I’ve recently become fascinated with the work of Ernst Haeckel, a German artist/biologist active around the turn of the century. His book ‘Kunstformen der Natur’ (German for ‘Art Forms of Nature’) contains a series of 100 lithographs, each arranging groups of disparate species into striking, unified compositions. Each plate is laid out as a collage, freeing the animals from their natural contexts – absent this constraint, the natural symmetries between different types of animals is astoundingly revealed.
The drawings are unquestionably beautiful, but more interesting are their philosophical underpinnings, and the application of those modes of thinking to our daily practice as digital artists.
From Olaf Breidbach’s preface of Prestel’s recent repackaging of Art Forms of Nature:
“In this profusion of symmetrical series, which seem to stem from the workshop of a brilliant designer, a fundamental formula for living things shines through for Haeckel. The many forms brought together in his work appeared to him to be a series of variations of simple constellations of symmetry. His depictions of them embrace a succession of complexities in which he saw the mechanics of evolution at work. His ‘Art Forms in Nature’ seeks to reproduce such constructions. Every plate in this work is an example of Haeckel’s notion of a principal unity of all living things. Each one of these illustrations – which for the uninitiated observer are at first only highly ornamental – was, for Haeckel, proof of his thesis. For him, the individual form, its inherent symmetry, documented Darwin’s notion of the evolutionary development of all living things..”
Catch that? Form is a documentation of evolution? It was an effective blending of science and nature, and his public ate it up. So what does it have to do with you?
Haeckel worked in the time of Art Nouveau and the birth of Darwinism – two ideological systems linked by their blurring of natural form and structure. As opposed to the theological perspective that living things came into existence in unchanging form due to divine will, the Darwinian perspective saw man as merely the current iteration of nature’s development. This line of thinking brought man much closer to nature – art nouveau synthesized this philosophy into an art of organic naturalism, realized in the decorative work of Gustav Klimt and the sculptural architecture of Gaudi, to name just a few. With these philosophies, the gulf between art and science became not only navigable, but irrelevant – art and science were merely opposing sides of the same coin.
If you’re a digital artist, there’s a similar philosophical chasm that has to be reconciled. Art is the expression of creativity, and creativity is a fuzzy, impossible-to-quantify thing. It would follow that, if the 1’s and 0’s realm of digital art is binary (and the context of art must mirror its content), digital media is unsuitable for rendering naturalism (the argument doesn’t really hold up as a snap your fingers, the art world changes-type thing, but for describing the way incremental technological changes have affected art, it’ll do). This is what we see in many forms of art today. The use of auto-tune in music gives the majority of our pop an artificial perfection. Video games tend towards increasingly stylized characters. We drive boxy cars down precisely aligned grids of roads. These forms of design mirror their digital production mechanisms, standing unified in opposition to naturalism.
But just as Haeckel saw the divide between science and nature irrelevant, so do I posit is the divide between naturalism and modernism in digital media. It’s a false choice – the more interesting places of artistic exploration are where digital/scientific/functional techniques and analog/naturalistic/formal patterns – merge and push each other forward. Examples?
- Frank Gehry, through the use of the program CATIA, construct the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as less structure and more sculpture.
- Some of the textures in Dan Deacon’s Bromst album are generated by connecting a MIDI output to a player piano, allowing the piano to play lines that are physically impossible for a human. (There’s an awesome video of this here).
- Robert Lazzarini’s Skulls series uses digital technology in hyperrealist sculptures of typical objects, skewed out of proportion. Looking at them almost makes you dizzy. (fascinating article about Lazzarini’s process here)
Each of these pieces leverage the best aspects of digital and analog technology – digital control and scalability, with organic feel and connection to history. I’m eager to explore these ideas more in my future sound and design work. Thoughts? Examples? Counter-examples? Holler in the comments.
I went to a wonderful lecture by Robin Sukhadia at LACMA this week on the history of Bollywood film music – a varied and rich tradition that I (and most Americans) know *nothing* about (my previous knowledge of Bollywood cinema was limited to the random glimpses I’d catch at Indian restaurants). Robin’s lecture put what I’d assumed were just elaborate, silly music videos into a bigger context – and the macro work technique behind their production raises intriguing questions about going deep or going fast.
For starters – It’s important to note that Hollywood and Bollywood are separated by more than thousands of miles. While the American movie system produces about 700 movies yearly (including major studio and independent releases), Bollywood produces around 4,000 – nearly all of which are musicals. Over the past 50 years, the vast majority of music in these films have been dominated by a small coterie of Indian superstars that, while household names in India, are virtually unknown in the U.S. To qualify ‘dominated’ – Mohammad Rafi, one of the premiere playback singers in Bollywood cinema, has the Guinness world record for the most number of songs commercially recorded. Between 1944 and April 1980, Rafi claimed to have recorded 28,000 songs in 11 different languages (to put that into perspective, there are only 13,140 days between 1944 and 1980). Rafi, along with Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, and composers like Sachin Dev Burman, Naushad, and Rahul Dev Burman created vibrant cinematic hybrids, molding traditional Indian classical music into bite-size pop confections.
It’s interesting to think of how the sheer volume of films influenced their production. To meet the demand, being prolific was kind of a necessity – which brings up an interesting question: is Bollywood better for it? Is it better in the end to be prolific and have that work be of varying quality, or to be a perfectionist, with less output, but higher quality? Representatives on each side of the spectrum have their strengths and weaknesses. Frank Zappa, Bob Dylan, and Ryan Adams are all wildly prolific, but have all had pieces of work (or, in Dylan’s case, decades) that are significantly less celebrated. On the other hand, while Peter Gabriel and Tool have created singularly constructed gems, they only dole them out every five years or so – and that kind of overthinking can be a danger in itself (witness the bronze turd that is Chinese Democracy).
I would argue that now, however, with business models, distribution models, and attention spans changing due to work being released on the Internet, it’s in the best interests of an artist to be prolific. A few reasons:
- There’s less risk of a dud blowing out a section of your audience – everybody produces crap from time to time, but if you’re producing more material the crap will quickly be forgotten in favor of better, more recent material.
- It’s easier to market more stuff – a rapid production clip enables different distribution strategies, like subscription models. And there are just more things to sell.
- It’s easier to form relationships – more output means more paths for audiences to form relationships with your content, which is ultimately what sells art.
- We get better by practice – a fast clip of work takes you out of your comfort zone and forces you to make creative choices out of necessity that you wouldn’t normally make, expanding your horizons and ultimately improving your work.
Here are some of my favorites from the lecture:
Hoton Mein Aisa Baat – from Jewel Thief [Lata Mangeshkar; SD Burman]
Aao Twist Karein – from Bhoot Bangla [Manna Dey; RD Burman]
Understanding Licensing – Part 3 – Performance Licenses and Performance Rights Organizations
Remember when we talked about the different rights you had for your music under copyright? One of them is the exclusive right to perform the work publicly, which is where performance licenses come in. ‘Performance’ is actually a pretty broad word – as defined by the Copyright Office, to ‘perform’ a work is “to recite, render, play, dance, or act it, either directly or by means of any device or process.” So by this definition, any time your work is played in a public venue (on a radio station, at a restaurant, even over a PA at a campground – seriously), your performance rights are being exercised and you are owed royalties depending on the terms of a performance license.
So all that artists have to do is monitor every public venue, check and see if their work it being performed, and individually negotiate a rate for each person using their content. Both impossible, and about as much fun as a sharp stick in your eye. Fortunately we have Performance Rights Organizations that do the heavy lifting.
Performance Rights Organizations (PROs) are the intermediaries between copyright holders and businesses that want to use copyrighted works. Artists affiliate with one of three PROs (in the United States they’re ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC) who collect and distribute royalties from public performances to copyright holders. Each business that wants to publicly perform work gets a license with one of these PROs, and pays them a set fee keyed to their capacity (for example, the Black Cat in DC might pay $5,000 yearly, while Madison Square Garden may be $500,000). PROs monitor venues and pay artists a cut of the money they collect from venues based on the amount of airtime that artist’s song is getting.
Performance Rights Organizations
I’ve always been a bit conflicted about PROs – they tend to be rottweiler-ish in their zeal for strict copyright rights (it took months of public shaming to get ASCAP to back on a lawsuit that required the Girl Scouts to pay licenses for singing campfire songs), but they’re instrumental in ensuring artists’ financial livelihood. I decided I needed to get a little more information. I’m affiliated with BMI, so during a trip to L.A., I stopped by their office, and met for about an hour with Hanna Pantle, AVP Corporate and Media Relations. She was generous with her time and (considerable) energy, and gave me a much more holistic understanding of how performance rights organizations operate. We’ll start with a little history…
ASCAP was founded in 1914 to protect the copyrighted musical works of composers and publishers coming mostly Tin Pan Alley (some of the charter members were Irving Berlin and John Philip Sousa). As radio started to gain popularity in the 1930s, artists wanted to be paid for their on-air performances, but stations were reluctant to pony up to ASCAP. So radio organizations banded together and chartered their own less expensive alternative to ASCAP in the fall of 1939, calling it Broadcast Music Incorporated, or BMI (their first hit was 1941’s bizarre ‘The Hut Song’). Many broadcasters and several of the major music publishers quickly shifted to BMI, setting off a small but heated skirmish between the two groups (for a ten-month period in 1941, music licensed by ASCAP couldn’t be broadcast on NBC or CBS radio stations). Eventually, public pressure forced the two groups to play nicely, and today their differences are as vast as that of Coke and Pepsi. Each group claims a roster in the hundreds of thousands, all artists and publishers whose copyright rights the Performance Rights Organizations rigorously defend.
And by the way, I’m not including the dark horse of PROs, SESAC, in this discussion. While ASCAP and BMI are both non-profit entities, SESAC is a for-profit business. And there’s no open membership – you have to be asked by the SESAC to affiliate with them.
Some other things PROs offer musicians:
Artist development – both organizations have a tremendous amount of resources new musicians can use to network and hone their skills (ASCAP’s calendar, BMI’s calendar).
Overseas Representation – PROs collect and distribute a significant chunk of money from performances in other countries – about 1/4 of BMI’s revenue comes from foreign countries.
Role in New Media – artists’ revenues no longer depend solely on radio. PROs are increasingly expanding into games, ringtones, mobile media, and podcasts.
So how does an artist pick which PRO to affiliate with? The typical answer to this question is to search your heart, consider the differences between the two groups, and go with your conscience. Which means nothing if the differences between the two groups are indecipherable to non-lawyers. The two groups monitor airtime slightly differently, but that distinction is subtle and doesn’t consistently affect royalty payouts. I ended up affiliating with BMI because they seemed scrappier and a bit less corporate than ASCAP. After my experience walking around their office and meeting their staff, I’m confident I made the right decision – their staff is truly passionate about new music, friendly, and generous (I even got a USB lava lamp out of the trip).
But there are still a lot of things to sort out. Can a common ethical ground be found between PROs, and Creative Commons licenses? How can the artist development tools PROs offer best be leveraged?
We’ll figure it out – stay tuned.
A mechanical license allows somebody to record and distribute music that was written by someone else. So – say I wanted to record a speed metal version of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ – I would owe Antonio Carlos Jobim (or, at least his estate) royalties depending on the terms of a mechanical license. There are two ways a mechanical license could be achieved:
Compulsory – After an artist publishes a song, a compulsory mechanical license kicks in. Compulsory means that, whether the songwriter likes it or not, anybody has the right to rerecord their song (within some reasonable boundaries, like not radically changing the lyrics). As of January 1, 2006, the statutory mechanical rate is $.091 for songs 5 minutes or less, or $.0175 per minute or fraction thereof per copy for songs over 5 minutes. So say my speed metal masterpiece becomes a smash hit and sells 200,000 copies. I owe the songwriter gets $.091 X 200,000 = $18,200 (Ouch). As egalitarian as such a system is, it is rarely used – there’s an exceptionally strict payment system, and the federally mandated rates of pay are typically higher than can be had after negotiation. Most artists prefer to go…
Negotiated – Representatives of the copyright holder negotiate rates and payment schedules directly. The mechanics of payment for the publisher are handled by the Harry Fox Agency – which is basically the ASCAP/BMI/SESAC of mechanical licenses.
A few items to note here – the artist who wrote the piece always retains a right called ‘first issue’. This means that the artist, and the artist alone, decides who will record their song first. This right can be extremely important. Bob Dylan had initially intended to release his song ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ as a cut recorded live at a folk festival. But when Dylan heard the final recording though, he decided it wasn’t quite up to snuff. Unfortunately, hIs record contract with Columbia didn’t give him the right to decide what material the company decided to release. Our man was in quite a spot.
So he denied his own record label a mechanical license to the song. Problem solved.
[More - CD Baby has a step-by-step process for obtaining compulsory mechanical licenses here]
As we speak (fingers crossed) my paperwork is working its way through the US Copyright Office. But simply having a copyright registered means nothing on its own. Copyrights are tools which are leveraged by licenses. Licenses specify how people can commercially use your content. I began to address licensing for non-commercial purposes in my post about defining a copyright strategy with Creative Commons, but there are a variety of commercial uses that have to be considered as well.
There are 4 types of licenses:
Mechanical – A mechanical license allows someone to mechanically reproduce music on some type of media (e.g. CD, cassette, 8-track, etc.) that was written by someone else. For example: say Astrud Gilberto decided to record ‘The Weather Forecaster’ as a samba put it on his next album – a mechanical license would dictate my royalties from the sale of her version.
Performance – A performance license allows someone to broadcast or perform music live. For example: say a truck stop in Iowa wants to set a certain vibe by playing ‘The Trucker’ – a performance license would dictate my royalties from that venue’s public performance.
Synchronization – A synchronization license allows music to be used with visual images (e.g. television shows, films, videos, and commercials). For example: say ‘The President’ was used as the centerpiece of a Volkswagon commercial – a synchronization license would dictate my royalties from the ad.
Print – A print license covers the sale of printed sheet music For example: say somebody wanted to include a tabbed transcription of ‘The Preacher’ in an introductory piano book they were compiling – a print license would dictate my royalties from the sale of the printed version of the song.
As licensing involves money, it’s gets complicated pretty quickly – so in this series I’m going to introduce each type of license individually and offer tools to get the job done. Stay tuned!
Perhaps you’re wondering why I bothered to detail the extremely tedious history of copyright. It’s important to understand the dichotomy between the core foundation of copyright and, in my opinion, its history of flawed application. This gulf helps to define my interpretation of an ethical, sensible approach to copyright for independent musicians.
I believe no idea is without precedent. Every song we sing, word we write, and idea we think follows from the trail of human experience. Ideas are the product of our collaborative relationship with our past – and we have a responsibility to foster this commune of ideas.
Copyright exists primarily to protect the rights of creators to make money from their work (what I view as a financial right). But with this right comes a responsibility. Copyright should also function as a method of spurring the creation of new works that might benefit society – it’s a give and take. Authors can benefit financially from their work, but in doing so they have to contribute to the overall artistic dialogue so that others can be inspired. However, as copyright has been applied over time, its role has focused on locking down the financial rights of intellectual property owners while the duty to contribute to the collective creative dialogue has been mostly ignored. In fact, nearly every modification we have seen in the copyright laws (absent the notable 1976 inclusion of fair use) have been to either lengthen the terms of copyright, or more strictly control the way copyrighted material can be used. As more content moves to digital distribution, copyright, the foundations of which were drawn in 1976, is beginning to show its age. We all know about the RIAA going after college students, but how’s this for silliness: in December of 2007 it was reported that the RIAA was suing consumers who ripped CDs to their computers that they had legally purchased. What a mess.
Fortunately, Creative Commons has emerged as a sane voice.
Creative Commons occupies a middle ground between the All Rights Reserved totalitarianism of copyright and the No Rights Reserved anarchy of the public domain. It works as a further specification to copyright to clarify how others may use your creative work. For example: as an independent musician, I want to make it as easy as possible for people to use and reuse my work, but I don’t want to give it away. If somebody wants to remix one of my pieces, more power to them – it gets my work exposed to more people and contributes to the culture of collaboration. Creative Commons provides a flexible legal framework that allows authors to select the level of protection they want. Here are the variables for Creative Commons licenses:
Commercial/Non-Commercial – Authors select whether users can copy, distribute, display, and perform the work for either commercial or non-commercial purposes.
Modifications – Yes/No/Share-Alike – Authors specify how others can make derivative works based on their originals. “Yes” means that you give people free reign to modify your original, “No” means that you prevent people from modifying your work at all, and “Share-Alike” means that you allow people to modify your work, as long as their derivative work is distributed under a similar license the original.
My Theory
I’ve decided that all of my work will be distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. That means people have the right to share (copy, distribute, display, and perform) and remix (make derivative copies of) my work, as long as I am credited in the resulting creations; nothing is used for commercial purposes; and any new works are distributed under this same license. I view this type of licensing as a sensible approach to intellectual property, as well as a method of forming a type of collective covenant with my audience. I retain the right to profit from my work, while contributing to the greater content collective and leveraging the possibilities of digital music distribution.
Who has done this well with this system? Our pal Trent. With Ghosts I-IV he licensed both the album and the session files under the same Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.
Tools you can use
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Copyright Tools – It’s important to understand that Creative Commons licenses aren’t replacements for copyright. They provide more clarifications of how users can exercise author’s creative rights, but copyright still plays an important role.
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We talked previously about how you can copyright your work using the paper forms provided by the U.S. Copyright Office. Here are the forms for the SR copyright, PA copyright (long form), and PA copyright (short form).
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I beta-tested the Copyright Office’s new Online Registration System – or eCO, and highly encourage others to check it out. It’s significantly faster, saves you some money, and is paper-free (right now the uploads for Jamboree’s SR copyrights are happily humming along). Much more information about eCO is available here. I’ll update any progress in the comments.
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Creative Commons
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Lawrence Lessig’s blog (Lessig founded Creative Commons).
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ccMixter is a community music remixing site featuring remixes and samples licensed under CC licenses (ccMixter is powered by ccHost, which is an open source media content management system I’m currently investigating).
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To let people know your music is CC licensed, check out CCPublisher – tool that aids identifying audio and video files as CC licensed (though a more robust ID3 tag editor like MP3 ID3X is far more flexible).
So – that’s copyright (whew). But this is just the first step in our journey – next up, licensing!
So, you know that something is protected by copyright, but you only want to use a teeny, tiny bit of it. Do you still need to seek permission from the copyright owner, creating the possibility that the owner will ask for money or say no? The answer is impossible to predict in most cases and depends entirely whether your use of the work is “fair use.” The Copyright Act lists the following four factors to determine fair use:
1 – The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2 – The nature of the copyrighted work;
3 – The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4 – The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
It lists criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research as examples of things that might be considered fair use.
For example, when the Nation Magazine published sections of an unpublished book autobiography of Gerald R. Ford in an article titled “The Ford Memoirs – Behind the Nixon Pardon,” the Supreme Court held this was not fair use. Harper & Row, Publishers v. Nations Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539 (1985). Even though the purpose was for news reporting, the court determined that the commercial aspects along with other factors tipped the balance against fair use.
Conversely, the Supreme Court held that 2 Live Crew’s parody of Roy Orbison’s song “Oh, Pretty Woman,” was fair use. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 510 U.S. 569 (1994). The court noted that the 2 Live Crew’s use was a parody that took no more of the original song than was necessary to identify it as the target of the parody. However, another court determined that a book parodying the O.J. Simpson trial written in the style of a Dr. Suess book was not fair use because the Dr. Suess was not the target of the parody. Dr. Seuss Enters. v. Penguin Books USA, 109 F.3d 1394 (9th Cir. 1997).
You may have noticed these examples all included a court. That’s because the courts have the most important say on whether something is fair use. Courts have stressed that all of the factors should be considered and balanced. Unfortunately there’s no way to guarantee that something is fair use. The important thing is to be informed of the law and to seek legal advice when needed to help you make educated decisions about using the content in the first place.Next week, we’ll look at licensing – until then!
- Laura Merritt is an attorney in the Intellectual Property group of Baker Donelson Bearman Caldwell & Berkowitz, PC.
Copyright – we’ve done history, we’ve done legal. Let’s get practical.
Most people equate getting a copyright with registering a copyright. To register a copyright, you simply file documents with the U.S. Copyright Office. The forms are relatively straightforward, but most people (if you’re like me) benefit from a more practical example:
These are complete, accepted Performing Arts (Form PA) and Sound Recording (Form SR) copyright forms. I annotated each form to provide more detail. These are pretty tiny, so I made a high-resolution PDF for your zooming, viewing pleasure.
We know that the purpose of copyright protection is to encourage the creation of expressive works by providing rights to people who make them.
The owner of a copyright in a musical composition (the music and lyrics) has the exclusive rights to:
1 – reproduce the work in copies;
2 – prepare derivative works based upon the work;
3 – distribute copies of the copyrighted work;
4 – perform the work publicly; and
5 – display the work publicly.
Regardless of whether you decide to draw a “C” inside of a circle on everything you create, copyright begins to protect your work as soon as it is “fixed into a tangible medium.” When most people refer to “getting a copyright,” they’re actually referring to registering their copyright.
But if you get all of the benefits of the copyright without registration, why should you register it?
Mainly, security. Registration with the U.S. Copyright Office is required to file a lawsuit for copyright infringement and registration within certain time frames provides additional benefits during litigation. For example, if you have registered a copyright within one month of finding out about the infringement, a court can award increased damages and attorney’s fees to you if you are successful in the lawsuit. Even if a copyright owner doesn’t bring a lawsuit in court, having a registered copyright gives the owner a much stronger bargaining position with anyone suspected of infringement. The owner of a registered copyright can file it with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to prevent infringing versions from being imported into the United States.
The act of registering a copyright requires the owner to send an application, deposit and payment to the U.S. Copyright Office in Washington, D.C. The forms are short, though ownership and authorship can raise questions in a collaborative creative environment. Generally, co-authors are co-owners in the eyes of the law without any agreements stating otherwise.
So, what does a copyright protect?
Musicians should be aware of two separate copyright protections: (1) copyright protections for musical compositions, which include music and lyrics (this copyright can be registered with application form PA) and (2) copyright protections for sound recordings, which protect the recording but not the underlying music and lyrics (form SR).
If you write a song and record it yourself, you would own both of these interests. But say, for example, you perform a song you wrote and someone else records it. Without any agreements to the contrary, the other person owns the copyright in the sound recording. That doesn’t give them any rights to prevent you from performing the song freely, but they have the right to make and distribute copies of the sound recording.
A copyright in a sound recording does not include a general public performance right but includes the rest of the rights listed above. When a sound recording is played on the radio, most likely the owner of the sound recording is not being paid a royalty but the owners of the copyright in the musical composition are (e.g. Dolly Parton likely made money from Whitney Houston’s recording of Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”).
As the owner of either type of copyright you can take actions to exclude others from your exclusive rights. But, like all legal topics, there are some exceptions. The main exception or defense to copyright infringement is fair use. Fair use is a legal theory that allows limited uses of copyright material for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research — I’ll talk more about fair use next Friday.
The Copyright Act additionally contains several mandatory licenses. In these areas – mostly concerned with broadcast transmissions according to both copyright and FCC law — when certain conditions are met, certain broadcasters can pay a royalty payment to the Copyright Royalty Board in exchange for certain uses of copyrighted material rather then negotiating individually with copyright owners. Copyright owners then can make claims with the Copyright Royalty Board to receive the royalty payments.
But that’s a whole new can of worms. We’ll open it in the weeks to come.
- Laura Merritt is an attorney in the Intellectual Property group of Baker Donelson Bearman Caldwell & Berkowitz, PC.
I’m buckling down here. I’ve got to write this quickly. Instinctually, I know what I want to write about – I’ve just got to sit here and pound it out. I’m on an airplane – there’s a limited amount of time I’ve got before we’re back in Pope City – let’s see how this book holds up. You see, I just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, a book that dissects the relevance of instinct in decision making. Weaving together an eclectic blend of personal anecdotes, interviews, and old psych papers, Gladwell spells out both the benefits and dangers of using less data to make decisions. As it turns out, our unconscious minds often know things before our conscious minds do – so working faster can oftentimes lead to better results.
Let’s give it a shot.
One of the many stories Gladwell tells to advocate for the role of automatic thought is the story of Paul Van Riper. Van Riper is a Vietnam veteran who played a key role in the Joint Forces Command’s Millennium Challenge (basically the war game to end all war games). The two players in the game were the ‘Red Team’ (run by Van Riper as a *completely hypothetical* virulently anti-American Middle-Eastern government) and the ‘Blue Team’ (the U.S.). The Blue Team was stocked with the most advanced warfare technology of the time. Their combat decisions were carefully executed based on information provided by an incredibly complex system of databases and modeling algorithms. Van Riper had significantly less technolgoy, and acted far more on instinct. His operational theory was that he was “in command, but out of control” – the idea being that, by placing nearly unfettered trust in his subordinates, he would enable a type of automatic cognition (the faster, lighter, stronger approach).
I think you can probably see where this is leading – with an unsuspected volley of fictional cruise missiles, the graybeard general crushed the nerd troupe who was left helplessly attempting to fit the attack into rigidly structured analytical models as they were being pummeled. Instinct 1, Analysis 0.
But not so fast.
As much as Gladwell advocates for a return to the primal nature of automatic thinking, Blink also warns of its consequences. In a look at the unlikely rise of Warren Harding, a dim politician whose main proclivities were womanizing, drinking and golf, Gladwell notes that the judgment of his champions was clouded by the overwhelming ‘air of distinction’ Harding seemed to emit. His advisors made instinctual decisions, but they were based on Harding’s presidential good looks, not on his political prowess. To further illustrate the dangers, Gladwell provides an analysis of the case of Amadou Diallo, the Guinean New Yorker gunned down in a hail of 41 bullets several years ago. Again, in this situation the police acted instinctually, but when placed within the context of an unusually tense environment, the officers missed all of the situational cues, and ended up making a series of, to put it mildly, ‘critical misjudgments’. Instinct 1, Analysis 2
It turns out that Gladwell is advocating more for a conscious recognition and balance of both the automatic and the analytical sides of the decision making process. As important as instinct is in decision making, in the absence of any situational data that instinct is uninformed, and can be wrong. At the same time, a glut of information clouds the dataset with noise, distracting from the key factors of an issue. Relying solely on either process is when the disasters come – the better decisions are made from an equilibrium of instinct and analysis.
The concepts of Blink track well to the creative process. In my songwriting experience, the trick is finding the balance between inspired improvisation (the automatic thought) and iterative editing (the analytical thought). So while Echo Bloom can tend towards the analytical side of things (guilty as charged), that intentional exploration enriches the instinctive output – hopefully it’s a good blend between the two.
And now, the plane is starting to land. Instinct 2, Analysis 2 – we’ll call it a draw.
More:
