Brian Eno, my son, music and generative thinking

"We will try to start something different here today. We will learn to sing and play some songs without any words", said Anita on a Saturday morning to a class of two-year old toddlers, each one hanging to their father or mother. The look on the faces of us parents that first day of class was somewhat skeptical, but no one could hide a glare of curiosity. The approach seemed unusual for most of us, who had learned since early years to identify our nursery rhymes through their titles and choruses.

I recall it took me several years to figure out that "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", the "ABC Song" and "Bah Bah Black Sheep" had all the same melody, with small variations, but completely different lyrics and stories. I went on, unsuspecting this was the case, throughout most of my childhood. After learning how to play the melodies of those three of my favorite English-tradition songs in the piano, I finally found out they were actually variations of the same song. I felt somewhat cheated.

"Children develop a better sense of music if they learn melodies and rhythm without any words to them, alongside the regular nursery rhyme repertoire", said Anita. The word "develop" definitely strung a resonant chord on most parents, so much that we are today centered on providing our kids the best opportunities for development, in a world that becomes more competitive and challenging at each turn. We, parents, were convinced, and from that day on we went from curious, to involved and, finally, some of us were able to enjoy with awe the truth behind Anita's words.

During the first few lessons, my boy was suddenly exposed to relatively complex rhythmic patterns and short sequences of notes stressing important intervals (mostly three-note chromatic ascents and descents, and major thirds and fifths), which were made palatable by means of puppets that would "say" sounds they had to repeat (things like "pa-paaaaa, pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-paaa" etc). The theatrical play, and the absence of words actually seemed to make the kids more comfortable, and the responses were faster than we had seen previously, when another teacher had opted to use the more traditional learning-through-words approach.

After two or three weeks of lessons with Anita, our two-year old boy came up with some pretty amazing musical stunts. One of them was particularly illustrative of what was actually happening to these young kids, via the opportunity of learning Anita's "songs without words". We were having breakfast one day, and he had his favorite toy cars on the table, from the film "Cars": "Mater" and "Lightining McQueen". He was pretending McQueen was being towed by Mater, and started singing along over the melody of "The wheels of the bus go round and round":

Lighting McQueen is pulling Mate
Pulling Mate
Pulling Mate

I was still half asleep, but suddenly felt enlightned to understand that he was having a hugely creative moment, mostly as a response to learning things the proper way: music as a more fundamental stream of possibilities for expressing his thoughts and feelings, not necessarily attached to any particular set of words. Oh, boy, that surely made me feel better, and soothed my feelings of having being cheated when I was a kid after finding out that a few of my favorite nursery rhymes were all the same song!

My two-year old had created his own soundtrack, freely using a known melody to attach his own words, all consistent with the context of his pretend play (OK, OK, he did invert which car was being towed...). At that moment, I also saw a strong manifestation of an idea I had been toying around with in recent weeks, which connected my son's improvisation to the more formal concept of "generative thinking" (se, eg, Low and Hollis, 2003). (See also a neat article about kids and generative learning/thinking).

The experience I had with my son also connected us to the fundamentally generative nature of musical works created by Brian Eno , to recent developments made based on Eno's works which led to applications for the iPhone , and even to the underlying framework governing the development and the internal mechanics of computer games like Will Wright's Spore. By the way, the seed that had me going on this topic in the first place was actually an interactive interview/workshop I had seen a few months back featuring Brian Eno and Will Wright, together, discussing generative creation processes.