discoveries by chance

Most innovative scientific discoveries are hit upon in a random fashion. Insight is important of course. But maintaining an alert mind that is open to peripheral developments is even more important.

Deductive thinking is vital but it will probably not take you anywhere beyond the already-beaten paths.

Here is an interesting article containing examples from medical disciplines.

While I was producing electronic music with Umut Eldem, I sometimes had the feeling that we were tinkering like scientists do in their labs. Although there was a lot of trials and errors, our searches were not aimless. In fact we always had some not-so-well-defined goals in our minds. But these goals often ended up being modified on the way. There was no method to our production. Instrumentation, and composition took place simultaneously. We frequently worked on entirely different things. Most of our independent little-findings would be discarded later on, but some would occasionally merge into beautiful and spontaneous pieces.

Our sessions were extremely fun to say the least. None lasted more than two days, and we turned out at least one complete song in each one of them. We connected and complemented each other well.

I remember one specific occasion when the importance of chance in compositions became really clear to us.

We had hit upon an incredible sound while playing around with an extremely complex synthesizer that had 50 continuous and 10 discrete variable-parameters. (Please keep in mind that I am only an amateur bass player. So when I say "playing around" I really mean playing around.) The sound was a digital reconstruction of something that is familiar to all classical-concert-goers. Just before a concert begins there is a brief, discordant period in which musicians settle down into their seats, flip a couple of pages and do some final checks on their instruments. By turning only two knobs on our synthesizer we could literally recreate this "settling-down-period." It was simply unbelievable. We were shocked. We were awed.

Then my computer suddenly crashed. Despite all our efforts we could not recover nor recreate the sound. There was a lot non-linearities involved. A tiny push on a relevant parameter was drastically changing the outcome. The sound was gone for good. It was very sad indeed.