INNOVATION A Study of Six Hussein Boon Six Innovative Music Approaches ■ Motown ■ Phil Spector ■ Suzanne Ciani ■ Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry ■ DJ Kool Herc ■ Charanjit Singh Motown ■ Took an industrialised approach based around car manufacture ■ Created a ‘creative’ assembly line ■ Encouraged competition, writing teams ■ Educated and taught artists aspects of finance, contracts, law Phil Spector ■ Highly influential ■ RnR start with Lieber and Stoller; girl groups such as Ronettes and Tina Turner ■ Doubled everything except the bass ■ Described as ‘wall of sound’ ■ Recorded in mono, partly due to simplicity and partly due to radio as significant consumption medium Suzanne Ciani ■ Classically trained pianist ■ Encountered modular synthesis (Buchla and Moog) ■ Worked on the assembly line to earn enough money to buy her own system ■ Took ideas of complexity within classical music (total serialism) and was able to ‘simplify’ into a performable system Suzanne Ciani ■ Moved to commercial world due to bias and sexism in academia ■ Started very successful sound design career ■ Everything designed using synthesizers including bubbles for Coca Cola advert ■ Also did sound design for films and games Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry ■ Widely credited with developing the extended dub plate ■ ‘Played’ the studio desk to extend and ‘dub out’ songs ■ Early type of remix ■ Affected many club styles to come including 12” singles and remixes ■ Also created a ense of exclusivity with dub plates DJ Kool Herc ■ Originally from Jamaica but moved to New York at 12 ■ Was already a DJ but could not find the Reggae tracks of his home ■ Invented the two deck approach of extending breakbeats ■ Along with Grandmaster Flash and Grand Wizzard Theodore, the essence of hip hop and decks Charanjit Singh ■ Credited with ‘accidentally’ inventing acid house ■ Created cult album Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat (1982) ■ Used Roland TB-303 and TR-808 – classics of the Acid House sound to be ■ "So I thought why not do something different using disco music only. I got an idea to play all the Indian ragas and give the beat a disco beat – and turn off the tabla. And I did it. And it turned out good.” (Aitkin, 2011) What Does This Mean For You ■ Innovation is a conscious process ■ Not directly experimental but can have elements ■ Innovation is a process of improvement that is not ‘accidental’ ■ Overtime an innovation becomes something that affects practice for others Bibliography Aitkin, S. (2011). Charanjit Singh on how he invented acid house ... by mistake. Guardian,. Available from https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/may/10/charanjit-singh-acid-house-tenragas.
