In the design and development world there is a lot of talk about constraints and embracing them to foster creativity. I love this movement and subscribe to it (at least I try to).
One thing that has slowly crept up on me though is that this type of attitude is starting to gain some real ground in the music world. Historically it would seem that sometime after the 60’s and the era of the power trio, musicians decided that adding more to bands was the way to go. Another guitar player here, a keyboard there, heck throw in another drummer and a triangle player for good measure! and even more so lately you have big bands like The Go Team (7+ members) and The Arcade Fire (5+ members). Now I don’t have anything against any of these bands (in fact I love the go team and the arcade fire), but it seems like the culture of bigger is better is getting out of hand!
Now I know in recent history the popularity of electronic music has soared and often times is a single person mixing records or composing using a computer this doesn’t seem as revolutionary to me as the advent of small rock bands.
Lately, and especially with new rock type bands you are starting to see a lot of 3 and 2 person setups
- Death from above 1979 – bass and drums
- Rodrigo y Gabriela – 2 guitars (fantastic too btw)
- White stripes – Guitar and drums
- Yeah Yeah Yeah’s – singer, guitar, drums
- Muse – guitar, bass, drums
These bands are realizing that great music can be made with less, embracing the constraints (whether by choice or otherwise) and not only succeeding but excelling at what they do.
Where have you seen people embracing constraints? Or creating constraints to foster creativity? I think it’s a fascinating topic and would love to hear more about it.
4 Comments
Thanks for the reference. Muse is one of my favorite bands. If you can find the “making of” video from Citizen Erased (one of my favorite Muse songs) you’ll see a hired team of cellists recording background instrumentation for the track. Not only do they embrace their constraints, but they use the plugin model for efficiency as well
I love the analogy you used in that last sentence!
Interesting post! As a recent twitterer I have been blown away by the innovation triggered by a 140 character limit.
I see a strong parallel between musical group size and development team size rather than seeing group size as a constraint. Small team sizes can be very effective and we see success stories like Diana Krall and Chris Thiessen at http://www.zoomii.ca (which you really should check out as it is an impressive one man show).
ONTH, I too love some large bands like the Arcade Fire. I almost used them as an example of how a team can pull together as generalizing specialists and outperform traditional teams. I was going to compare their cover of “Born on a Train” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6UlxHQsfzA) which is simply awesome compared to the original Magnetic Fields version.
My point is that a musical group can be an interesting metaphor for a development regardless of group size.
Declan, I find myself comparing agile development teams to all kinds of other area’s, sports and music are just a couple. Do you find yourself doing the same thing often? I find it intriguing that so many parallels can be drawn between what appear to be completely different disciplines.