More Tech……Less Create…..Perhaps Not

As Elliot remarked in the lecture, the shooting and editing process when he first started in the digital media was dirty, tedious and time consuming. But does that time that was put aside for editing that we now take for granted, take some creativity away? Does it relax our imagination? Does it numb our brain?

Even though movies and music have not been improved in the time it takes to write or compose, they have been made a whole lot more stress free with the ease and accessibility of this newer technology. But, this has made me ask the question is music and cinema as good as it once was, during the height of the analogue era?

Did you have to take more care in the studio because the more you edited the material, the quicker the quality would diminish?

Here is a video of the Beatles reacting to a piece of portable sound recording equipment, they are quite astonished to be hearing their own voices back in real time.

The Beatles have written some of the most diverse and timeless music in history identifying with every generation in one way or another since they burst out of Liverpool in the 1960s.

The fact that they created some of the worlds greatest LP’s on complicated, inaccessible & expensive technology shows that their creativity was ‘on’ all the time.

The next example is of revolutionary hip hop artist Kanye West recording his hit ‘Power’ through a series of samples on a sample machine. The samples are pre-recorded segments of songs assigned to a button on the machine. Side note – Regardless of the ease of recording, I personally think that this is one of the best hip hop/rock songs ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SixPXQPsma0

This is a reasonably easy method of recording and performing a song and there is no such thing as generation-generation quality loss.

But this  begs the question, has any imagination or creativity been lost in this ‘easier’ way of crafting music? We all know the greatness that is The Beatles, but Kanye West is arguably ‘The Beatles’ of the 2000s. He is one of the few artists in the mainstream changing the face of hip hop and pop music. Radio constantly adapts to Kanye West and not the other way round like the mass of other pop artists.

Or have we (the music listening people) just accepted that this is music and regardless of its quality or effort invested, we will buy and dance to it anyway.

Cue T-Pain(ful) app –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFrFppQ7VTA