Freddie Keppard was one of the early and legendary New Orleans trumpet players, playing music that would one day be called jazz. In the lineage of the music Keppard is the successor to Buddy Bolden, the trumpeter who is said to have truly begun the style.

In 1915, the Victor Talking Disc Company approached Keppard and his band, The Original Creole Orchestra, about making a record. It would have been the first time jazz had been recorded. But, out of professional protection (Keppard often worried people would "steal" his ideas and sometimes played with a cloth over his hands so rivals couldn't tell how he used his valves), Keppard turned them down.

This idea of ownership, intellectual property rights, and copyright is changing in the digital world. One can make money by giving away things that can then be copied, altered or reconstructed in some way. The following post (above) explores this concept and what such an attitude might mean for music education.

The Mystical aspect of Left-Brain Processing

Want to experience nirvana? Have yourself a stroke.

Watch this incredible performance/reenactment by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor. She "had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness ..." (TED.com, 2008). Be warned that you will see a real live brain with spinal cord attached in this presentation.

Creativity: Unconscious Processing

If you read this post, you have a choice to make. There is a video to watch. It's creative and smart and there may be an "aha!" moment in it for you. If you'd like the information about unconscious processing first, then read through the post and watch the video at the end. If you want to watch it first before reading the info, then go watch this video now on YouTube.

Keep this experience in mind when you read the post below, or remember it when watching the video later, at the end. It may be that your unconscious mind made the leap of understanding long before "you" did, consciously. This raises some interesting questions about the nature of the self that might be fun to discuss later. But it is the unconscious mind that is the topic du jour.

Lately I've been charged to think about creativity, specifically musical creativity, and in order to understand musical creativity it seems wise to understand a little about creativity in general. This is no small task. One aspect tangled up in whatever creativity is, is what I'd like to ramble on about for this post: the idea of unconscious processing.

Many cognitive psychologists and other thinkers believe the unconscious mind's ability is both greater and of a different type than conscious abilities. The conscious/unconscious mind is often likened to serial/parallel processing in computers, with the conscious mind being the serial, linear processor of information, and the unconscious being a parallel processor, meaning it can process more than one "stream" of information at once. A number of studies show the unconscious has some pretty incredible capabilities. The undermind is the name Guy Claxton--psychologist and learning scientist--gives to the unconscious mind. If you'd like to actually get your hands on a list of these studies, check out Claxton's book, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind.

Regardless of whether you call it the unconsious or the undermind (I'll use Claxton's term because it's much more interesting/creative), we have all have experienced this illumination welling up from the somewhere "outside" of awareness. You know, you're standing in the hot shower and your mind drifts as you enjoy the sensation and the heat and your mind drifts in a stage at the edges of sleep. Then something hits you, an insight or an idea about some issue you've been focused on lately. Maybe it's as simple as where you lost the car keys last week, or maybe you just had a great idea for a new project, or saw some insight into your own or another's personality.

So what is the boundary between the conscious and unconscious processing? Well, apparently it changes. That is there is a threshold for an idea or a thing to become apparent to the conscious mind. It has been shown experimentally that this threshold changes based on the content of the idea (Claxton, 1996). If a particular stimulus in the environment is repugnant to you then the threshold for that to become conscious is higher than something more pleasant. In one of the experiments, participants were flashed a number of words, so quickly that they were not perceived by the conscious self. Gradually, the time that the words were displayed was lengthened until eventually the conscious mind was able to "see" the information. Results showed conclusively that words that made the participants uncomfortable for whatever reason, took longer for one to become conscious of them.

So, to me that's some interesting stuff. What does our subconscious, our undermind pay attention to? Everything? Is it somehow selective? How are ideas combined in the unconscious to produce insight or illumination or revelation? Can we train ourselves to become more aware of our unconscious process and facilitate more ideas or connections from this undermind companion we all carry around in our heads? How can we study something that is, by definition, almost completely inaccessible?

And most importantly, what role might unconscious processing play in being musically creative? Any suggestions out there?

watch the video on YouTube.