Technology is now playing a bigger or a central role in music-making with softwares that are encroaching on the territories usually reserved for the creation of music -- selecting the chord, sequencing and eventual sound output.

This sound obviously is not natural but computer-generated that may hold greater appeal for the listening pubic that is more attuned to this sonic variation rather than natural sound. To all those involved in music making, terms like workstation, applications, plugins, keyboards, synthesisers, auto-tuners and chord progression have household familiarity.

In the past, the vocalist spent years in getting command over the sur while the instrumentalist grappled with the characteristics of the instrument before he was ready to play. He was initially made to be master of his craft or the skill before he ventured into what in general parlance is known as creativity.

The instrumentalists spent so much time with their sitars, tablas or sarangis, etc, etc, that they became part of their anatomy. They relied on it for expression the way we rely on vocal chords for enunciation of words and sounds. Without the craft, there was no possibility of being creative.

Now probably the sequence or the craft-creativity relationship has changed or there is less and less talk of perfecting the craft. Where the composition is concerned, the keyboard with its softwares does all, performs all the functions, and where vocalisations is concerned, it is put through some tuner and its rough edges and weakness of sur are, as if, rectified. Then that initial composition is put through various post-production processes till it is declared a final cut, fit to be released or put up for a performance.

The next logical step to ask is what is meant by creativity in music now. If we go by the standard definitions, as creativity was perceived to be, it is no more than an invasion of technology where the machine has taken over the creative and imaginative roles that humans always prided themselves with. It is only a mechanical rendition of something that was once truly human.

In classical music, for example, the raags were sung; the same raags which had been sung over centuries with the same tonal complexities and it was hardly ever said that the raag bhimplasi of Abdul Karim Khan was a replica of Bare Ghulam Ali Khan. Both sang the same tonal pattern but by singing it they brought it afresh to life and filled the dead lifeless notes with energy all their very own. Even if the composition was the same and the raag was the same, yet every time it was considered anew and not a repetition of one already sung.

Can we say the same thing about sound that is a production of a machine without the living throb of the human sound production?

What if one goes beyond the standard differentiation that separates form from content? Though idealistically the two are the same because what you sing cannot be separated from the way it is being sung, yet the two theoretically could be placed in two compartments with the technology forming part of the form rather than the content.

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Content was something that was derived from life or lived experience and the manner of singing it, its formal structure was what made it appealing and struck a chord. Supposing this distinction is not taken into reckoning and only the form or technology is considered, the massive inflows of experiments conducted in what is sound, its physics, its frequencies, its decibels itself become the new content that one has to grapple with.

By an understanding of sound and by recreating it through the new means available, perhaps new content is being added to the conventional body of content whose definition we are familiar and complacent about.

In this and past century, there has been undue emphasis on newness or saying something which has never been said or done before. The stress has been on individuality of expression and not on building a universal.

Perhaps this was allied to the rise of extreme individualism and the focusing on the individual in a highly competitive capitalistic order. This must have been facilitated by the unprecedented changes that took place in the intellectual and physical landscape. An objective environment which changed so little as to give the impression of being unchanging, all of a sudden took off with a speed that exceeded anything experienced earlier.

Whether there was enough content in this change is a matter of debate because most of all that one has seen, experiments that have not gone beyond the externals of form. And, therefore, have remained as exercises in formalism. First, the experience resulting from change became the subject and then change itself; and now the instruments of change like technology per se is invading the thematic preserve.

After all, there is only so much that can be created or produced in the world. The stock of experience is limited and the situations vary only in nuances -- it is the same cycle that keeps recreating itself. No new story has ever replaced the ephemerality of life against the universal of permanence, the chasm of what is and can be and the conflict of the individual and society.

What may have changed and keeps changing is only the formal structures of expressing it so. It is no surprise then that creativity is now explained in terms of arrangement of sound patterns already existing rather than creating sound itself traditionally understood as music.

Originality and creativity are just as scarce and precious as ever and the limitless openings that the present society offers is no guarantee of it coming any easier. This borrowing, regurgitating, reworking the given stock, producing undigested material on the basis of equipment and technology is what is the main area of activity. It is an entire shift in the attitude when an artist spent his entire lifetime working on the finer aspects to cultivate it as the expression of his being, to more of an eclectic output to be collected at the end of an assembly line.