Creativity Now 2005: Brian Eno

Issue 45 of Tokion magazine, the “Creativity Now 2005” issue, is in large parts a transcript from a conference organized by the magazine in November. Among the speakers were Brian Eno. Here are the parts I liked:

I’d just [about the time he started experimenting with “ambient music”] been reading an essay by Warren McCulloch called “What the Frog’s Eyes Sees,” and it’s about habituation. Habituation is what happens when our eyes move all the time. We don’t keep our eyes still. We scan all the time. We do that so that the rods and cones don’t habituate. So, to habituate is to become saturated, and to cease to give any signals. What frog’s eyes do is they stay absolutely still, and so any parts of the environment that aren’t in motion cease to become visible to the frogs. Now, the big advantage of this is that, assuming something does move, like a little fly, it’s the only thing the frog sees.

Eno continued to say that part of what he wanted to do with ambient music, was to, as I understand him, create a repetitive backdrop to habituate the ears, to make you attentive to other sounds, “to ignore the common information, and start to hear more and more exotic subparticles of information that are the changing parts.”

(The title of the essay Eno refers to might actually be “What the Frog’s Eyes Tells the Frog’s Brain.”)

He continues:

I thought that was very, very interesting because it was using a process of the brain as the method of composing. It’s very, very different from the classical idea of composing, where the composer is a sort of an architect who specifies something in full detail, down to the faucets in the bathroom. It’s much more like a gardener might do: planting some seeds and letting them come up.

Later, responding to a question from the audience about what interests him about pop music:

I think what interests me about pop music is that it’s a very, very democratic container. It’s capable of holding anything that you can put into it. It’s much more interesting to me in that sense than, say, gallery fine art. Gallery art, to me, is constantly in a state of defense against becoming too accessible.