Anthony Brandt on Music, Creativity,Science and Technology, The Runaway Species and why The Arts are so Important for
Today and the Future
photography: Tommy LaVergne
The Runaway Species, a book by Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman asks what creativity is, how it started, what drives humanity to create and how art, technology and science link together. Through neuroscience and their bending, breaking, blending model, they present how creativity has and is remaking the world we live in. The book explores these questions and ideas with great visual examples, written in a way that is accessible to us all, making us think more about our surroundings and what they mean.
I sat down with Anthony Brandt to ask him about the ideas explored in The Runaway Species, his music, his organisation Musiqa and to find out how music, the arts, science and technology can come together and what impact that might bring....
I sat down with Anthony Brandt to ask him about the ideas explored in The Runaway Species, his music, his organisation Musiqa and to find out how music, the arts, science and technology can come together and what impact that might bring....
Why did you want to become a composer?
There were a few key factors. First, I grew up in a classical music family: my grandfather was the violist of the Budapest String Quartet. I was surrounded by a lot of musicians when I was little and heard classical music all the time, so music was a big part of my upbringing.
In addition, my parents didn’t buy my sister and I any pre-fabricated toys: instead, they only got us building blocks, paper, crayons and so forth, so whenever we wanted something we had to make it ourselves. I give my parents a lot of credit for that. I loved music, so from the moment I started studying the violin, I also started composing.
A few years ago, I found some of the little pieces that I wrote when I was six years old. It was so embarrassing: one of them was about a soldier who goes off to war. I’m a total pacifist and was a little shocked by my six year old self!
There were a few key factors. First, I grew up in a classical music family: my grandfather was the violist of the Budapest String Quartet. I was surrounded by a lot of musicians when I was little and heard classical music all the time, so music was a big part of my upbringing.
In addition, my parents didn’t buy my sister and I any pre-fabricated toys: instead, they only got us building blocks, paper, crayons and so forth, so whenever we wanted something we had to make it ourselves. I give my parents a lot of credit for that. I loved music, so from the moment I started studying the violin, I also started composing.
A few years ago, I found some of the little pieces that I wrote when I was six years old. It was so embarrassing: one of them was about a soldier who goes off to war. I’m a total pacifist and was a little shocked by my six year old self!
When you play music, what sensation do you feel? For instance, is it a must, do you have to create, as if it’s almost a part of you?
The way I would answer that is to tell you how I approach teaching. The Shepherd School of Music, where I work, is a conservatory. The difference between a department of music and a conservatory in the United States is that if you’re enrolled in a music department and decide composition is not for you, it’s easy to change majors and you can be a psychology major or do religious studies or whatever you want. But in a conservatory, you’re accepted as a composer and changing your mind and switching majors is really hard.
One day, I had some students come to me that were wondering whether to continue in the composition program. I refused to tell them whether or not they had any talent: I don’t think that’s something any of us can really judge. What I told them instead is that the only answer is going to come from inside. I said to the students that they each should ask themselves “Do I still hear music in my head? And if I don’t write it down, is it a bad day?” If the answer is that you don’t hear music in your head-or if you do but not writing it down is not a big deal, then it’s totally OK to switch and do something else. This is what college should be about; finding the thing that really means something to you. However, if you do hear music in your head and if you don’t write it down, it’s a bad day, then you owe it to yourself to keep going.
To me, that’s essentially the bottom line question. I’m also an optimist and believe that people don’t get a burning desire to do something they’re not capable of. That doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to come easy: you may have to work harder than anyone else. But I think that motivation is under-estimated as the root of success and, if you feel inside yourself a burning desire to be creative in whatever domain you want, that’s a sign that you’re capable of doing it.
The way I would answer that is to tell you how I approach teaching. The Shepherd School of Music, where I work, is a conservatory. The difference between a department of music and a conservatory in the United States is that if you’re enrolled in a music department and decide composition is not for you, it’s easy to change majors and you can be a psychology major or do religious studies or whatever you want. But in a conservatory, you’re accepted as a composer and changing your mind and switching majors is really hard.
One day, I had some students come to me that were wondering whether to continue in the composition program. I refused to tell them whether or not they had any talent: I don’t think that’s something any of us can really judge. What I told them instead is that the only answer is going to come from inside. I said to the students that they each should ask themselves “Do I still hear music in my head? And if I don’t write it down, is it a bad day?” If the answer is that you don’t hear music in your head-or if you do but not writing it down is not a big deal, then it’s totally OK to switch and do something else. This is what college should be about; finding the thing that really means something to you. However, if you do hear music in your head and if you don’t write it down, it’s a bad day, then you owe it to yourself to keep going.
To me, that’s essentially the bottom line question. I’m also an optimist and believe that people don’t get a burning desire to do something they’re not capable of. That doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to come easy: you may have to work harder than anyone else. But I think that motivation is under-estimated as the root of success and, if you feel inside yourself a burning desire to be creative in whatever domain you want, that’s a sign that you’re capable of doing it.
Karol Bennett performing John Corigliano's "Mr. Tambourine Man" with Musiqa
You founded Musiqa, how did that come about?
And with Musiqa, you work with other art forms, how does that relationship take shape?
Musiqa is a contemporary music ensemble and we tend to play music written in the last 20 years. I founded it with several of our composer peers who were all arriving as junior faculty to Houston around the same time as I was. . They are an exceptional group of composers and I’m very proud to be colleagues with them. Another reason is my wife is an extraordinary singer and one of the things that she’s most celebrated for is her singing of contemporary music (for instance, one of her recordings was selected for “Best of the Year: Classical Music” by the New York Times). She had to give up a thriving career in Boston when I got the job at Rice University and so part of the idea behind Musiqa is that it was something that we could do together. So those were some of the organizing thoughts behind it.
Right from the beginning we always had this idea that we would incorporate another contemporary art form in all of our concerts. I don’t know how it is here in Britain but in the United States the different contemporary art forms are incredibly fragmented: somebody who loves modern dance or modern art may have little awareness of modern music. We thought if we could knit those communities together then we could cultivate a group of people who were excited about the “here and now” in other arts and come to appreciate modern music. It has turned out to be a work in progress: it’s harder than I expected, to get people to crossover from one discipline to another, but a lot of what’s best of what Musiqa has accomplished is due to that. I get so excited when I feel like the dance audience or the visual arts audience is in the house for one of our concerts.
And with Musiqa, you work with other art forms, how does that relationship take shape?
Musiqa is a contemporary music ensemble and we tend to play music written in the last 20 years. I founded it with several of our composer peers who were all arriving as junior faculty to Houston around the same time as I was. . They are an exceptional group of composers and I’m very proud to be colleagues with them. Another reason is my wife is an extraordinary singer and one of the things that she’s most celebrated for is her singing of contemporary music (for instance, one of her recordings was selected for “Best of the Year: Classical Music” by the New York Times). She had to give up a thriving career in Boston when I got the job at Rice University and so part of the idea behind Musiqa is that it was something that we could do together. So those were some of the organizing thoughts behind it.
Right from the beginning we always had this idea that we would incorporate another contemporary art form in all of our concerts. I don’t know how it is here in Britain but in the United States the different contemporary art forms are incredibly fragmented: somebody who loves modern dance or modern art may have little awareness of modern music. We thought if we could knit those communities together then we could cultivate a group of people who were excited about the “here and now” in other arts and come to appreciate modern music. It has turned out to be a work in progress: it’s harder than I expected, to get people to crossover from one discipline to another, but a lot of what’s best of what Musiqa has accomplished is due to that. I get so excited when I feel like the dance audience or the visual arts audience is in the house for one of our concerts.
Because the arts all interlink…
Yes I believe they should
Like if you are a painter, sometimes you are listening to music when you paint
Exactly, and there’s another dimension: it’s often great for the audience to have a hook on the program of an art-form that they’re more familiar with.
Sometimes the other art-form we present is itself so far out that I have the same reaction that some people do when they are listening to contemporary music: I’m saying to myself, ‘What the heck is this? I don’t get this at all!’, and then I sit with that feeling and I think we are doing that to a lot of people that hear our music, so I shouldn’t chase that feeling away. I better understand what it feels like to be thrown into something that the audience is unfamiliar with. So all of those aspects add to the experience of our concerts.
It’s a great challenge for us, because essentially every concert is totally different, and we have to keep picking the rabbits out of the hat to come up with something exciting. Our last concert was a collaboration with a wonderful dance company: we did three works together and one each separately.
That’s the perfect model and mix for a Musiqa concert.
Yes I believe they should
Like if you are a painter, sometimes you are listening to music when you paint
Exactly, and there’s another dimension: it’s often great for the audience to have a hook on the program of an art-form that they’re more familiar with.
Sometimes the other art-form we present is itself so far out that I have the same reaction that some people do when they are listening to contemporary music: I’m saying to myself, ‘What the heck is this? I don’t get this at all!’, and then I sit with that feeling and I think we are doing that to a lot of people that hear our music, so I shouldn’t chase that feeling away. I better understand what it feels like to be thrown into something that the audience is unfamiliar with. So all of those aspects add to the experience of our concerts.
It’s a great challenge for us, because essentially every concert is totally different, and we have to keep picking the rabbits out of the hat to come up with something exciting. Our last concert was a collaboration with a wonderful dance company: we did three works together and one each separately.
That’s the perfect model and mix for a Musiqa concert.
Your book The Runaway Species looks at what creativity is and why and how humans create. How did this book come about?
David and I first met when he very generously agreed to give a talk at a benefit for Musiqa. I had called his teacher Read Montague and asked him if he could do it, and he said to me “I’m sorry I can’t but I have this brilliant student named David Eagleman and he’s a great speaker”, and David who was kind enough to say yes, gave this fantastic talk on Synesthesia and we became friends right after that.
Then a few years later I wrote an oratorio for soprano and chamber orchestra called Maternity based on David’s short story The Founding Mothers. My wife and a Houston chamber orchestra premiered it.
The Founding Mothers is a beautiful short story that David wrote for Mother’s Day: it traces a maternal line back through history. In total there are 21 mothers and they get spaced further and further apart in time: there are recent humans, then a prehistoric human, an ape, a fish, a single cell organism, all the way to the birth of gender. The story traces this vast long maternal line and all the little coincidences and lucky twists of fate that lead to any of us being here on this planet.
It was a really fun challenge to write. I couldn’t set the complete text--the piece would have been about 4 hours long, but I kept all of the mothers. I think it’s a fun piece for the singer because she personifies all these different creatures as the piece goes back in time. David and I were meeting to talk about this collaboration. We got on the subject of creativity and ended up having a 3 hour conversation and found that we agreed basically 99% of the time. I have the greatest admiration for David: he’s an amazing thinker. That my thoughts about creativity would align with his so well was really encouraging to me and at the end of the conversation, David was like “We should write a book together,” and that was the start of it.
David and I first met when he very generously agreed to give a talk at a benefit for Musiqa. I had called his teacher Read Montague and asked him if he could do it, and he said to me “I’m sorry I can’t but I have this brilliant student named David Eagleman and he’s a great speaker”, and David who was kind enough to say yes, gave this fantastic talk on Synesthesia and we became friends right after that.
Then a few years later I wrote an oratorio for soprano and chamber orchestra called Maternity based on David’s short story The Founding Mothers. My wife and a Houston chamber orchestra premiered it.
The Founding Mothers is a beautiful short story that David wrote for Mother’s Day: it traces a maternal line back through history. In total there are 21 mothers and they get spaced further and further apart in time: there are recent humans, then a prehistoric human, an ape, a fish, a single cell organism, all the way to the birth of gender. The story traces this vast long maternal line and all the little coincidences and lucky twists of fate that lead to any of us being here on this planet.
It was a really fun challenge to write. I couldn’t set the complete text--the piece would have been about 4 hours long, but I kept all of the mothers. I think it’s a fun piece for the singer because she personifies all these different creatures as the piece goes back in time. David and I were meeting to talk about this collaboration. We got on the subject of creativity and ended up having a 3 hour conversation and found that we agreed basically 99% of the time. I have the greatest admiration for David: he’s an amazing thinker. That my thoughts about creativity would align with his so well was really encouraging to me and at the end of the conversation, David was like “We should write a book together,” and that was the start of it.
Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman with Kishore Hari at Kepler's in Menlo Park, CA
One of the key elements in the book is that ideas evolve one on top of each other, everything that is creative comes from somewhere, there’s a pattern, there’s a history. There are two things that came to my mind when I was reading about that, that historically yes, we can step back, but when we are in the now, in the present, how do we differentiate between someone who is being influenced by something that came before, from someone who is almost steeling an idea or plagiarizing one?
And secondly, what differentiates something that is creative from what people are doing for marketing and branding purposes, and is that creativity in itself? In other words, it surely can be, but is there a difference?
The first question you’re asking is one that patent offices ask themselves all the time. That makes them a perfect embodiment of one of the main thesis of our book, because patent officers are always recognising that new ideas coming from prior ones but then they have to judge did the inventors move away far enough from the prior idea to be able to claim it as their own. That’s really the progress of human history: taking the stuff that we experience and pushing it just enough further away from where it was. Folks who make only minor tweaks are not what we’d call the original. But those who mash up the stuff around them and take them further then any of us expected, they are the ones that we herald as the great innovators.
When Picasso was young, he lived with a bunch of poor artists. They all worked in cramped studios with the roofs falling over their heads. Picasso had a reputation for going from studio to studio, checking up on what everyone else was up to, stealing what they were doing and doing it better. And that’s what everybody is doing, consciously or unconsciously—drawing on the world around them. It doesn’t take one ounce of credit away from Picasso and his originality because all of the artists were living in the same milieu, and everyone had the access to the same storehouse of raw materials that he did. But only he worked so hard to take a shared culture to a place that no one else got to. That’s where the credit is due: it’s for the imaginative work that you do on your raw materials.
The second answer to your question, is that one of the things we wanted to do in the book was just to celebrate the fact that, yes, there are certainly varying degrees of creativity, but the fact is that it’s happening around us all the time, in conversations, in recipes, in things people do with their children and with their mates and such and so forth.
For instance, we make the point that repetition suppression causes the brain to tune out to the familiar, and so our brains constantly crave a certain measure of novelty. For instance, consider the advertising of diamonds. The product doesn’t change, but the advertisements still do—because repeating the same pitch will wear out its welcome. The slogan “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend” stayed the same for decades, but the images supporting it were perpetually redesigned. The history of advertising shows us our need for creativity to fight repetition suppression and how much imaginative work goes into constantly refreshing our attention on things.
And secondly, what differentiates something that is creative from what people are doing for marketing and branding purposes, and is that creativity in itself? In other words, it surely can be, but is there a difference?
The first question you’re asking is one that patent offices ask themselves all the time. That makes them a perfect embodiment of one of the main thesis of our book, because patent officers are always recognising that new ideas coming from prior ones but then they have to judge did the inventors move away far enough from the prior idea to be able to claim it as their own. That’s really the progress of human history: taking the stuff that we experience and pushing it just enough further away from where it was. Folks who make only minor tweaks are not what we’d call the original. But those who mash up the stuff around them and take them further then any of us expected, they are the ones that we herald as the great innovators.
When Picasso was young, he lived with a bunch of poor artists. They all worked in cramped studios with the roofs falling over their heads. Picasso had a reputation for going from studio to studio, checking up on what everyone else was up to, stealing what they were doing and doing it better. And that’s what everybody is doing, consciously or unconsciously—drawing on the world around them. It doesn’t take one ounce of credit away from Picasso and his originality because all of the artists were living in the same milieu, and everyone had the access to the same storehouse of raw materials that he did. But only he worked so hard to take a shared culture to a place that no one else got to. That’s where the credit is due: it’s for the imaginative work that you do on your raw materials.
The second answer to your question, is that one of the things we wanted to do in the book was just to celebrate the fact that, yes, there are certainly varying degrees of creativity, but the fact is that it’s happening around us all the time, in conversations, in recipes, in things people do with their children and with their mates and such and so forth.
For instance, we make the point that repetition suppression causes the brain to tune out to the familiar, and so our brains constantly crave a certain measure of novelty. For instance, consider the advertising of diamonds. The product doesn’t change, but the advertisements still do—because repeating the same pitch will wear out its welcome. The slogan “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend” stayed the same for decades, but the images supporting it were perpetually redesigned. The history of advertising shows us our need for creativity to fight repetition suppression and how much imaginative work goes into constantly refreshing our attention on things.
In the book you mention “repetition suppression” with the iPhone, how the structure repeats itself but with just a little change each time for the audience to be familiar with it. Steve Jobs always wore the same black turtle neck, maybe that made us trust him each time with a new product because of a familiar visual pattern. Is this what happens in music when you compose? Is that why there is sometimes a chorus, a repetition?
The word music encompasses an incredibly broad range of possible ways of expressing oneself through sound. If you look at world culture, there’s a phenomenal range of roles and functions of music and types of music sounds. Music can be used in a ritual, in therapy, and for communal bonding. One of the things that makes Western classical music very distinctive--it’s an outlier in this respect—is that it’s not participatory. It’s made for the audience to sit in the dark listening quietly, giving their full attention, so it’s vulnerable to repetition suppression. Folk and popular music can be very repetitive, but that’s OK because that predictability gives people the confidence to join in and that’s what that music is designed to do: it gets you singing along and feeling one with the experience, which is wonderful and probably a great builder of social cohesiveness.
Western classical music has a different ambition: it’s more about the people on the stage sharing an experience with you. In order to do that, you cannot have the same repetitive musical structure that you do in a folk song because if I’m sitting there listening in the dark and I’m not supposed to join along then repeating the music over and over again with very little change is going to cause my brain to tune out. Brains are built to be ruthlessly efficient, the more familiar they are with something, the less attention they pay to it. So I consider a composer like Beethoven to be one of the first scientists of human attention. He is famous for his “shut up and listen attitude” but the incredible thing about Beethoven is that, that’s not something that he had to say out loud, he wrote that command into his music. He basically gives you some new reason to pay attention in every single measure, often by constantly introducing novelty to his basic ideas. The tension between familiarity and novelty is where the creativity lives, in that tension that is perfectly embodied in Beethoven because you recognize the basic ideas that he is referring to and yet he is constantly surprising you with the way he’s expressing them. You can take any of his pieces as a textbook about creativity.
Reading your book and talking now on what creativity and music can do, I guess that’s why dictators and tyrants don’t want people to be creative, so that they go on autopilot, that’s what they want to achieve by stopping creativity
Yes: how you get control over people is to get their behaviour to be predictable. Brains are very susceptible to that. It doesn’t mean that people in countries with dictators or tyrants aren’t creative, but that there are other forces that can supress it. The same thing happens with sexuality: it’s not that people living in dictatorships aren’t sexual beings, it’s that under a repressive regime those aspect of their behaviour are often constrained. The same suppression of creativity can happen with governments can also happen with families and communities . A lot of time, people who don’t feel creative have at some point been knocked down by other people. One of the themes of our book is that all of us are entitled to stand up and say “No, sorry you’re wrong about that, I’ve got the same creative software as everyone else running in my brain.”
Yes: how you get control over people is to get their behaviour to be predictable. Brains are very susceptible to that. It doesn’t mean that people in countries with dictators or tyrants aren’t creative, but that there are other forces that can supress it. The same thing happens with sexuality: it’s not that people living in dictatorships aren’t sexual beings, it’s that under a repressive regime those aspect of their behaviour are often constrained. The same suppression of creativity can happen with governments can also happen with families and communities . A lot of time, people who don’t feel creative have at some point been knocked down by other people. One of the themes of our book is that all of us are entitled to stand up and say “No, sorry you’re wrong about that, I’ve got the same creative software as everyone else running in my brain.”
Which probably can start being achieved when we are young. You talk a lot in the book about education and starting to link things at a younger age. When I was at school, we went to a museum and the teacher told us that if we look at a painting, if it was a good one, our eye should be able to capture every part of the painting through the formation of a geometric shape or shapes, it would form triangles, and can be very mathematical if we are dealing with perspectives. That fluidity between subjects, you are doing with Musiqa, but throughout life people often ask if a person is going into humanities or going into social sciences, if they are business minded or have a creative mind. When you say in the book, the educational system needs to change, how can that be done? Does it start small with people doing their own small enterprises like you are doing with Musiqa and then hopefully there’s a big change that occurs?
From the top down, it’s about creating a playing field where flexibility is much easier to accomplish. So, for instance, universities in America are bound by the departmental model: even in a liberal arts school, each department sets its own degree requirements, and so linking arms with people in different departments is often very difficult. Yet universities recognise that collaboration often promotes innovation and they want to facilitate that. You don’t want the administration to do that by saying to one professor, ‘You’ve got to work with so-and-so.” What you want to do is give faculty incentives to collaborate, and make it easy for them to do it if they want to. I think that’s the best top-down approach.
From the bottom up, you want to free yourself to think about all the ways in which you might want to link arms with people and create opportunities for people to cross disciplines.
I also think there’s another issue that’s very important, a lot of people on explaining or giving advice about creativity are too binary. They create some contrast (neat vs. messy, social vs. isolated, etc.), and then tell you which one is the right way to behave. We feel that to be totally wrong, that creativity is about covering a whole spectrum of human behaviour. The people we tend to view as the most creative, they were neither neat nor messy, social or isolated: they were capable of being whatever they needed to be that served their purpose at whatever point they were in their project. The more that the full spectrum of behaviour is honoured, respected, nurtured and encouraged, the more you are going to find any one person feeling more capable of expressing their own creativity.
From the top down, it’s about creating a playing field where flexibility is much easier to accomplish. So, for instance, universities in America are bound by the departmental model: even in a liberal arts school, each department sets its own degree requirements, and so linking arms with people in different departments is often very difficult. Yet universities recognise that collaboration often promotes innovation and they want to facilitate that. You don’t want the administration to do that by saying to one professor, ‘You’ve got to work with so-and-so.” What you want to do is give faculty incentives to collaborate, and make it easy for them to do it if they want to. I think that’s the best top-down approach.
From the bottom up, you want to free yourself to think about all the ways in which you might want to link arms with people and create opportunities for people to cross disciplines.
I also think there’s another issue that’s very important, a lot of people on explaining or giving advice about creativity are too binary. They create some contrast (neat vs. messy, social vs. isolated, etc.), and then tell you which one is the right way to behave. We feel that to be totally wrong, that creativity is about covering a whole spectrum of human behaviour. The people we tend to view as the most creative, they were neither neat nor messy, social or isolated: they were capable of being whatever they needed to be that served their purpose at whatever point they were in their project. The more that the full spectrum of behaviour is honoured, respected, nurtured and encouraged, the more you are going to find any one person feeling more capable of expressing their own creativity.
Musiqa's educational program "Musiqa ReMix"
Social media has helped people to have a platform, as if it is a new language. In the book you mention Esperanto as having tried to be a universal language. Maybe in a way, creativity is too a new form of language through codes and signals and these can be globalised. Do you think globalisation has improved creative possibilities?
Yes--and again, since creativity comes from your storehouse of experiences, then the richer your storehouse, the greater the likelihood that you will be productive creatively. Those great societies like Venice and Florence in the Renaissance, they were at the forefront and at the meeting points of East and West and all sorts of cultures intermingling, it’s part of what supercharged those environments.
Both David and I feel like the world is upping its possibilities in terms of creative output and yet, at the same time, that too many school systems are squashing it down. School systems have to rise to the challenge of their times—that’s one of the main points in our book.
Yes--and again, since creativity comes from your storehouse of experiences, then the richer your storehouse, the greater the likelihood that you will be productive creatively. Those great societies like Venice and Florence in the Renaissance, they were at the forefront and at the meeting points of East and West and all sorts of cultures intermingling, it’s part of what supercharged those environments.
Both David and I feel like the world is upping its possibilities in terms of creative output and yet, at the same time, that too many school systems are squashing it down. School systems have to rise to the challenge of their times—that’s one of the main points in our book.
In the book, you say that time between major innovations is shrinking rapidly, that things are getting faster. Though that’s great that through technology and social media we all have a creative outlet and globalisation is helping with creativity, simultaneously, it also doesn’t leave people time to develop or to make mistakes, because it feels like we have to either have a creative idea straight away or not at all and so with these ways, are we in a danger of not giving people enough time to develop and therefore in turn rely too much on institutions that are incorporating everything because the demand for rapidity and the next thing is so high?
My theory would be that this is a self correcting problem. Typically, the way creativity as is presented, is that it’s all about novelty- novelty- novelty. But that’s not really accurate: it’s a tension, a tug of war between novelty and familiarity. We don’t all just want to throw our iPhone 8 in the bin and get the new one that is implanted in to our earlobe, etc.--we don’t rush into every new novel thing all the time. We have a certain tolerance for how much novelty we will accept in our lives. Our brains do need the security of feeling the familiar around us.
If all of the sudden I came home and the lighting had all been replaced by floating things and the lock of my door was changed and I had to use an eye scanner, I would probably be thinking "Wow hold on, wait a second, don’t take it all away at once", and so what we find is that humanity will lurch forward and then it will pull back. That’s why there’s always a risk. You can have an extraordinary idea, but there’s such a thing as too much too soon. Imagine that next year, carmakers introduce a self-driving car where you can sleep and therefore ride overnight rather than take a plane. It’s an awesome idea, but people might say “No, not yet, we’re not ready for it.”
What we are going to be ready for and how fast we are going to be ready for it, no one can predict. As I say I think this will be a self correcting problem: we will never give ourselves over completely to novelty. Our brains are not equipped for that: it would make us feel hopelessly insecure and on edge. And so, yes, there’s no doubt we are accelerating and that, especially in young people, there is now this expectation that things are constantly remodeling themselves at a much faster speed than a 16th century person would expect. But still, there is a breaking mechanism in the human brain. We will always create this tug-of-war between too much, too soon and not enough, too slow.
My theory would be that this is a self correcting problem. Typically, the way creativity as is presented, is that it’s all about novelty- novelty- novelty. But that’s not really accurate: it’s a tension, a tug of war between novelty and familiarity. We don’t all just want to throw our iPhone 8 in the bin and get the new one that is implanted in to our earlobe, etc.--we don’t rush into every new novel thing all the time. We have a certain tolerance for how much novelty we will accept in our lives. Our brains do need the security of feeling the familiar around us.
If all of the sudden I came home and the lighting had all been replaced by floating things and the lock of my door was changed and I had to use an eye scanner, I would probably be thinking "Wow hold on, wait a second, don’t take it all away at once", and so what we find is that humanity will lurch forward and then it will pull back. That’s why there’s always a risk. You can have an extraordinary idea, but there’s such a thing as too much too soon. Imagine that next year, carmakers introduce a self-driving car where you can sleep and therefore ride overnight rather than take a plane. It’s an awesome idea, but people might say “No, not yet, we’re not ready for it.”
What we are going to be ready for and how fast we are going to be ready for it, no one can predict. As I say I think this will be a self correcting problem: we will never give ourselves over completely to novelty. Our brains are not equipped for that: it would make us feel hopelessly insecure and on edge. And so, yes, there’s no doubt we are accelerating and that, especially in young people, there is now this expectation that things are constantly remodeling themselves at a much faster speed than a 16th century person would expect. But still, there is a breaking mechanism in the human brain. We will always create this tug-of-war between too much, too soon and not enough, too slow.
You state fashion as an example in the book and it is very parallel to what you are saying. Fashion can be too quickly too soon, and often the design is done almost a year ahead but because of social media, sometimes that is now changing. People when they see something, they want it straight away they don’t want to wait a year to buy it, so some people are providing that service. Furthermore, there is such a demand, that there is an increase of fashion shows per year, at the same time, to expect that designers can be creative all of the time, have a constant creative button, that doesn’t seem fair. And maybe we can even say that styling and embellishment has changed in the last 10 or 20 years, but the cut hasn’t moved that much.
I think you are observing correctly but there will be a limit I would say and no one expects a designer to come up with a new dress every day because at a certain point, what’s the point in producing something new if there’s not even time to buy it before it’s out-of-date. So again, yes, things are speeding up and we are becoming more demanding but there will always be the breaking mechanism.
It’s interesting to watch different fields adjust at different speeds: each hits its limits and sort of settles itself. The fashion shows may come sooner and sooner, and then there will be the radical person who comes along and says, you know what, I’m doing one catwalk a year and all of the sudden everyone will say, "This is so revolutionary, this is the new leading figure.”
I think you are observing correctly but there will be a limit I would say and no one expects a designer to come up with a new dress every day because at a certain point, what’s the point in producing something new if there’s not even time to buy it before it’s out-of-date. So again, yes, things are speeding up and we are becoming more demanding but there will always be the breaking mechanism.
It’s interesting to watch different fields adjust at different speeds: each hits its limits and sort of settles itself. The fashion shows may come sooner and sooner, and then there will be the radical person who comes along and says, you know what, I’m doing one catwalk a year and all of the sudden everyone will say, "This is so revolutionary, this is the new leading figure.”
And there is; There always is that one person,
That’s kind of what fashion does, create a norm, a pattern and then break that norm or that pattern.
And like in art, people are buying paintings online, that wasn’t something that was done
.
That’s kind of what fashion does, create a norm, a pattern and then break that norm or that pattern.
And like in art, people are buying paintings online, that wasn’t something that was done
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Karol Bennett premiering Sebastian Currier's "Deep-Sky Objects," commissioned by Musiqa
My understanding from the book is that it says, us as humans we are different to robots because we can create, we are different than the animal kingdom too, but since science and technology are going very fast, do you think one day we will be able to transplant creativity and emotion with Artificial Intelligence (AI)? And so therefore why couldn’t creative particles be implanted into robots or into animals?
The first thing that is reassuring to the human race is that right now for the most part AI is mainly devouring repetitive tasks because that’s what is the easiest for a computer to do. Computers love doing the same thing over and over again, and there’s a lot of human tasks that involve that, that, computers are going to take away. When David and I were at the Aspen Ideas Festival, I heard a talk by a technologist who said, “Don’t have your children become radiologist because that job is going to be done by computers within 5 years.”
Computers are getting more sophisticated in the type of repetitive tasks that they are able to do, so most of the energy in the IT world is dedicated right now to mastering those repetitive tasks. The software engineers are leaving creativity more or less to human beings, at least for now.
The second thing is, I think that the bending, breaking, blending model we describe in the book, is actually very useful for AI because it gives some very concrete strategies for how to rework data and to come up with new ideas. It’s already being done implicitly but I think our book might help it become more explicit.
But the problem for a computer is that once it gets a hold of that data, sure it can take it in, manipulate it and so forth, but it has no awareness of what’s going to land successfully versus what’s a bad idea. And how you judge what ideas to keep and which to throw away--that turns out to be a very social issue. It’s not one person knowing the answer, it’s the whole interaction of culture, depending on what else is around and what people feel is the necessary next step. So one thing we suggest is that if you really want AI to be creative you need a whole society of different AI agents all trying to surprise and impress each other, trading ideas and sharing them and building off each other. It’s a funny idea, but then the machines will have their own creative culture.
The first thing that is reassuring to the human race is that right now for the most part AI is mainly devouring repetitive tasks because that’s what is the easiest for a computer to do. Computers love doing the same thing over and over again, and there’s a lot of human tasks that involve that, that, computers are going to take away. When David and I were at the Aspen Ideas Festival, I heard a talk by a technologist who said, “Don’t have your children become radiologist because that job is going to be done by computers within 5 years.”
Computers are getting more sophisticated in the type of repetitive tasks that they are able to do, so most of the energy in the IT world is dedicated right now to mastering those repetitive tasks. The software engineers are leaving creativity more or less to human beings, at least for now.
The second thing is, I think that the bending, breaking, blending model we describe in the book, is actually very useful for AI because it gives some very concrete strategies for how to rework data and to come up with new ideas. It’s already being done implicitly but I think our book might help it become more explicit.
But the problem for a computer is that once it gets a hold of that data, sure it can take it in, manipulate it and so forth, but it has no awareness of what’s going to land successfully versus what’s a bad idea. And how you judge what ideas to keep and which to throw away--that turns out to be a very social issue. It’s not one person knowing the answer, it’s the whole interaction of culture, depending on what else is around and what people feel is the necessary next step. So one thing we suggest is that if you really want AI to be creative you need a whole society of different AI agents all trying to surprise and impress each other, trading ideas and sharing them and building off each other. It’s a funny idea, but then the machines will have their own creative culture.
So it’s not so much about the actual creativity because like a lot of creativity is digitalized, we started with a simple Photoshop on computers and now we are doing 3D Printing, but it’s more about other people accepting a particular creativity within their cultural element, in their realm
Each moment in time and place subconsciously creates its own rules and judgements. These rules change over time and they change from one place to the other. It’s true the world is becoming more homogenous because we are way more interconnected than at any time in human history. But it’s still not necessarily true that what lands in London is going to be a hit in Tokyo. A computer in Tokyo might come up with something that the New York computer thinks is a terrible idea. However I think that computers as tools for creativity, I absolutely see that coming. For instance, I can easily imagine a movie or television composer--who are some of the last people involved in the production of a film or television show and often have very little time to produce hours of music--I can easily see those composers handing over part of that task to a computer, to generate for instance, the romantic music based on the main theme of a movie. With careful curating by the composers, computers could really facilitate this high pressured job. That’s something that I can see on the horizon. But the day in which we go to see the exhibition by a computer on the level of Basquiat, we are still far away from that. Thankfully we still have a lot of room for humans.
Each moment in time and place subconsciously creates its own rules and judgements. These rules change over time and they change from one place to the other. It’s true the world is becoming more homogenous because we are way more interconnected than at any time in human history. But it’s still not necessarily true that what lands in London is going to be a hit in Tokyo. A computer in Tokyo might come up with something that the New York computer thinks is a terrible idea. However I think that computers as tools for creativity, I absolutely see that coming. For instance, I can easily imagine a movie or television composer--who are some of the last people involved in the production of a film or television show and often have very little time to produce hours of music--I can easily see those composers handing over part of that task to a computer, to generate for instance, the romantic music based on the main theme of a movie. With careful curating by the composers, computers could really facilitate this high pressured job. That’s something that I can see on the horizon. But the day in which we go to see the exhibition by a computer on the level of Basquiat, we are still far away from that. Thankfully we still have a lot of room for humans.
At the end of the book you talk about the future and that you cannot predict it, but if you were to describe the future, which piece of music would you say?
I often say that one of the difference between the arts and technology is that you and I for instance, can sit here right now and we can imagine the car of 50 years from now: it doesn’t have a steering wheel because it’s self driving; it communicates with all the other cars on the road so there’s much less traffic and much less risk of accident. In addition, the cars are all inter-connected, so they teach each other about road conditions, etc. Thanks to digital technology, the car is also very customisable: you can turn it into a playroom or game room. If you have kids, it turns into one type of car and if you do not have kids, then it’s got a different interior. We can imagine all that, but we can’t build it yet.
But if I can imagine a piece of music of 50 years from now, then nothing is stopping me from writing it down right now. Whatever I am imagining to be the future of music is the present of music. I don’t know what music will sound like in 50 years or 100 years, because if I did, then I would make that music come alive right now. So that’s an interesting difference between the arts and technology: the best that I can do in my own time and place is take it as far as I am able to within the constraints and infrastructure that I’ve got.
Imagine that in a 100 years there are no longer symphony orchestras—I hope that doesn’t happen, but imagine that turns out to be a very difficult and financial model when we are living on other planets. Or that in 100 years there’s no such thing in the Western classical tradition as a fixed composition: it’s all done by computer and every performance is custom made by a software program. But if I could imagine that music, then there would be nothing stopping me from doing it right now. Except for the other planets of course. So that thought experiment is an interesting one when you are in the arts, because if you start to imagine, "Oh well I wonder what music in 20 years from now will be", if you have an inkling or a suspicion then that’s really your own brain telling you, here’s the next step for you.
I often say that one of the difference between the arts and technology is that you and I for instance, can sit here right now and we can imagine the car of 50 years from now: it doesn’t have a steering wheel because it’s self driving; it communicates with all the other cars on the road so there’s much less traffic and much less risk of accident. In addition, the cars are all inter-connected, so they teach each other about road conditions, etc. Thanks to digital technology, the car is also very customisable: you can turn it into a playroom or game room. If you have kids, it turns into one type of car and if you do not have kids, then it’s got a different interior. We can imagine all that, but we can’t build it yet.
But if I can imagine a piece of music of 50 years from now, then nothing is stopping me from writing it down right now. Whatever I am imagining to be the future of music is the present of music. I don’t know what music will sound like in 50 years or 100 years, because if I did, then I would make that music come alive right now. So that’s an interesting difference between the arts and technology: the best that I can do in my own time and place is take it as far as I am able to within the constraints and infrastructure that I’ve got.
Imagine that in a 100 years there are no longer symphony orchestras—I hope that doesn’t happen, but imagine that turns out to be a very difficult and financial model when we are living on other planets. Or that in 100 years there’s no such thing in the Western classical tradition as a fixed composition: it’s all done by computer and every performance is custom made by a software program. But if I could imagine that music, then there would be nothing stopping me from doing it right now. Except for the other planets of course. So that thought experiment is an interesting one when you are in the arts, because if you start to imagine, "Oh well I wonder what music in 20 years from now will be", if you have an inkling or a suspicion then that’s really your own brain telling you, here’s the next step for you.
There was a robot that conducted an orchestra
I’ve seen a robot marimba player who improvises, which was really impressive,
That’s as close as we are getting right now to robots giving us a run for our money.
I’ve seen a robot marimba player who improvises, which was really impressive,
That’s as close as we are getting right now to robots giving us a run for our money.
I do love technology, but it is a bit scary with what we are getting into with it all if laws are not put into place. Like when you were describing cars of the future, I felt like we were going full circle in our conversation to go back to the autopilot part that the dictators and tyrants so like us to be like. As if we push so much creativity and technology, that we will all end up the same and we all end up on autopilot mode
The other part of that is it’s so important for the arts and sciences to be linked. It’s going to be software engineers who are and will be creating this AI creativity, and if they have what I would call too much of a rules based attitude and they don’t appreciate some of the dimensions that we talk about in the book, then they will actually create a very limit, almost self-defeating vision of creativity which doesn’t really capture the full bloom of what humans can do. Artists are necessary to kind of constantly remind the software engineers of what the dynamics of human creativity are all about--and I don’t mean that in a condescending way because there are tones of things that I can’t do scientifically. Linking arms in that way I think will result in a much more interesting outcome.
The other part of that is it’s so important for the arts and sciences to be linked. It’s going to be software engineers who are and will be creating this AI creativity, and if they have what I would call too much of a rules based attitude and they don’t appreciate some of the dimensions that we talk about in the book, then they will actually create a very limit, almost self-defeating vision of creativity which doesn’t really capture the full bloom of what humans can do. Artists are necessary to kind of constantly remind the software engineers of what the dynamics of human creativity are all about--and I don’t mean that in a condescending way because there are tones of things that I can’t do scientifically. Linking arms in that way I think will result in a much more interesting outcome.
The humanity side of being able to reach out person to person, or explaining our life or our work cv, sometimes it doesn’t always follow a pattern that it’s supposed to, or come in a copy paste formula
I firmly believe that human creativity has been the defining feature of our species since the earliest Homo Sapiens. What is so fantastic about the earliest cave drawings is that not only were they brilliant paintings but they were not literal depictions of reality. In fact, most of the animals they were painting were among the rarer species, not the ones they hunted for food. It doesn’t appear that they painted to necessarily depict their lived reality or for practical purposes, though, no one knows for sure.
I feel very strongly that we’ve always had this capacity to imagine all these alternative realities and we are so flush with them in our brain that we have a need to share them, put them out into the world and not just have them in our thoughts. Thankfully, it turns out others enjoy that because it breaks the monotony and it’s much easier to build communities when you are surprising each other then when you are on autopilot tuning each other out. Thanks to the structures of our brains, we have those bubbling imaginations; and there’s a place in society for that to be shared—that combination is what has supercharged creativity.
For humans, it’s a biological need. On the other hand, computers don’t have to do anything they don’t want to do or aren’t asked to do. Computer creativity will be interesting to see, it’ll be creativity 2.0 on some level. It will never be the same as human creativity because it’s not biologically mandated.
There’s a lot that computer’s do totally differently than humans do. Like how computers play chess is different from the way humans do: it’s literally pure computational muscle. The great grandmaster Gary Kasparov does not have the time or the brain power to do that. Instead, he’s learning certain basic patterns and then making deviations off of those. He can’t try out each of all the different trees of possible moves and figure out the ones where he has the greatest possibility of winning, that’s not how his brain works. A computer can do that.
Maybe AI creativity will work in a very different way than human beings, and in certain circumstances that may turn out to be great, because they will be able to come up with ways of networking information that a human brain would really have to spend a long time figuring out. Computers can figure out that we can get all the cars to coordinate with each other by doing such and such imaginative programming. But with the arts, I don’t know what it would mean to have a computer thinking about it all by themselves. It’s such a social thing and that’s one of its main functions.
I firmly believe that human creativity has been the defining feature of our species since the earliest Homo Sapiens. What is so fantastic about the earliest cave drawings is that not only were they brilliant paintings but they were not literal depictions of reality. In fact, most of the animals they were painting were among the rarer species, not the ones they hunted for food. It doesn’t appear that they painted to necessarily depict their lived reality or for practical purposes, though, no one knows for sure.
I feel very strongly that we’ve always had this capacity to imagine all these alternative realities and we are so flush with them in our brain that we have a need to share them, put them out into the world and not just have them in our thoughts. Thankfully, it turns out others enjoy that because it breaks the monotony and it’s much easier to build communities when you are surprising each other then when you are on autopilot tuning each other out. Thanks to the structures of our brains, we have those bubbling imaginations; and there’s a place in society for that to be shared—that combination is what has supercharged creativity.
For humans, it’s a biological need. On the other hand, computers don’t have to do anything they don’t want to do or aren’t asked to do. Computer creativity will be interesting to see, it’ll be creativity 2.0 on some level. It will never be the same as human creativity because it’s not biologically mandated.
There’s a lot that computer’s do totally differently than humans do. Like how computers play chess is different from the way humans do: it’s literally pure computational muscle. The great grandmaster Gary Kasparov does not have the time or the brain power to do that. Instead, he’s learning certain basic patterns and then making deviations off of those. He can’t try out each of all the different trees of possible moves and figure out the ones where he has the greatest possibility of winning, that’s not how his brain works. A computer can do that.
Maybe AI creativity will work in a very different way than human beings, and in certain circumstances that may turn out to be great, because they will be able to come up with ways of networking information that a human brain would really have to spend a long time figuring out. Computers can figure out that we can get all the cars to coordinate with each other by doing such and such imaginative programming. But with the arts, I don’t know what it would mean to have a computer thinking about it all by themselves. It’s such a social thing and that’s one of its main functions.
It is a social function, and it unites people together from different backgrounds and across borders.
And it stretches our sense of the possible. That’s one of the things that being in a very rich arts environment does, that it constantly reminds you that there is no end point. It is constantly reminding you that the human mind is always remodelling.
And it stretches our sense of the possible. That’s one of the things that being in a very rich arts environment does, that it constantly reminds you that there is no end point. It is constantly reminding you that the human mind is always remodelling.
Dr. Brandt is a Professor of Composition and Theory at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He has been awarded the University’s Phi Beta Kappa and George R. Brown teaching prizes.
Composer Anthony Brandt earned his degrees from California Institute of the Arts (MA '87) and Harvard University (BA '83, PhD '93).
His honors include a Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet-the-Composer, the Houston Arts Alliance, the New England Foundation for the Arts and the Margaret Fairbank Jory Copying Assistance Program.
He has been commissioned by the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra, Da Camera of Houston, the SOLI ensemble, Houston Ballet II, the Bowdoin International Festival, the Moores School of Music Percussion Ensemble, the Webster Trio, the Fischer Duo and others.
He has been a fellow at the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Tanglewood Institute, the MacDowell Colony and the Djerassi Resident Artists Colony, a Visiting Composer at the Bowdoin International Festival, the FICA Festival at the University of Veracruz, the Bremen Musikfest, Baltimore’s New Chamber Arts Festival, Southwestern University, SUNY- Buffalo and Cleveland State University, and Composer-in-Residence of Houston’s OrchestraX and the International Festival of Music in Morelia, Mexico.
Recent works include the chamber opera Ulysses, Home, with a libretto by playwright Neena Beber, about a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder. An album of his vocal music, including his chamber opera The Birth of Something, with a libretto by playwright Will Eno, is available on Albany Records (Troy 1144).
Dr. Brandt is co-founder and Artistic Director of the Houston-based contemporary music ensemble Musiqa (www.musiqahouston.org), two-time winners of Adventurous Programming Awards from Chamber Music America and ASCAP (2013 and '16). Musiqa’s free educational programs have served over 50,000 public elementary school students in the past twelve years and have won eight awards from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Dr. Brandt is the author of an innovative, web-based music appreciation course called “Sound Reasoning” (www.soundreasoning.org), created for Rice University’s OpenStax. “Sound Reasoning” was awarded an Access to Artistic Excellence Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has organized three international conferences at Rice on “Exploring the Mind through Music," most recently in June 2016. He has co-authored papers published in the journals Frontiers and Brain Connectivity and serves on the Advisory Board of Methodist Hospital’s Center for Performing Arts Medicine, where he is a principal investigator in a research project involving music and stroke recovery.
Dr. Brandt and neuroscientist David Eagleman have co-authored "The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World".
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