Reviewing the TED.com site, I watched several talks that were music related and informative and entertaining. One such talk by Mark Applebaum, entitled "The mad scientist of music" , was particularly interesting. Mark is a composer in a very nontraditional sense of the word. The meat of his talk was framed around the question "Is it music?". Surrounding this question, Applebaum sought to focus on boredom and how he uses it as a catalyst for creativity and invention, how it forced him to change the fundamental question he was asking in his discipline, and how it pushed him towards taking on roles beyond the traditional narrow definition of what it means to be a composer. He began with an excerpt from Beethoven, commenting that it was boring. Shocking, right? But what Applebaum did from here was transform the audience from being shocked by his statement to eventually leaning more towards agreeing with it. The resolve was that Beethoven's music is...