Why Do We Want What We Do Not Have?

[baratron]

An, introspection at 6 o'clock in the morning. Don'cha love it?

I mentioned in passing earlier that I was listening to "very weird symbion project stuff". One of the tracks is called 2 Hour Tekno because kasson wrote it in 2 hours. "i was bored one night and decided to see what i could write and program, mix and master, in just 2 hours. it's not that bad considering." <-- Understatement of the frigging millennium. You can download it here and listen for yourself.

I'm already jealous of his musical talent - in as much as you can be jealous of someone that you're in total awe of while not actually falling down & worshipping at their feet. (Because sending him a laundry basket was loony enough, I don't need to get a reputation). And then I hear THAT. The guy writes better music in 2 hours than I could write in my entire lifetime. (I'm not joking - on my old Archimedes there is a sound sampler & synthesizer program, and one day if I'm feeling very, very mean, I'll dig out my "compositions" and convert them to a modern format, for you to cringe at).

So then I got to thinking about talent, and why his (and anyone else's) ability to consistently write good songs bothers me so much.

The thing with music is that there's only so much you can learn. I played the piano and cello at school and learnt some music theory. I actually cared about the cello, and practised properly for something like 7 years. Yet can I write songs? Hell, no. I can't even string three chords together and make up a punk song! How in God's name generations and generations of punk bands manage to string the same 3 chords together and yet come up with something original seems like nothing short of magic to me. Because, y'know, name any handful of punk songs that are based on C, G, D or C, G, F - and they don't all sound the same.

Then there is the pitch thing. Richard, for example, can listen to any song and know what key it's in. He insists that he doesn't have perfect pitch, yet he can pick up the guitar and within minutes have the whole thing fingered out. I spent literally years working on aural tests to try to distinguish perfect fourths, perfect fifths, imperfect cadences, whatever. Spent years and years, and never really managed it - I generally scraped through that section of the music exams.

I hit on it earlier. For me, music seems like magic. I care so much about music that I spend all day, every day singing to myself, hearing the words and melodies of my favourite songs playing in my head. There are albums that I have played quite literally more than a thousand times, where if I never, ever heard them again, I'd still know all the words. Look at me a few months ago - bought Erasure's "The Innocents" off eBay & played it for the first time since I was 15, and found I was still word-perfect in half the songs. One of the reasons I'm often reluctant to listen to new stuff is that I worry that all this music in my head takes up space that should be reserved for useful information!

So only so much musical ability can be learnt. The rest is innate. Either you got it, or you don't. So - why the hell does that bother me? Just because I don't have it? There's more to it than that.

What talents do I have? Well, *looks down & buffs fingernails nervously* I'm pretty darn good at chemistry. Oh woo. Chemistry. There's a sexy talent if ever I saw one. Wait a minute - I did a chemistry degree, of course I'm good at chemistry. Duh. I learnt it all at college.

I should know from my own students that that's not true. Some of them enjoy chemistry, are keen to learn and put the time & effort in. Yet still they struggle with comparatively simple questions. The knowledge is there but the understanding isn't, they aren't able to link together topics and see the subject as a whole, even though they are very bright students who get easy As in their other subjects. I tell them that chemistry is a hard subject because there's only so much you can learn from textbooks, the rest is more like detective work. You get the clues and have to piece it all together to come up with the solution. And there might be more than one right solution, or none at all - especially once you have to consider real-world industrial things like percentage yields, equilibria, cost of chemicals and safety. I tell them that learning how to "do" chemistry is more important than memorising facts - that in a real world laboratory context, you always have textbooks and reference manuals to look up details like the boiling point of some particular compound. What's important is not remembering the actual boiling points of individual chemicals, but instead being able to look at a class of chemicals and know instantly what the trend in boiling points is. Being good at chemistry involves verbal reasoning, mathematics, spatial awareness, parallel processing, time management and problem-solving - before we even get onto the scientific knowledge that must be learnt and the scientific understanding that must, somehow, be gained.

OK. So why does that seem less of a $deity-given talent than musical ability?

Is it because science is based on logic, whereas music taps into the emotions? Is it something to do with left vs right sides of the brain? Is it something to do with the fact that I'm strongly - strongly NF on personality tests?

I can't give you an answer. But it's certainly something I'm going to be thinking about.

Comments

[tropism.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I think that it's just because people are wired slightly differently in the pattern-matching areas of their brain. I'd like to be able to do some things, like write computer software, but the kind of intuitive leaps which come naturally to a good programmer just usually aren't there for me. I don't see the shortcut; I don't see the logical progression; I've never written a truly righteous hack. I also sucked at calculus because I didn't see through the equations to know when to apply certain recutive formulae.

On the other hand, give me a camera and I can -work- a subject. Give me a starting point and a couple of characters and I can flesh out a story. The inspiration sleets down light lightning in a bad storm. And, like I said, I think it has something to do with the way that we see the essential object through the noise of the rest of the environment. It's pattern-matching, except in this case, it's like some strange kind of open-ended mensa test. Triangle, square, pentagon -- what comes next? (Or, in the case of a story I'm working on, early bronze age society, small group of religious outcasts, and a stranded human escape craft. What comes next?)

To some extent, of course, it also just comes down to how well you know the subject matter. For example, I know the workings of my camera intimately. I know what effects f-stops will have on my depth of field at what range, I've learned to 'see' in the reduced dynamic range of a digital sensor or film, I've learned what effect shutter speeds have on my picture, etc, etc. Once this is truly _learned_, to the point where you don't even consider it consciously, it just comes together transparently and astounds those who've never encountered it before. It's zen -- the best work comes when there is no thought involved, because there need be no thought involved, because you are in the moment and working on sheer reflex and inspiration to get what you need to do done. The tool becomes an extension of yourself.

These two aspects combined -- the simple knowledge of the tools you're using and your natural inclination to different forms of pattern-matching and recognition -- seem to lead people to excel in different fields. Being able to compose something like that techno piece in two hours is the result of knowing your tools so intimately that they are transparent to the creative process, and having an intuitive grasp of the patterns of music, so you can say "I want this...what should I do?" or "This just happened...what should come next?" and a few good answers come to mind.

[nmc.livejournal.com]

What tropism said, quite nicely.

I might throw in some little caveats, though. In my opinion, you do need training with the tools of X. But it also needs to be recent training; higher levels of training fade quickly. You also need to enjoy it. In my opinion, people who dislike doing X can sit through hours and hours of training and not make much progress.

Oh, and confidence. It's amazing how many times I'm teaching / tutoring someone, and I realize that the problem isn't in their skill set or mental facility with the subject, it's simply that they don't believe they can solve the problem. If I can convince them that they can solve the problem, the answer comes to them.

Also, I agree entirely with the knowledge of the tools bit. Both the mental tools and the physical tools, really (with much hand waving as to the distinction). tropism has much facility with certain mental tools of the photographer; seeing as a camera, the ability to mentally switch through different settings and relative positions, and so forth. I have a great deal of facility with the mental tools of a programmer; all the different flow control and data manipulation options and how they can work together or against each other. I'd also bet we're pretty good with our physical tools. I often find myself hitting Control-X Control-S before I even think about saving a file. I'll bet that if tropism has a camera they've used for quite awhile, there are at least a few settings they set before they even realize they wanted to set them.

Give me a different editor, or tropism a camera they're unfamiliar with, and we'd still have all the training, mental facility and mental tools leaping to our aid. But it'd probably take us longer, and we'd get more and more pissed off about it. We'd have to deliberately stop doing all the little things that are instinctual plus figure out how to do every little thing.

As an aside, it's also ... amazing / amusing / horrifying ... how many intermediate-level people will suddenly obsess over the physical tools. When I played the trombone, it was the exact mouthpiece class and metallic composition of the horn. With programming, the Emacs vs. vi war. I'd assume that there are intermediate-level photographers who are unhealthily obsessed with the exact make and model of the camera. In all cases, though, as long as you have something roughly right, all you really need is to get really, really used to what you have.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

My intuitive leaps are in chemistry and cooking. It's funny, because I was always told that "Good chemists make good cooks" - but I SUCKED at lab chemistry at college, and could barely cook anything more complicated than bung ingredients in the oven. Over the past couple of years, as I developed more and more food intolerances, I had to learn to cook for myself because it was that or starve, and now it's intuitive. I find myself with an ingredient in my hand and no idea why, except that I suspect adding a smidgeon of it will change the flavour and... it just happens.

Now cooking is one of my favourite things to do - making a meal for someone is the way I show I care for them, and the physical processes help me when I'm stressed. I just go down to the kitchen and bake a cake or bread or something.

The chemistry part is frustrating. Now that my brain is back up to speed, I am saddened by all the years I lost to illness, and all the potential I have that's going to waste. Getting back into research now would be very difficult, and even if I could persuade someone to take me on, dangerous. I already know that I don't have the emotional strength to keep going. My current job is the best of a set of bad options - the closest useful thing I can do bearing in mind my health. And it bothers me.

[rowan-leigh.livejournal.com]

*sympathizes*