Consume With Intent

Let's have a look at how one way of consuming media can help boost your creativity.

As always, I will first show you an example and then I'll elaborate. Let's roll.

Pick a song

Say you like a song. Say it's really popular. Great. This is harder to do with something not many people know of. You take this song, and you listen to all the covers of it, specifically those that have little to do with its original genre. To demonstrate what I mean, I have compiled a list of Let it Go covers because I love Frozen and don't mind that my daughter wants to hear it on repeat, making it the first song that pops into my mind. Have a look:

1. Original Let It Go from Disney's Frozen

2. "Africanized" Let It Go by Alex Boye

3. Metal cover of Let it Go by Leo Moracchioli

4. Bossa Nova Jazz cover of Let it Go by Swing'it Dixieband

5. A Cappella cover of Let it Go by Polar Collective

6. Not a cover, but a mashup of all the versions of Let it Go (all the languages it's been localized into)

How does it help?

As you consume cover after cover of one song, then another, and then another, your brain starts to pick up on a pattern: this is what you can do with a tune, a melody, a rhythm, words, instruments, etc. You become aware of how many properties to each element there are, how a song isn't just "a song" but all of these very different sounding things.

If you play an instrument, the next time you pick one up, whether it be a hobby of yours or to practice for your next gig, you're aware of how many more things you can do to spice up an old tune and begin to try it out. After some time, (quantity before quality, right?) something really cool emerges.

What about all the garbage I had to listen to on the way?

It's important to listen to things you don't like too. This is how you develop taste. You learn to discern what you like from what you don't not only through emotion (eg. I am uncomfortable listening to this genre), but by becoming aware of specific details (eg. I am not a fan of this genre, but I can tell this musician is playing his instrument masterfully and thus appreciate it for what it is).

Consider it research, like building a reference library in your head. You'll have a lot more to draw from on the spot, from what kinds of elements you'd like to include in your music to what kind of performance gaffes you'd like to avoid (providing you've watched videos too). You'll know which directions you might want to look into, to learn to do, that can be then blended with what you've already been doing via the question of "what can I do to avoid being like that guy?" Plus, if you don't know what exactly you hate about what you've just seen or heard in terms of technique, you now have a specific example to take apart with a teacher or someone else who is more knowledgeable than you and is willing to help.

"I'm not a musician at all. Now what?"

Writing about how to make something a transferable skill is a bit tricky, because it can, quite honestly, be a creativity exercise on its own and definitely deserves its own post. However, it's important to be aware of how everything I write about in this blog can be applied outside of the mentioned contexts, so let's see if we can express it in so many words for the time being.

So say you're not a musician. How does listening to a bunch of covers of a song you like help you in day to day life? As I said earlier, your brain starts picking up on the pattern of 'same but different'. What happens is that show vs tell thing. You're showing your brain that there's a multitude of ways to reinterpret a familiar thing, as well as examples of how it can be done, instead of just vaguely trusting that there are said ways. You can read more about how our brain processes patterns here.

Essentially, you're mildly conditioning yourself to expect variety in execution. You've understood that if, in a song, we can take the tool (instruments) and change it, we can similarly change a tool in another field and see what happens. We can change up the tempo. We can change the genre. We can try to stylize it according to the aesthetics of another era. Obviously this comes with deliberate practice, and this is just one of many exercises you can do to help, but this kind of exposure helps pave the way to better creative thinking across the board.

Can you think of ways you can do the same with other media content?

Cheers!