Musical creativity and the embodied mind

Embodied creativity

What does creativity produce? A concept is ‘a mental representation of a class of things’ Murphy (2002, p.5), and concepts are the primary output of a creative process. In other words, creativity is the process in which a creative agent recognises a new kind of thing, or modifies their understanding of a kind of thing, changing their view of the world in some valuable way. The visible output of...

Musical Creativity and the Brain

On the spot, as great jazz performers expertly improvise solo passages, they make immediate decisions about which musical phrases to invent and to play. Researchers, like authors Mónica López-González and Dana Foundation grantee Charles J. Limb, are now using brain imaging to study the neural underpinnings of spontaneous artistic creativity, from jazz riffs to freestyle rap. So far, they have f...

Musical Virtuosity and Creativity

Virtuosos are human beings who exhibit exceptional performance in their field of activity. In particular, virtuosos are interesting for creativity studies because they are exceptional problem solvers. However, virtuosity is an under-studied field of human behaviour. Little is known about the processes involved to become a virtuoso, and in how they distinguish themselves from normal performers. ...

The Embodied Emotional Mind

Creativity Studies and Musical Interaction

It is difficult to talk about creativity—musical creativity in particular—in a scientific context. Creativity has been addressed for some time by various research communities in social science, psychology, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, with the surprising effect of turning an elusive word into a research theme, and sometimes even into a fully-fledged scientific “issue.” There a...