mike_mccue
This can be a deep subject if you want it to be...
What is talent? Is it some innate ability you are born with?
Is talent "nature", or is talent the result of outside influence, education, and awareness ?
Is talent "nurtured" rather than the result of some spontaneous natural force?
Are you implying it has to be one or the other?
Are these songs you hear in your head your absolute and original creations or are they amalgamations and mash ups of everything you have already heard?
In almost all cases, people are largely repeating, rearranging and producing variations on what they have heard and are familiar with, particularly people with limited backgrounds who might not even realize they are using the same chords/scales/rhythms/progressions over and over again. If one spends some time listening to a variety of music from outside the traditional/common/normal/popular genres in their milieu they will likely realize how much we limit ourselves. Note that this is not necessarily a bad thing. If you are an artist attempting to work in a given genre, you are somewhat limited by the rules of that genre - otherwise your audience might start calling you Judas (which may or may not suit you
).
Do you have the skill to recognize the difference in thoughts that you synthesize and create with your own mind and thoughts that are merely a realization of ideas that have entered your brain from various external influences?
Do you need a skill to make that decision? Or can you just be naturally talented at recognizing talent?
You can easily create a circular definition here - "I am talented at doing what I do". Well duh, of course you are! But one cannot really claim they have a talent for creating "popular" music/art without ever exposing their creations to the public. People sometimes play with semantics in a discussion to get the results they want - use a vague definition of "talent" here and a more specific one there and pretend they are the same.
When people stop and state something like "that person has a talent for that", what do you think they mean? What is it that they recognize as talent? Do they actually recognize that talent or are they acknowledging a symptom of something they call "talent"?
A
dictionary can sometimes come in handy.
For example; Is it possible to consider someone as a talented cook without ever viewing, smelling or tasting some of the food they cooked?
You could consider someone based on reputation. But how you evaluate "talent" would depend on your standards. Is someone a talented cook if they create unique and unusual food you personally don't happen to enjoy? This is a question of the criteria used for evaluation more than "talent" itself.
Have you ever looked at a total stranger... someone you were wholly unfamiliar with and sensed that they were imbued with "talent"?
Pretending we can "sense" something we don't/can't sense sounds like it's either a trick question or someone confusing one's self.
It's hard for a person, such as myself, to consider your theory that one may have an instinctive knowledge that they possess some natural talent.
Why not? The trick is the semantical game - "I have a
talent for imagining music that I believe is superior based on my own subjective standards" is not the same as saying, "I have a
talent for imagining music that meets some external standards - perhaps just popular appeal, perhaps some other unspoken standard". But if you have an objective criteria and a clear understanding of that objective criteria used for evaluation, then you could make such a determination (if you are honest with yourself).
If you focus on the criteria for evaluation, the question becomes much simpler: "Do I have some
special ability in meeting these specific criteria?". In some cases the criteria are clear, but if they aren't, and if a person can't articulate them, it becomes difficult to make an evaluation. Testing popular appeal sort of requires putting something before the public, but personal subjective determinations risk the circular argument: "I am talented in doing what I do".