Musical Creativity

2021

Contemporary Music Review, 1993

Literary and linguistic computing, 2008

The Evolution of Creativity and Music, 2014

For several decades, the study of creativity in music has been in vogue. A broadcasted TED lecture by Sir Ken Robinson on creativity alone was viewed over seventy million times. Creativity and creative thinking are seen as both an asset and a goal of education, a necessary 21st-century skill for the workforce to sustain competitiveness in the globalised economy. Creativity, its definition, the study of creative people and attributes of those who possess it, as well as its measurements, historically go back more than fifty years. It covers empirical and theoretical study. The classical musical paradigm of creativity as the creation of an autonomous composer is inadequate to secure the diversity of musical creativity in today’s multimedia, multi-genre world. Today’s evolving musical landscape encompasses various musical creativities – performance type, individual, collaborative, communal, empathetic, intercultural, multicultural, multiethnic, symbolic, computational, and acknowledging the diversity of genre-based creativities.

Proceedings of the ECAI02 Workshop on …, 2002

Culture & Psychology, 2011

Musical creativity can be found in several domains of music-making (composing, improvisation, performing) as well music perception and analysis. Musical creativity cannot be approached without being aware of the wide range of pluralistic analysis methods, their implementation in creative processes and their inherent creative nature. This commentary enlarges Glaveanu’s (2010) five principles of creativity of cultural psychology; alongside a short theoretical overview of artistic and scientific creativity in the domain of music I have hierarchized Glaveanu’s five principles. Contextual understanding emerges as the meta-principle, while the ecological nature of creativity opens the question of research methodology having an impact both on creativity giving birth to an artwork through composing, improvising, and performing, and the way in which we understand artworks through listening, historically and analytically. Tension design as an analytical tool has the potential to fit the condi...

Creativity studies have traditionally tended to focus on the evaluation of products generated by creative people, which are categorized in various ways according to their reception and impact on society. This orientation has been advanced in various ways by including factors such as process, personality, cultural pressures. While these approaches have produced many important insights, it may be argued that the types of creativity involved in music performance involve additional aspects. Musical performance necessarily entails developing forms of bodily skill that play out in real-time interactive contexts that involve other people, musical instruments and technologies, acoustic spaces, and various socio-cultural factors. Accordingly, some scholars have recently posited relational, environmentally distributed, and cooperative models that better capture the complex nature of musical creativity in action. In this chapter, we review some key approaches to creative cognition, with a special focus on understanding creativity as it unfolds in the real-time dynamics of musical performance. In doing so, we introduce a number of concepts associated with recent work in cognitive science that may help to capture the adaptive interplay of body and environment in the co-enactment of musical events.

Musical creativity: multidisciplinary research in …, 2006

This paper addresses the topic of musical creativity and its underlying mechanisms. An operational definition is provided in an attempt to bring together in a theoretical framework such distinct musical behaviours as listening, performing and composing. Based on the concepts of adaptation and the epistemic control system, it is possible to conceive of the music user as an adaptive device responding to the sonic environment. In order to do so he or she can make new distinctions, perform internal computations on the observables and create different semantic relations with the sonic world. As such it is possible to go beyond perceptual constraints and to conceive of coping with music in terms of creative thinking and epistemic autonomy. A central thesis in this approach is that creativity occurs at the epistemic levels of musical input and output as well as at the computational level.

Journal of Creative Music Systems, 2017

The 1st Conference on Computer Simulation of Musical Creativity (CSMC16) was held June 17–19, 2016 at the University of Huddersfield. Several themes emerged in the conference discussions addressing some of the fundamental questions of what “creativity” is, or could be, as well as issues regarding methodologies for evaluating the potential “creativity” of computational systems. For this conference review I invoke Wiggins’s (2006) formalisation of creative systems, understood as searches in conceptual spaces, and I use this as a working understanding of creativity in order to suggest some questions related to the papers and discussions; these questions may provide fuel for themes in future conferences in this cross-disciplinary field.

Artificial Intelligence, 1995