If you can draw a relationship, it can exist. The world keeps opening up, unfolding, and just when we expect it to be closed — to be a sealed sensible box — it shows us something completely surprising. In fact, the result and possibly unacknowledged aim of science may be to know how much it is that we don’t know, rather than what we do think we know. What we think we know we probably aren’t really sure of anyway. At least if can get a sense of what we don’t know, we don’t be guilty of the hubris of thinking we know any of it. Science’s job is to map our ignorance.

Maybe people used to think Power-Point and various other things were just tools, like a hammer. But no, every tool, including hammers, is about doing very specific things. With a hammer, it’s easier to hit a certain kind of nail than it is other kinds of thing. And so they lead you, subtly, to do certain kinds of things. At the end of the 1800s, Edison invented a recording system that didn’t use any electronics. There was no microphone: the sound was focused through a physical horn that made a little needle etch a wax cylinder. The technology could record certain things, such as a singer, but percussive things, such as a bass drum, those kind of big bass-sound impulses, made the needle jump in the recording and the playback, so a lot of the time they relegated the bass to the back of the [recording] venue, or sometimes took it out altogether in jazz recordings. Which meant that the jazz ensembles that were recorded were not the same instrumentation as you would hear live. And so what got disseminated, what people heard and recognised as jazz, early jazz, bore almost no resemblance to what was actually being played. The technology limited what could actually be distributed. That’s an early and blatant example, but it continues. It’s a little more subtle. There are other things now that shape the music in other, more subtle ways.

After more than a hundred years of technological innovation, the digitization of music has inadvertently had the effect of emphasizing its social function. Not only do we still give friends copies of music that excites us, but increasingly we have come to value the social aspect of a live performance more than we used to. Music technology in some ways appears to have been on a trajectory in which the end result is that it will destroy and devalue itself. It will succeed completely when it self-destructs. The technology is useful and convenient, but it has, in the end, reduced its own value and increased the value of the things it has never been able to capture or reproduce.

The adaptive aspect of creativity isn’t limited to musicians and composers (or artists in any other media). It extends into the natural world as well. David Attenborough and others have claimed that birdcalls have evolved to fit the environment. In dense jungle foliage, a constant, repetitive, and brief signal with a narrow frequency works best — the repetition is like an error-correcting device. If the intended recipient didn’t get the first transmission, an identical one will follow.

Birds that live on the forest floor evolved lower-pitched calls, so they don’t bounce or become distorted by the ground as higher-pitched sounds might. Water birds have calls that, unsurprisingly, cut through the ambient sounds of water, and birds that live in the plains and grasslands, like the Savannah Sparrow, have buzzing calls that can traverse long distances.

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So musical evolution and adaptation is an interspecies phenomenon. And presumably, as some claim, birds enjoy singing, even though they, like us, change their tunes over time. The joy of making music will find a way, regardless of the context and the form that emerges to best fit it.

Presuming that there is such a thing as ‘progress’ when it comes to music, and that music is ‘better’ now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It is a myth. Creativity doesn’t ‘improve.’