and roll to folk and then to country and now we have Taylor Swift.  And we can look at going from Rock and Roll to blues and then up to R&B now to rap.  It's like a tree that would be a really cool diagram to design.  But each culture took the previous style of music and developed it further to develop a sub culture.  Look through all the different genres of rap or punk.  But it's all developed and twisted if you will based on a sub culture and the members experiences.

I feel like we enjoy music that we can relate to often times.  Or things that tell a story that we can't relate to but find interesting.  Like, I've never been in a gang shoot out or even lived in the rough parts of a city, but I enjoy listening to gangster rap.  I am rambling at this point like an old man, but I think you get the gist.  Keep thinking and questioning everything around you.

[ellijos5]

Haha, rambling is one thing i do. 

I also had this thought.  Here is a scenerio.  You wake up one day in a world of no people, no sounds, no memory, nothing but a drum or guitar or piano in front of you.  You have no memory or conscious of music ever heard.  I suspect that you wouldn't even have initiative to even grab the intrument and play it.  And if you did you would have to base it off something but you have nothing so therefore you couldn't create music.  Unless somehow you were influenced by sounds you make when you walk or something.  Like maybe birds learned how to create noise by hearing trees fall so they mimicked it.  Then we were influenced by other creatures sounds and they just built.  I don't know kinda rambling here but someone tell me if this could be plausible or not.

[HW7]

I know what you are saying, but I don't know that I can get down with it.  I think that being human, we are naturally curious.  We may not know what to do with it but we are going to try to figure out something to do with whatever instrument it is.  Since those instruments are designed for a certain purpose I believe that when we hit the strings on the guitar or the skin of the drum it will trigger the best chemical reaction in our head.  Like, "WOW!  I don't know what the HELL that was, but hitting that string was AMAZING!"  Where as if we just used it to drag on the ground we may be like, "huh. this is a weird object but dragging it on the ground is really stupid." and we would move onto a different behavior trying to elicit the best reaction from the instrument.

Your thoughts?

[ellijos5]

Yeah I like the way you put it.  Kinda like a trial and error type thing.  I can just imagine how awesome that would be creating your very own music that has never ever been made before im sure it would be quite gratifying. 

[HW7]

Yea, that would probably be something that I can't identify with, but I imagine how satisfying it must be to hit that first note ever.  I remember as a child, I used to go to weird places in my lawn and in places like the mall and stand in them wondering to myself if I was the first person to ever stand in those very strange places.  And of course, being 10 or so, I was always the first human to stand there and that pleased me every time.