Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2012 December 3

= December 3 =

original idea
I was watching 'everything is a remix' on youtube earlier, it discusses that almost everything we see in the media or everywhere else came from another idea, they have examples about apple copying and innovating other technology to come up with something thats really something worth it.

my question is, what thing, anywhere between songs, movie or any idea at all, can be considered as original? i really prefer to know something about songs and movies.. 203.112.82.1 (talk) 21:33, 3 December 2012 (UTC)


 * There was a caveman once who banged two rocks together in an interesting pattern, at first accidentally, and then noticed he and others liked it. Since then, pretty much nothing.  -- Jayron  32  22:11, 3 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Yes, nothing. There's no difference between a troglodyte banging rocks together haphazardly and the rise of polyphony, or Bach writing The Well-Tempered Clavier, or Beethoven writing his 9th Symphony, or Schoenberg inventing 12-tone music, or Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, or .....  No musical innovations there at all.  Zilch.  These 18 million ghits should be totally ignored.  :)  --   Jack of Oz   [Talk]  01:36, 4 December 2012 (UTC)


 * See, the problem is how do you define totally original. Bach and Stravinsky and Beethoven and all the rest were working with musical ideas that already existed.  They were influenced by other artists, working within (and modifying) forms and material that already existed.  Certainly, all artists do something that no one else has done before, but no one creates in a vacuum, and none of the composers you cited actually created a single work of art which could be said to be totally and completely without any influence from even a single other work which came before them.  So no, there has never been a completely original work of art in history, at least in the absolute sense.  There have been very important and worthwhile and wonderful and magically beautiful works of art which have been created; there have been novel additions and modifications and expansions of the corpus of great works, but that isn't what the OP asked, now is it.  What the OP wanted to know is what works could be considered original without, in some way, borrowing from something else.  No work of art or technological innovation or scientific advance has ever been created that did not start from something already in existance, whether it was to expand, improve, or even reject the earlier ideas.  -- Jayron  32  01:53, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
 * That was the core premise of the TV series called Connections, a few decades ago: That practically everything we do builds on something that went before it. I also recall an old Disney educational short film Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom that theorized about the evolution of music - in essentially the way you initially described it here. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 07:06, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
 * James Burke has always been a personal hero of mine because of the way he deconstructed technological history in that show. Connections was one of my all time favorite series.  I also highly recommend The Day the Universe Changed, which takes another interesting perspective on the ways in which science and technology affect the prevailing zeitgeist and worldviews of the times.  -- Jayron  32  07:12, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, the more original something is, the worse it's likely to be. This is because really popular things tend to be copied to death.  For an example of some really bad, yet fairly original, "music", try anything by Yoko Ono. StuRat (talk) 02:24, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
 * See, even Yoko isn't that original: In order to avoid copying something, you need the same level of awareness of the existing standards just to intentionally avoid copying. The rejection of standards requires the exact same level of monitoring of those standards as does working from those standards.  Yoko's works aren't more or less "original", they just use the information about the existing standards of beauty in different ways; but the connection to the knowledge of the existing standard is there.  In other terms, trying to be intentionally different is still just as unoriginal as trying to intentionally copy: it requires the same level of connection to the existing culture.  -- Jayron  32  02:31, 4 December 2012 (UTC)