A quick musical experiment with constrained creativity

Music software company Ableton recently posted a couple documentaries on their website about the music production collective Team Supreme and its various members. In the first episode, the producer Great Dane explains how Team Supreme got started as a result of a little music production/composition game. The rules of the game were (essentially) as follows:

• Everyone gets the same short audio sample.
• Everyone has to use this sample in ~1 min of original music.
• Everyone only has 30 minutes to create this piece of music.

This idea stuck with me for a couple days and the more I thought about it the more I liked it. I am more creative when I am not aware I am being creative. The stress of a time limit would prevent me from over thinking things. So I gave it a go. and then i did it again and again and again. I didn’t create anything I consider a song, just beats, but I made a lot of them.

It is no masterpiece, mixing is generally pretty messy and some ideas just don’t work, but there are also some things worth saving. Compare the above 10 min block of music (who am I kidding, just scrub through it and you will get the idea) with a recent idea I was playing with for probably about the same amount of time as it took to create all of the 30 minute game beats:

I mean even if it all sucks, for the amount of time invested I have generated a bunch more ideas by placing this time constraint on my process. And I had a lot more fun.