Victor Bello 6/26/12
Psychology Dr. Kinslow MUSIC PRODUCTION AND CREATIVE THINKING

“Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.” These words of wisdom come from the great philosopher Plato and I have taken them to heart along my musical journey. I’ve known for a long time that I would find my calling in a career in the music industry. It was around the age of 12 that I really how much I really loved music and wanted to do this for the rest of my life. My journey into music began with me teaching myself to play the drums, even though I had taken guitar and violin lessons in the past this was the first instrument I learned on my own and the beginning of my journey to become a music producer. I have realized that many of the concepts in psychology can be applied successfully to the music industry and ultimately further me in my career as a music producer. As I have been studying psychology, there are four major concepts that have stuck out to me as the most crucial things I needed to survive in the music industry. The first was emotional intelligence, also known as EQ, this is a crucial factor to me because I believe that to be a very good music producer you need to understand how other people’s emotions work. This is really important because music is all about emotion and expression, such things as a change in tempo and scale can make a happy song sound more depressing and slow. For one to produce music, you have to be able to feel the music. If you can’t feel your own music, no one else will and your work will suffer. The second concept is auditory perception. This is also a very important concept because it deals heavily in the audio engineering side of music production. Because music is sound, learning the basics of how sounds works is very instrumental in mixing music. For example, pitch is the frequency of a sound wave, a higher frequency wave corresponds to higher while a lower frequency corresponds to a lower pitch. A bass guitar would be an example of a low pitched instrument, while a soprano saxophone is a high pitched instrument .An understanding of how pitch, amplitude and timbre affect music are pivotal in any musical career.
The third concept, social psychology, is also a very critical point because social influence is very powerful. Your understanding of social psychology and the way you interact with other people can easily make or break your career. For this reason, people in the corporate world often talk about “fit.” So even if you are the smartest or most qualified person on a team, your career can still suffer if you don’t know how to interact with the people around you. In addition, people often say “it’s not what you know but who you know.” This shows the importance of networking. Your career can easily get stuck if you don’t know how to leverage your network.
This also applies to the music industry since it a very business-oriented environment. To survive in the music world, you have to really understand the industry as a whole and know how to interact with the “movers and shakers.” You also have to be a trend setter and be an inspiration and influence to others. This can be tricky because you must conform to social standards without conforming your music as an art. You have to be able to create your own sound and not be a ‘’copy-cat biter,” while still being “sonically in the pocket”, as a rising producer recently told me. You want to stand out, but not stray so far from the norm that your art form is unrecognizable or unacceptable. As an artist, you also want to maintain your unique style and brand and not conform to what is selling and popular in the music industry. This to me is the second most crucial point because without your own sound you will not stand out in an already over-saturated crowd.
The last and most powerful concept is creative thinking. Creative thinking is the most important aspect because it challenges us to think outside of the box and think of things that wouldn’t come to the minds of most people. Creative musical thinking is the seed to creating music because without it your music just won’t grow. An example of creative thinking in the music industry is Johnny Juliano. He had an idea to record a hair clipper and put it in a song. This was something never done before, but now attempted by many producers.
Creative thinking is by far the most critical aspect of music production and music education. Yet it has been quite difficult for scientists to understand. Without their being a system for measuring musical creativity it has been hard for researchers to conduct experiments especially in participants with no prior musical experience. However scientists have recently created a new method of measuring musical creativity that even people with little to none of experience in music can participate in. This new method is the MET which stands for Musical expression test, The main objective of the MET is to expand the brains ability to use convergent and divergent thinking which researchers says are the most critical aspects of musical creativity. These aspects are measured using four musical activity tests which are free exploration, alternative use, composition and improvisation. The MET includes a sound production kit which includes items such as a xylophone or cymbal to create sounds with and a computer sequencing system to record the sounds the participants create. The participants of the experiments were forty-two students in their first year of high school all around the age 15 with half almost half of the participants having prior musical knowledge. The correlation method was used to determine that that they were four types of creative styles gifted, playfully creative academic and disorganized Gifted was the best in all three categories of creativity, technical quality and expressivity. The academic type performed the worst with failing scores in creativity and expressivity.
In conclusion Creativity thinking is the most desired aspect of music, without it Music would lack originality and suffer. EQ, auditory perception, social psychology are 4 crucial steps to a career as a music producer. REFERENCES
Barbot, B., & Lubart, T. (2012). Creative thinking in music: Its nature and assessment through musical exploratory behaviors. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, doi:10.1037/a0027307
Lillenfield, S., Lynn, S., Namy, L., Woorlf, N. (2010). Psychology: A Framework for Everyday Thinking, Third Custom Edition for Prince George's Community College.