What do traffic jams and music have in common?

by Minim Pro
It's Friday night on the M6. The traffic is a nightmare as always and I'm stuck in the middle lane of the motorway in a big jam. Every 30 seconds or so, the cars in front of me edge forward about 20 metres before stopping again. I do the same.

This goes on for a while before I get fed up of constantly riding the clutch and moving forward only to have to stop almost immediately. I decide not move as soon as the cars in front pull away and allow a gap to open up in front of me. I figure that I won't go forward until it's actually worth doing so. This way, I won't need to keep braking every two seconds and I can just allow the car to roll forward in first gear - a much more sensible way of driving in a jam.

After a couple of minutes of this, the car behind me forces it's way into the nearside lane and tail-gates the car in front in order to inch past me as I continue to roll forward and maintain the big gap. Once it has undertaken me, the car pulls back into the middle lane, accelerates up to the car in front and then slams on the brakes.

As the car passes me, I notice it is driven by a mousy, middle-aged woman - hardly the boy racer type I might have expected. When we eventually get past the accident that was causing the jam and accelerate to normal speed, it's not long before I go past her. She's doing 60 in the slow lane - ten miles per hour below the legal speed limit.

Why is she now going so slowly yet felt the need to undertake me to get one car ahead in the jam? The answer is most likely not that she was in a big hurry, but that I was irritating her or making her uncomfortable by not conforming to the behaviour of the crowd. Even though I was taking the more sensible course of action, using less fuel and driving in a less tiring way, she had to behave like everybody else.

This is the mentality of the crowd and the effect of learned behaviour. As human beings we learn by observing the behaviour of others and copying them. This is how we establish what is appropriate behaviour in different situations. The woman behind me was frustrated that I wasn't conforming to the standard behaviours demonstrated by the rest of the traffic.

Whilst we're not great in traffic jams, as pedestrians the British are fabulous at queueing. Go into any busy shop or take look at any bus stop and you will see how naturally we form patient and orderly lines. Nobody pushes in and everyone waits their turn. We think that people from other countries are rude when they don't share our love of the queue. However, the reality is that this kind of queueing is just a learned behaviour particular to Britain.

Learned behaviour affects nearly everything we do but we don't have to be a slave to these behaviours and conventions. If we are prepared to think about why we act the way we do and what would happen if we behaved in a different way, we can find new insights and see new opportunities.

Music is not exempt from the effects of learned behaviours - it's just that we often call them 'stylistic conventions'. Any musical style is simply a series of learned behaviours and conventions which musicians copy and absorb when learning to play.

Every now and again, somebody will come along who challenges these conventions and goes against the conventional wisdom of what constitutes a musical style. If their new behaviour is compelling enough, everybody else will copy them until that behaviour becomes the new norm.

These musicians are the ones we call geniuses, the ones that define a new series of standard musical behaviours within a genre. When the crowd copies the musical behaviours of a genius and abandons the previous conventions, music is changed forever.

Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Chuck Berry, The Beatles, Elvis, Hendrix, Satchmo, Bird, Coltrane, Miles - all of these artists changed music by deciding to break away from the musical conventions and learned behaviours specific to their respective genres.

As musicians, we have a choice of sticking with the conventional and the tried and tested, or we can begin questioning the way we do things to see if there are new musical approaches we haven't yet considered. This will involve breaking away from the crowd and it's scary and risky - but the possibilities are both endless and exciting.

I'll leave you with this video from Derek Sivers which is the perfect example of how a couple of people prepared to behave differently can start a movement.

From: http://playjazz.blog.co.uk/