Mixing zones and creativity

Recombination as a source of novelty

A recurring theme in this newsletter is that old ideas beget new ideas. Existing elements collide and combine in novel ways. Modularity shows up everywhere: ideas, technologies, art forms, cultures, alphabets and language, genetics, biology. This recombinant effect is all around us.

Along with being a generative mechanism for creating new things from constituent parts, mixing ideas can also be a trigger for getting yourself unstuck. In a way, we can force generation by jamming together existing, but possibly tangential, or even totally unrelated ideas. As we discussed last week, composable ideas enable this kind of cross-pollination.

Here's a great example I ran across last week. One of my favorite things on YouTube is the cultural time capsule you find in old talk shows, like the Dick Cavett Show.

Somehow I landed on this interview with Paul Simon, a fascinating moment from 1970. In the clip, Simon tells the origin story of the song "Bridge Over Troubled Water" — an absolute classic. He goes in depth on his process around the 6:00 mark:

So it started out with me singing a song, the beginning of the song that I had... plays guitar

Now this part... sings and strums.

That comes from a Bach piece – from a Bach chorale. So that was in my mind. That's how that part slipped in.

So his first inspiration for the tune came from a piece of choral music from the 18th century. Interesting.

Then he didn't know where to go from there:

Paul: I was stuck there. That was all I had of that melody.

Dick: What makes you stuck?

Paul: Well, everywhere I went led me where I didn't wanna be. So I was stuck.

A fantastic definition of what a creative block feels like! But he kept his ears out for the next piece that fit in with his initial musical idea.

Dick: When you get a block like that, how do you break through it?

Paul: As it happens I was listening to some music by a gospel group called the Swan Silvertones. Every time I'd come home I'd put that record on, and I think that must've subconsciously influenced me, because I started to go to gospel changes.

Incredible. First taking an inspiration from the 300+ year old baroque period, and combining it with 1950s gospel music. Outside observers often imagine that a songwriter gets divinely inspired, belting out an entire original from thin air. As Simon goes on to say, though, this is how the process works: a piecemeal mixture of disconnected sources of inspiration:

That's how songs happen. They piece themselves together.

One of the lessons I take from this story is the benefit of ranging widely in what you consume and study. This song owes its existence to Simon's knowledge of both Bach and gospel. If he wasn't interested in such a wide variety of music, he wouldn't have these building blocks at hand to blend together: the benefit of a generalist's interest in all music genres, rather than a deep expertise in a single one. You have more bricks to click together in new ways.

---

---

The mixing of disparate concepts is where the interesting stuff happens. In Pace Layers I compared the collision spaces between layers to estuaries: ecosystems with distinctly different biomes that generate exceptional biodiversity through their combination. The same phenomenon happens with ideas.

Can we purposely cultivate a "creative estuary" by sticking ideas together that initially sound crazy, and just see what happens?

---

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages. —Mark Twain

---

When Simon was writing his song, we don't know what dead ends or wrong turns his process took along the way. Perhaps he tried melding classical Bach with jazz chords or a 12-bar blues and hated it. We don't know. But what we do know is he kept on the lookout for new sounds. He stayed open-minded for that novel direction he hadn't considered. His songwriting process permitted — perhaps even created intentionally —a mixing zone of new ideas to try.

In his book How to Listen to Jazz,

Ted Gioia

describes how the city of New Orleans was a melting pot of mixing cultures, a physical mixing zone. It's position at the mouth of the Mississippi and the entrance to the Gulf — a literal estuary — made it a gateway for shipping and trade, forcing thousands of diverse cultures to cross paths. It combined the cultures of the Spanish, English, and especially French colonial roots with West African culture through imported slaves. This hodgepodge sprouted what became jazz, among many other creations like creole cuisine, zydeco, and its unique architecture.

Ideas from one domain inspire breakthroughs in another. When you look around, you see these examples of recombination all over:

• The printing press — Gutenberg combines the screw press (for wine-making) with movable type

• Film noir — German expressionism + American crime fiction

• The Wright Brothers' flyer — bicycle manufacturing + gliders + internal combustion

• Post-It notes — a failed adhesive that wasn't sticky enough + paper notes

• Ride sharing — smartphones + GPS + maps + mobile payments

• Bitcoin — cryptography + peer-to-peer networks + computing

And each ingredient idea or technology can itself be traced backward down the tree.

Innovation comes from making novel connections between existing concepts. Mixing zones are sources of creative magic, and its interesting to me the degree to which we can induce originality through setting up our mixing zones to live and work in.

---