Music Memos: You can now get an app for creativity... but would you really want to?

Does technology make us more creative? It has certainly facilitated a global splurge of what people like to call "content", where mountains of words, images, audio and video are brought to the edge of a bottomless pit called the Internet and dumped into it unceremoniously. But does that always count as creativity?

I found myself pondering this again at the weekend, as I played with a new Apple app called Music Memos, which has been billed as a godsend for musicians. You just dink the record button, play a few chords on a keyboard or guitar, and when you play the recording back the software adds tasteful bass and drums to your composition, even taking into account your errant timing and fumbled notes.

I couldn't help but be impressed by this, but something didn't feel quite right. And I realised what it was: while the software was automagically enhancing my guitar playing, it was also taking choices away from me. I'd handed a whole part of the creative process over to a smartphone – but I didn't feel unburdened, I just felt weird.

These days, technology does its best to give us a warm, fuzzy feeling of achievement, of having created something cool. It's such an undeniably great feeling that it feels bad to even question its purpose, but as software gets cleverer, the process of "content creation" becomes more about making a few pre-approved choices that, once made, give a superficially impressive result that says little about who we are.

Years ago, photographers were bitching about Instagram for this very reason, with our pleasantly filtered shots referred to as "unconsidered art" – but now you see this across creative software of all kinds, from music to video to web design and beyond. Templates, building blocks, easily selected and tastefully arranged. But is this creativity? Isn't creativity supposed to be about new ideas? I struggle a little with this line of thought, because who would deny anyone the feeling of having produced something that they like? And I'm not having a pop at technology per se – I've handed off countless musical tasks to machines who can do them far better than I can. But if software becomes any more ingenious and multi-faceted – and it will – we'll be delegating so much of the creative process that our role will become purely administrative. We'll just press a big red button marked "Generate" while we put our feet up and have a cup of tea. From a creative point of view that brings little pleasure, and it's bound to be reflected in the finished product.

People have whinged about this kind of thing for generations ("That's not proper music/painting/ writing") but we're at a curious point in history. Our digital immersion is total, and there's a cultural abundance that gratifies us with sounds and images at the drop of a hat. Recent studies done at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and the University of Illinois have concluded that this abundance has affected our creative impulse, and that, in turn, presents a great opportunity for software that lets us "create" quickly and easily.

Yes, software like Music Memos is very clever. But we mustn't let it usher us towards a kind of cultural homogeneity, where our creative efforts are rubber stamped by technology firms. Let's take risks with the tools they give us. Mess with them. Sneer at their suggestions and think "I could do better than that." Because we can.

Twitter.com/rhodri