Thursday, February 18, 2010

The Experiment!

     So after many days of being pissed off at the University of Minnesota, I began to think 'why can't a school do everything right?' Mostly, I mean why aren't there schools whose sole prize is creativity? I don't care about learning what other people know, other people know that and they can do it fine now. There needs to be a school that teaches how to actually think, and create new ideas. Of course any time you start discussing original thought the old debate comes up: is any thought original, or do we always subconsciously build on our influences? I don't know, and that's not what I'm here to discuss. When I shared this idea with Jake Davis, we got into an intense discussion about the place of creativity in education, and, more importantly, how to teach creativity. Which led to   proposing "The Experiment". The Experiment is this: if you took a child (or ideally multiple children to account for variances in personality) and raised them in such a way that they never heard any music, not singing, not the radio, no music. And once they were maybe ten years old or so put them in front of a piano, what would they play? Of course it would take them a while to become familiar with the instrument, but once they start seeing the patterns (i.e. lower pitch on the left, higher on the right) what music would they make? Would they eventually get to major chords? Or octaves? Are these concepts of what make music good (correct sounding) cultural, or are they somehow an inborn trait of people? I really hope this hasn't been done before, cause its a good idea! I want to hear what those kids could play.