On Turning Down the Volume to Hear Your Own Voice
Once Beethoven had gone completely deaf, his work became more original and innovative.
In writing about an article by Arthur C. Brooks about Beethoven’s deafness, Cal Newport expounded on the vital importance of blocking out the noise of the crowds in order to hear your own voice.
The TL;DR of the article is that once Beethoven had gone completely deaf, his work became more original and innovative. It is thought this was due to his inability to be influenced by prevailing compositional fashions—this ability to work in a creative silo culminated in his most outstanding work: his famous Ninth Symphony.
There is something to be said for immersing yourself in the marketplace of ideas and being exposed to what your contemporaries are doing and saying, but there is a very real danger that you become the kind of creative individual who does more on-looking than creating.
This is a concept I’ve returned to again and again after various bouts of dipping my toe into the soggy morass of social media. I’ve never quite felt at ease using any free products wherein, due to their free-ness, I become the product and give away a little piece of my soul in the process. I wrote many years ago about the damaging effects of FOMO, and my rigorous journey towards extricating myself from the dangers therein but never really dug into the artistic benefits of doing so.
As Newport succinctly puts it:
“…we’re constantly connected to a humming online hive mind of takes and urgency and quantified influence. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been told I was missing out because of my absence from this scrum. I needed to “build my brand,” or be exposed to more interesting people and important ideas, or plugged into the tick tock of the big events of the day.”
The ability to yank yourself out of the endless slip-stream of ‘content’ and quietly explore your own ideas is one that should be cultivated above all else for an artist. That is unless you like the idea of mimicking everyone around you by osmosis and wondering why nobody is noticing your work.
As Jaron Lanier explores in his long, seething 2014 essay on the modern music industry being devoid of imagination, courage, faith, or vitality, the result of everyone echoing each other in the creative marketplace is a dearth of memorable, generation-defining art. In its place lies the scattered miasma of sonic copycats that become indistinguishable from one another. The dreaded “prevailing compositional fashions” loom to stifle innovation.
Also See: Writing Netflix series, hit singles, and superhero films to an algorithm to ensure investor satisfaction.
(Sidenote: Perhaps the discussion on ‘true innovators in music’ should be taken up with Mr. Lanier on this, as I won’t purport to be an authority on contemporary music production.)
But his larger points holds:
Artists only languish when their primary drive is to merely strive to keep up with what their peers are doing. If they are only exposed to the contemporary trends of their art form, their ideas will reflect that limitation.
Some of the most satisfying deep work I’ve managed to accomplish as an artist has been during times of great isolation — picking up from the city and driving off to a tiny cabin on the side of a mountain with a laptop, a french press and a bottle of scotch.
(Ok, and my dog.)
It’s like wearing noise-cancelling headphones 24/7 without the batteries running out.
If you have the ability to do so, I would highly recommend the practice of taking yourself as far from the aforementioned slipstream as you can: Delete all social media from your phone, disable all notifications, and bring only what is necessary to do your work. Nothing else.
By maintaining routine blocks of protected solitude, some of the world’s greatest artists have produced the most innovative creative work, pushing their medium forward into previously unexplored terrain. There’s absolutely no good reason for you not to do the same.
Footnote: This advice may contradict my “Read before you write, Look at art before you draw” exercise. I should make clear that exercise is more for people who are struggling to ‘get their head in the game’ than those who are trying to disconnect and explore their art in untainted solitude.
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Hear hear. I've been monitoring how I feel before and after using different social media: Facebook usually leaves me somewhat angry, Instagram gives me a very rushed feeling. The word's still out on Bluesky - although I think it's not for me, even when it's friendly at the moment. Substack is the only platform that doesn't rush me, gives me interesting and uplifting content (like yours!) and leaves me feeling informed and connected.