On April 23, 2018, our HIST 390 class (as an extension of our previous April 18, 2018 class) discussed the complexities of the originalities of music and how GarageBand relates to such a mystery.  As discussed in class, Dan Emmett was a songwriter and entertainer who performed in black face and wrote the famous song known as, “Dixie”.  Supposedly, however, Emmett had a small notebook containing all of his songs, songs that were arguably written by the Snowdens, a black family.  It’s safe to say that this has caused its fair share of controversy.  This brings up the question if Dan Emmett was as musically creative as people had originally thought, even if he did not outright copy the Snowdens’ music and simply based his off of theirs, which brings about the argument that creativity needs limits, otherwise the infinite amount of sheer options would only overwhelm people if they ever attempted to be creative.  It’s one of the reasons why our professor encouraged those who did not know what to do for their original song to find another song and simply change the genre of music or change it around a bit.  Yes, it seems like even GarageBand has features that can help the creatively challenged be a little more creative, as midi files of original and well known songs can be found and used as a base for anyone who is in desperate need of inspiration.

While I personally don’t care about a possible conspiracy about a man and a family that existed a fair amount of time ago (even though I probably should), the discussion of limitations to creativity is an interesting one that certainly piques my interest.  While it is true that the possibilities of creativity are theoretically limitless, the fact remains that there exists no such person that can tap into all of it.  Humans each have their own little suspension of disbelief, and anyone that goes beyond that is either considered crazy or weird.  Let’s be honest, a guy flying on a pizza shooting eyebeams is technically creative, but there is certainly a sizable amount of people that would just shake their head and denounce the very premise as too stupid to be true or to put money behind it.  Heck, there are actual machines and programs nowadays that can arguably be more creative than a human can be!  I’ve actually heard about an A.I. that has been created that can actually create music indiscernible from human composed music, as creativity uses specific parts of the brain and, under the hands of the right programmer, computers can imitate such processes and make beautiful music all by themselves.  You honestly wouldn’t be able to tell the difference otherwise!  There truly must be limits to creativity, otherwise, computer programs that attempted to imitate our creative processes would simply crash under the infinite amount of possibilities, wouldn’t it?