The Absence of Limits
The enemy of art is the absence of limitations so why do we seek to eliminate to cost of acquiring skills?
“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations”
—Orson Welles
“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.”
—Larry Page
Young Adults and the Consequence of Severed Conscience and What Our Generation Allowed
For over two decades the promise of the Internet delivering a variety of information, tools and opportunities for communication has been the mantra of those who insist that continual online presence with social networks liberates the mind. The idea is that the effort to learn and acquire skills is greatly reduced, if not eliminated, because we have access to the ideas and the works of the entire planet at our fingertips. The phrase “building communities” has been proffered as the rationale for trading your time and attention with your surroundings in order to “engage.”, as community confers a sense of well being and positive interaction.
Spending excessive amounts of time online has had two effects. For one, it removed the possibility for failure for our kids that we Gen Xers experienced while we practiced sports, played music, learned carpentry or worked to earn a little money. Many kids today struggle with building relationships because they haven’t witnessed each in a way that shows that they all face challenges. There is risk being active together in sports, in group activities that is not present at all in social networks. We are depriving our kids a sense of adventure, and not allowing them to seek out things for themselves where physical interaction is required, such as playing a band.
The second effect has been is our youngest generation is not forming in-depth skills to continue creating and exploring ideas, as they toil less mastering elements of required to produce art, writing and music. Our fascination with entertainment has given rise to proliferation of “content” that fills the social media streams and consumes our attention, and much of this is created using tools that eliminate the need to identify a lack of expertise and build fundamental skills. What does that do developmentally when someone does not need to face their limitations?
And what do kids do with this extra time that they now have? If young adults don’t have to practice an instrument because software and digital sampling libraries enable anyone to create music, are they spending more time hanging out with friends, or is social media creating a state of Severed Conscience where kids are just part of the dopamine mills?
Below is a very sad passage from a young writer for Jonathon Haidt by the name of Freya India who focuses on the damage social media does to teens.
Allowing youth to languish online has eliminated the joy of music, creativity and art as CONTENT has been streamed at them non-stop. Online “content” for many teens is a series of images, jokes, videos and social messages containing references that require the understanding of adults to add context. There are experienced in complete and many cases extreme isolation as a child stares at the screen and scrolls.
But recently I was sitting at one of Jon’s talks in London and he asked members of Gen X and Baby Boomers to think back on their childhoods. He asked them to remember all the things they did, all the adventures they had, and then imagine removing 70% of the time hanging out with friends. At least 70%. Next remove hobbies, then risk, thrills, and adventures where you might have gotten hurt—imagine 80% of that gone. Now imagine growing up with what’s left.
I felt a bit sick because I didn’t need to imagine. I never snuck out. I didn’t build a den or a hideout in the woods. I can’t remember goofing around in the park, or going on teenage adventures. And I know why. I came home from school and immediately loaded up MSN. I kept up Snapstreaks with my friends, alone in my room. When friends did come over for sleepovers, we took selfies for Facebook; we posted questions on anonymous messaging platforms like Ask.fm; we spoke to naked strangers on Omegle. Sometimes we sat side-by-side, scrolling.
Absence of Limits
Why do we seek to eliminate the cost of acquiring skills? There are many times when I wonder what people expect everyone will be doing if we eliminate the cost of learning and obtaining new levels of ability. Not only is this applicable in art, but also in business, education, science, music, literature, economics, medicine, play time, and after school projects. I am going to go out on a limb and say that this is applicable to most endeavors for life. Most importantly, we will see this lack of limitations regarding communications is destroying our ability to create lasting relationships in person. Less effort is needed to ping someone online than it is to maintain a conversation over the phone, and to plan activities with family and friends. We see Gen Z, who has had many limitations removed from their daily lives, and the arduous paths to acquiring skill replaced with streams of video and constant updates from posts.
We are going to start with music and then work our way to other areas of life. You’ll see that there is a movement in our culture that claims when all skills from all types of professions should be at our fingertips, we will be more creative when we accept that eliminating the time and cost to acquiring a skill. This is the justification for using common sources for creativity, for our thinking, for our writing. Artificial Intelligence and social collaboration is the main driver. Social media is also a factor, because the ubiquitous nature of new trends and influences; in fact, the thrill of new discovery online is a major factor as to why people are spending far less time creating things themselves.
What Did You Do Before The Internet If You Loved Music?
You struggled, you held albums and songs as special because the good ones were so rare and hard to come by. You had to work at a job to earn money to go to a concert. Music was scarce compared in the 1980s compared to the present.
Today there are many wonderful YouTubers who teach music theory, demonstrate how to play songs and discuss the history of all sorts of music. It is wonderful, and I wish I had access to this resource as a kid in the 80s because it would have helped me learn more efficiently. But as many of today’s musicians say, there is a trend of great technical performers, but they are performing solo on YouTube. This has cut into performing music with others, and eliminates a very important source of feedback that takes you from being technically capable to being able to communicate musically and collaborate.
In the 80s you could MAYBE find sheet music and if you did, you got a blend of piano with guitar chords but not the chord voicings. This meant that you could sing along, but sounding like the performance was really hard - there were very few books that told you the precise transcriptions or the hand positions that the original artists used for guitar.
This made the music all the more special - measuring your skill against the performer’s demonstrated your limitation. It presented a barrier that you had to break through if you wanted to be like those you admired. This also presented a challenge - how would you go about sounding like the artist who inspired you?
Immediately you are on a hard path of discovery. Prior to YouTube, Spotify and Apple music, you had to see the performers in concert to glean any sort of tips regarding the performance of your favorite music. Or you sought out other musicians and learned what they learned. Invariably you heard “no that’s not right, it’s like this” when you were trading riffs.
“What’s that chord - where are you placing your fingers on the fretboard? Oh that’s A Minor 7, up there, that high on the neck, too?”
Then there were moments when by accident you stumbled upon how a song was performed when you noodled around and used your ear to just figure something out. Many times that was a combination that was not a standard chord or voicing.
That was the magic reward.
That type of discovery would be enough to inspire you to sit down with a record or tape cassette, play the song, try your version, and compare. A lot of trial and error. A lot of time you had to spend on your own, which meant sacrificing other things. Perhaps less TV. Or reading. But invariably you came back to a group because you had to perform and gain feedback on your progress. High school was brutal, because you got brutal feedback. That toughened you up to come back and prove people wrong when they said you sucked. When the lovely Lisa S. lays into you with the stinging rebuke “you keep playing that, can’t you learn anything else?” and she’s the one you were trying to impress, that’s a beating. Lisa, despite that I still kept trying to impress you. Hopefully you were impressed without noticing how hard I was trying.
Accepting Limitations In Order To Blend
Back during this time you would have to perform live in order for people to hear you. That meant you either formed a band and practiced together or you took music at school. Either way, too much time in isolation worked against you, because no matter how you sounded, you had to learn to blend with others. My band teacher drilled that into me – when you’re here, you have to listen to how the others sound as well as how you are supporting them. This is a group effort.
These are all ego checks, these are all limitations imposed on you. Sometimes they were roadblocks, and that’s why we value some creativity over others. For me I wanted to be able to play well, and because I had a good mentor who made me work at things, I learned to break things down into components and work on weak areas. I also learned the difference between wanting to sound like the artists that I admired and the reality of how I needed to play in my high school concert band or jazz band. My guitar playing was only a camp counselor and church endeavor until the chair opened up at school. And I couldn’t play the songs I wanted because we focused on jazz. Another limitation. But that presented new challenges and barriers to overcome. And a lot of things to learn that I wouldn’t have considered had I stuck with just playing rock music.
Embrace What Seems Impossible, the Limitation Forges Something
I also was faced with the realization that I needed to blend in order to produce something that was pleasant to listen to. You weren’t there to stand out as the best, you needed the whole group to stand out as musical performers. Sometimes that meant taking a supporting role if you were in the rhythm section - bass, drum, guitar and piano - because the horns and saxes were the featured instruments. Sometimes those chord changes were intricate, but that didn’t matter as much as you were there to support Lisa when she played her solo. That meant going unnoticed at times. If that makes sense in a weird Zen way.
Learning the ins and out of accompanying and developing your ability to communicate while performing to produce something where the whole is greater than the parts is a form of collaboration that takes time to develop. But those most capable musicians rely on that ability to perform well with each other. The best musicians can achieve that heightened wavelength after years of practice, trial and error. Identifying areas where they need to improve.
If you watch the first minute of Paul McCartney warming up in this video with Billy Preston, you can see McCartney drift in to an exchange of ideas musically. He’s inspired by Billy’s melody and is supplying a killer bass line, and Billy in turn continues with more improve. In my opinion I wish this had developed into a song, it was something very different from the Let It Be album offering, a glimpse into some musical magic. Note how Paul drops that exchange and just rolls into I’ve Got A Feeling. The communication and context switching is fluid and instantaneous. There is a cost to developing, can that be replaced with pre-fabricated sample libraries?
All of these live interactions are replaced in this era by libraries, software and AI. It’s cheaper and more productive to use samples, which sound very good, or sound libraries for drums. It is incredibly difficult to mic a drum kit. It is incredibly expensive to mic a drum kit. Pictured below is Neil Peart’s drum kit. For those who are unfamiliar with prog rock, Neil was one the leading drummers who unique style gave the band Rush it’s flare. Peart effortlessly played varying time signatures within the same song as though they were as natural as a standard 4/4 meter song. Elaborate might not a strong enough term for his gear. The drum is clearly analog, so for each element that you want to adjust when recording, you may need a specific mic so you can record the sound digitally.
Neil Peart’s Drum Kit from the late in his career.
You can barely see Neil through all the mic stands in this photo of a studio session.
The effort to set up and record is hugely expensive, and so naturally you only want to record those worthy of listening to. This created a barrier to entry for many musicians, but is also set horizons to be scaled.
But solving that economic barrier to creating music has lowered the value of what is produced - if you can just download a software library that gives you an approximation, you have circumvented a limit. You can program it to play anything you want. That requires some skill, but not nearly as much as the hard won skill of live performance and collaboration with people. But if you want to know why most music today sounds so similar and bland, it’s because of the ubiquitous access to sampling libraries that anyone can employ on their laptops.
It is one thing to build up a library of skills and start to recognize patterns in a particular endeavor. But it is a sign of mastery when you can apply what you have learned, on the spot, and start to assemble new ideas, to create. With performance in music, you can eventually use those patterns to anticipate where a melody is headed. Knowing the key and the relationships of the notes to that key, you can very quickly get an idea of what notes to play ahead of time. “Sight reading” is not only quickly recognizing the notes, but all the turn arounds and resolution to musical phrases.
But with AI just pulling patterns together for you, there is NO skill at all. It is the elimination of skill, it is the devaluation of the relationships you need to form with others during performances and with instructors or your church choir that is making us just consume output. It removes quality and the scarcity that makes music, art, literature and many other things something to cherish. It also removes the need to aspire to anything. After all, you just need the right library and formula and or template to make sounds that people can download. Are you capturing a performance or are you creating a presentation? Those are two different things.
Lessons From Having Limits
I spent a lot of time with music and hands on projects. In fact, as a Gen Xer I spent a lot of time on things non-academic because there was nothing else to do. And it was how you got to hang out. I can’t imagine taking 70 or 80% of that away and being given a screen and told to sit inside. Embarrassment, heart break, spending hours practicing, trying to figure out how songs were played, all of those limitations which incurred so much time paid off in moments that I still remember today. I still play guitar today, have played drums off and on, and have enjoyed my kids starting their own musical interests. And yes, I do watch a lot of YouTube on playing technique. But also live performances. To see the years of sacrifice come to fruition in an artist’s talent is what creates the value.
There is a price to pay by eliminating the costs of acquiring skill in an age where the time received back is not spent on areas of life that involve direct interaction with others. I surprise myself when I continue to witness how many do not see this. Eliminating barriers in many cases also eliminates responsibility that we have to ensuring our kids our leading fulfilling lives, that they are challenging themselves. Growth comes from challenge after all.
I wan to leave you with one last thought. Back in 1973 Ray Charles performed some iconic music for A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. The music written by Vince Guaraldi is an amazingly rich, vibrant score that introduces wonderful melodies to kids. Live horns and saxophones requiring humans to perform bring a dimension that I don’t think is found in “content” for children today. If you weren’t a child in that era, this was a special event that played once a year on television. Once. Yet the producers invested money time and effort to create something unique. Back then they didn’t have the digital recording equipment we possess today. But they produced an amazing work, created through record living performance.
Contrast that to all the information, entertainment and social network based interaction that kids can have effortlessly, it’s there just like electricity. Does that offer something of the same quality, does it encourage them to take chances by sticking their necks out should they choose to perform at church or school?
Our documentary and book Severed Conscience examines the consequences of living out our lives online. Our minds are shuttered as we lose our ability to maintain relationships and even our ability to think rationally. Our book can be purchased on Amazon.,com