Abstract
Introduction
Human creativity has traditionally been explored across a vast range of activities and domains (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2010; Shiu, 2013; Sternberg, 1988). Among these, the array of practices and experiences associated with the phenomenon of “music” may offer an especially rich area for theory, empirical research, and individual reflection (Burnard, 2012; 2013; Odena, 2012). Indeed, human musicality spans an impressive range of being, doing, and knowing—including, for example, primary interactions between infants and caregivers; emotion regulation; therapy and healing; the development of personal, social and cultural identities; collective performance; and the expression of complex aesthetic relationships (DeNora, 2000; McPherson, Davidson, & Faulkner, 2012; Small, 1998). Because of this, developing deeper understandings of what musical creativity entails may result in finer conceptions of creativity more generally. This article aims to contribute to this project by exploring musical creativity in light of recent developments in embodied cognitive science. More specifically, we will attempt to frame an approach to musical creativity based in an
The article is structured as follows. We begin with a review of approaches to creativity. While these models all offer important insights, they tend to focus on the evaluation of creative products and/or mental processes confined to the individual. This, we suggest, may limit our understanding of creative phenomena. With this in mind, we then introduce more recent perspectives that highlight the relational (collaborative), distributed, and emergent nature of musical creativity (Burnard & Dragovic, 2014; O’Neill & Green, 2001; Sawyer, 1999, 2009; Woodman et al., 1993). Following this, we develop an approach to musical creativity based on the 4E model of cognition mentioned above, showing how this perspective may support and extend the richer view just described. Taking this further, we then explore the complex embodied–environmental interactivity associated with musical creativity through the lens of dynamical systems theory (DST). Building on previous creativity studies that discuss DST (e.g., Sawyer 1999, 2003; Schuldberg, 1999), we consider how this approach may lead to more nuanced understandings of what musical creativity entails—especially when developed in conjunction with accounts that situate specific instances of musical creativity in personal, historical, intersubjective, and cultural contexts. Here, we also consider possibilities for DST in controlled research settings by discussing results from a recent experiment (Walton, Washburn, Langland-Hassan, Chemero, Kloos, & Richardson, 2017) that measures how changes in the structure of a musical environment impacts the experience of creativity in interacting musical improvisers. We then offer some suggestions for how 4E and DST concepts might provide useful heuristics for thinking about creativity in cultural and historical contexts. To conclude, we summarize our discussion and briefly discuss its relevance for practical contexts such as music education and performance studies.
Before we begin, we would like to make it clear that this article is intended to spark dialogue and the exchange of ideas. Indeed, different approaches imply contrasting methodologies and theoretical assumptions, and the current contribution offers a new way to think about creativity and embodied music cognition that is different in its premises and scope from other perspectives. 1 We should also note that we are not aiming for some strict definition of what “creativity” entails. Like “music” we understand the term “creativity” to cover a wide range of phenomena. 2 It takes on different manifestations and characteristics and is recognized in different ways in different contexts—the diverse array of approaches we review in the next section all address important aspects of this multidimensional phenomenon. We suggest, however, that new insights may be found in perspectives that look beyond the traditional focus on the creative individual—and/or the reception of products and outcomes—and towards the embodied, ecological, and relational–interactive aspects of human creativity. As such, we are advocating for the inclusion of 4E/DST thinking as part of a broader, pluralistic approach to understanding the complex range of human thought, action, and experience associated with the words “music” and “creativity.” In all, then, our aim is not to overturn previous approaches to creativity, nor to offer the final word on what musical creativity entails, but simply to explore another perspective that might contribute to the field. Because of this, our discussion considers a range of areas and is often speculative in tone. Nevertheless, we hope that the ideas offered here will be interesting and provocative, inspiring further refinements as well as critical feedback.
Perspectives on creativity
As we have just begun to consider, human creativity is a complex phenomenon that takes on numerous forms and may be recognized in various ways depending on the context and criteria we impose. As a result, conceptions of creativity have changed over the centuries and vary across cultural and social contexts (Mpofu, Myambo, Mogaji, Mashego, & Khaleefa, 2006; Niu, 2006; Niu & Sternberg, 2006; Preiser, 2006; Preiss & Strasser, 2006; Sawyer, 2012). For example, in Ancient Greece the types of human activities and products we now refer to as “creative” were thought to be driven by
Products and categories
Current research explores creativity from a number of perspectives (e.g., cognitive science, developmental theories, biology, health and clinical sciences, education, business, cultural studies, computer science, and more). As such, it remains difficult to describe creativity in simple terms (see Runco, 2014; Veale, 2013). While scholars have put forward a number of contrasting possibilities, they generally agree that the generation of new and valuable outcomes (information, knowledge, procedures, artefacts, or other items) is a necessary element of creative processes (see Mumford, 2003). Because of this, much research and theory focuses on developing distinctions between a range of creative products and their reception. Here, creativity tends to be explored in terms of categories such as “big-c” 3 and “little-c”—where the former refers to eminent, domain-changing outputs, and the latter to creativity in everyday problem-solving situations and creative expressions, which include the forms of wishful, imaginative, or counterfactual thinking that occur in everyday life (Byrne, 2005).
This approach has been developed in different ways (Kozbelt, Beghetto, & Runco, 2010; Runco, 2014). For example, in addition to “big-c” and “little-c,” Kaufman and Beghetto (2009) add “mini-c” and “pro-c.” The former describes the novel abilities and understandings that stem from an agent’s learning processes (e.g., a music student), while the latter concerns the types of products exhibited by professional creators (e.g., a music composer) who have not achieved eminent domain-changing (or big-c) accomplishments in society. Similarly, as Kirton (2003) argues, creativity may also be understood in terms of a spectrum between
Another important approach is offered by Boden (1998, 2004), who posits three sub-types of creativity:
These approaches can be applied to musical contexts in interesting ways. Consider, for example, the work of Arnold Schoenberg, who famously forged a new approach to composition. His work might be placed in the “big-c” category, be situated towards the “innovator” side of Kirton’s spectrum, and be representative of
Creativity as process
In light of the last remarks, other authors have offered a variety of models that attempt to understand creativity in more explicitly
More recently, some authors have attempted to refine earlier process-based theories by introducing a range of new factors. In addition to the four processes discussed by Wallas (1926; see also Wertheimer, 1945), Hélie and Sun (2010) include creative problem-solving processes that entail the interaction of
Looking ahead: Creativity as distributed and emergent
As we have seen, creativity is no longer conceived of as a divine or biological “gift,” nor is it understood only in terms of products. Increasingly, it is explored in terms of complex processes that occur in given situations. (Finke et al., 1992; Gruber, 1982; Hargreaves, Miell & MacDonald, 2012; Hennessey & Amabile, 2010). Here we should also note that the
Additionally, recent years have seen a move to understand the social dynamics of creativity, especially by researchers and theorists associated with music education who wish to foster more open and creative environments for teachers and students (e.g., Burnard & Dragovic, 2014). This aligns with a shift away from traditional “work-based” pedagogical approaches, where the focus was on developing the technical skills required for the reproduction of musical compositions, and where “creativity” was a domain (tacitly) reserved for the composer (Elliott & Silverman, 2015). Accordingly, musical creativity is now explored in conjunction with a range of activities and approaches that highlight the possibilities of collaborative music making. Among other things, research in this area explores non-formal learning processes (Green, 2001, 2008). This concerns the types of self-directed learning that occurs outside of the (formalized) school environment. Here, students develop a range of skills and understandings through engagement with creative-exploratory activities, whose processes and outcomes are not strictly defined, and where shared worlds of musical understanding are “enacted” collaboratively (Burnard, 2012; Schiavio & Cummins, 2015). In these contexts, improvisation and composition often become part of the same process (Sawyer, 2000, 2007; Swanwick & Tillman, 1986) and the body takes on a much more explicit and primary role (Bowman, 2004; Bowman & Powell, 2007). Here, participants may bring forth new ways of interacting with their instruments and each other. The cognitive relationships they develop and creatively manipulate are thus informed by the dynamic interactivity (feedback loops) that occurs between instrument, body, brain, and the environment, which includes the activity of other creative agents (more on this below; see Borgo, 2005; Walton, Richardson, Langland-Hassan & Chemero, 2015) 4 .
Importantly, we may note here that although the range of approaches discussed earlier in association with product- and process-based accounts all offer important insights into certain aspects of creativity, they do not address this last set of observations regarding the embodied and dynamically interactive (collaborative) processes that characterize musical creativity in practice. Rather, they tend to explore creativity in an individualistic context—often assuming that it is something that necessarily occurs within the personal domain (i.e., in the head of) the individual. We suggest that this is not sufficient to meet the observations of the recent music education research just mentioned—which, again, increasingly highlights the embodied, situated, and socially interactive nature of musical activity (Barrett, 2005; Bowman, 2004; Bowman & Powell, 2007; Elliott & Silverman, 2015; Küpers, van Dijk, McPherson & van Geert, 2014; McPherson et al., 2012; van der Schyff, 2015). Such concerns have been addressed (among others) by Sawyer (2003, 2006), who draws on recent developments in social and distributed cognition (e.g., Greeno, 2006; Jordan & Henderson, 1995), and real-life experiences in musical and theatrical improvisation. In doing so, he develops a rich model for exploring creativity as a The activity has an There is The interactional effect of any given action The process is
In what follows we will attempt to support and develop this situated and socially interactive perspective on (musical) creativity through the lenses of the 4E approach to cognition and DST (see Sawyer, 1999, 2003; Schuldberg, 1999). As we go, we suggest that this approach may help us understand (musical) creativity not only in terms of products or individualistic processes, but also as a dynamically
Toward a ‘4E’ approach to musical creativity
Humans engage in musical activities in various ways. These are continuously shaped by a range of social, biological, developmental, cultural, and historical factors (Clarke, 2005a; Cook, 2001; Cook & Everist, 1999; Cross, 2012; DeNora, 2000; Huron, 2006; Krueger, 2011, 2013; Small, 1998). Such activities may involve composing new music, improvising, dancing, reflecting on and writing about a particular piece, performing, listening, learning, and employing music in a range of socio-cultural contexts (religious, therapeutic, etc.). And of course, the way musical experience is enacted differs with each type of activity and in relation to the context it is associated with—one can feel different emotions in each situation, or engage the body in different ways (dancing, conducting, etc.). Despite these differences, we suggest that the bio-cognitive
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processes at the basis of musical experience always involve an important creative engagement. We are aware that this may seem somewhat counterintuitive, particularly when considering how Western musicology has traditionally tended to treat creativity as a solitary achievement realized by great geniuses. Moreover, because psychological and philosophical approaches to musical creativity often focus on the
Embodied
Considering the mind as embodied means rethinking the boundaries between the neural and extra-neural (e.g., metabolic, thermodynamic, and muscular, among others) factors that drive cognitive processes. From this perspective, the brain becomes a part of a larger network that involves the nervous system and the sensorimotor capacities of the entire organism (e.g., Gallagher, 2005, 2011). In a sense, therefore, separating brain and body, perception and action, experience and behavior, may in fact be a largely artificial move that offers only limited accounts of what mental life really entails (Hurley, 1998, 2001; Thompson, 2007).
Shortly, we will develop such concerns through the lens of DST. For now, we ask the reader to consider the following example. If a bass player is given a novel instrument and is asked to improvise with it, he or she will not start only by “thinking” about what notes, phrases, dynamic and timbral configurations, and rhythmical patterns will be developed. That is, the process arguably does not first involve the generation of “mental maps” and explicit representations about the different possibilities offered by, for example, the new electric bass provided. Rather, improvising is intrinsically related to the actual ways the fingers hit the strings and how the instrument “responds” to the performer’s intentions (i.e., what it “affords” in real time, as the improvisation unfolds), and how the entire body “feels”—how it facilitates and resonates with such activity, dynamically. Through this embodied form of
Embedded
As we have begun to consider, the body does not simply provide biological support for an otherwise detached brain that “commands” behavior. Rather, it participates in driving cognitive processes (Gallagher, 2005). But this does not happen in a vacuum. Indeed, embodied minds are parts of broader physical and socio-cultural systems that shape and are shaped by the agents who inhabit them. As such, a growing number of scholars also consider cognition as Perception is direct (no mental representations). Perception is primarily for the guidance of actions (it is not for neutral information gathering). Perception is of affordances—directly perceivable, environmental opportunities for behavior.
But what does this understanding of perception as “affordances” for action reveal about how musicians negotiate meaning with their environment in creative ways? Consider, for example, a situation where an experienced trumpet performer and a beginner are both given a trumpet to look at. The expert player will be able to individuate a far richer variety of possibilities for action (affordances) than the amateur (Menin & Schiavio, 2012). Such possibilities may be understood to emerge from the dynamic relationship between an embodied agent and his or her history of action-as-perception with the instrument. This could be considered as relevant to creativity on a number of integrated situated and temporal scales—for example, how the agent uses or (at a distance) understands the (musical) object and its possibilities in a given situation from moment-to-moment (short-term), and how such usage and understandings involve the adaptation of motor-based knowledge the agent has acquired through his or her history of development as embedded within a given milieu (long-term). 7 All of this resonates closely with the embodied perspective just discussed, showing the deep relevance of sensorimotor activity in constituting the meaningful relationships that arise between agents and environment. Such insights are central to the enactive approach to cognition that we discuss next.
Enactive
The enactive dimension describes how organisms and their environments mutually determine each other (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). Most centrally, this perspective highlights the active role living creatures play in developing patterns of (sensorimotor, neural, metabolic, interactive) activity that allow them to maintain a viable existence. Such sets of meaningful activities constitute what enactivists refer to as “sense-making,” which is ultimately equated with “cognition” (see Thompson & Stapleton, 2009). The enactive approach, therefore, replaces the more traditional input–output model of mind with a more relational story—where an agent’s ongoing history of interactivity (structural coupling) with the environment becomes central to his or her mental life. It should also be noted that while this perspective asserts the inseparability of organism and environment, it also seeks to provide a biological account of the autonomy we experience with ourselves and other living beings (Di Paolo, 2005; Schiavio & van der Schyff, 2018; Weber & Varela, 2002). To better understand how this is so we might consider the self-organizing social dynamics of joint music performance (e.g., a string quartet or a jazz trio). In such contexts, each performer is required to engage in circular processes of collaborative adaptive activity (Salice, Høffding, & Gallagher, 2017; Schiavio & Høffding, 2015). Here, individuality and collectivity must be continually renegotiated by each performer to sustain and develop the musical environment being enacted. This involve on-line cross-modal information coming from the individual parts being performed; an awareness of music as it unfolds “as a whole”; the shifting emotions and intentions of the musicians; their relationships to their instruments (and to their audience); as well as shared forms of visual, corporeal, and auditory signaling, and more. Broader ecological factors such as the nature of the acoustic space and the social significance of the musical event are also important to consider. In brief, musicians must individually and collectively initiate, and adapt to, a range of interacting dynamics in the larger musical system. They work within various levels of constraint to keep the musical environment coherent, maintaining their status as autonomous musical individuals whose actions simultaneously inform and are informed by the musical environment they co-enact. Additionally, musical agents can and do push against such constraints to initiate transformations that keep the music vital or “alive.” Importantly, the way this occurs is primarily driven by the self-organizing dynamics of the system itself (more on this shortly in the context of DST).
Such processes are perhaps most evident in improvised settings, where the modes of interaction and the desired outcomes are less strictly defined (Borgo, 2005; Linson & Clarke, 2017; Schiavio, van der Schyff, Gande, & Kruse-Weber, 2018). However, even in situations where musicians are closely following a score, music-making is never simply a reproduction of that score. Rather, it always involves dynamic forms of negotiation and adaptation by and between performers, between performers and their instruments, and between performers and audience (Davidson & Good, 2002; Schiavio & De Jaegher, 2017). 8
Extended
By now it should be evident that while each of the E’s in the 4E approach offers a certain perspective on the nature of cognition, they are not discrete. Rather, they overlap—aspects of one dimension will necessarily be reflected in the others. With this in mind, we conclude our look at the 4E approach with the “extended” aspect of cognition and creativity. This is an important dimension to consider because although many embodied approaches to cognition do, by necessity, focus on the situated aspects of cognition, it is often argued that too much focus on neural and bodily factors can obscure the dynamical processes of co-determination that occur between (musical) agents and their environments (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Menary, 2010b; Rowlands, 2010).
The “extended” dimension of the 4E framework holds that “[biological and non-biological] features of the environment can co-constitute the mind” (Hutto & Myin 2013, p. 139; see also, Clark, 2010). Think, for example, of a percussionist improvising on an arrangement of instruments. In the process of enacting a meaningful relationship with this collection of instruments, the instruments must become part of the musician’s cognitive ecology. In other words, the performer might be seen as “offloading” his or her musical expertise to the instruments in ways that are “functionally coupled” with the broader musical environment. This is to say that, when needed, tools and objects from the environment can become integrative parts of mental life and the creative processes that go along with it (see Malafouris, 2008, 2013, 2015). The very act of engaging with musical objects and technologies—for example, composing by improvising on a specific instrument, by using music notation software (such as Finale or Sibelius), by notating by hand on a sheet of paper, and so on—can contribute greatly to how musical ideas develop. One might also consider the ways people use personal music listening devices to regulate their emotions and to create unique “aesthetic” relationships with the everyday worlds they live though (Bull, 2000; 2007; Skånlad, 2013). In brief, non-biological components of the physical world are important parts of the realm of musical cognition and creativity. And as technology develops, they may well become ever more integrated with human bodies and brains. 9
Finally, the extended mind is also relevant in the (social) contexts we began to discuss above. When groups of musicians enact shared musical environments, they may be understood to engage in shared or “participatory” forms of sense-making (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007), which involves offloading and taking on various tasks required by the extended cognitive ecology (e.g., by entraining with a beat provided by a drummer). This could entail embodying various roles that are culturally instantiated to various degrees. Or it might involve the development of radically new extended musical ecologies through free improvisation, experimentation, novel technologies, and new approaches to composition, performance, and musical interaction more generally (Bailey, 1993; Laroche & Kaddouch, 2015; Walton, Richardson, & Chemero, 2014; 2015).
A view from dynamical systems theory
From a 4E perspective, the mind may be understood as an emergent property of organism–environment interactivity, which involves biological, non-biological, cultural, social, technological, and historical dimensions. Here, cognition is not grounded first in internal representations, but rather in the ways living systems self-organize and autonomously enact dynamic patterns of behavior that are relevant to their continued survival and well-being. Such processes occur over various time scales at the level of the individual and the collective. Because of this, interacting, self-organizing agents may be understood to influence and, if the system is “functional,” help sustain each other’s behavioral dynamics. This results in what is sometimes referred to as larger-scale, multi-organism systems (Maturana & Varela, 1980, 1987; in a musical context see Walton et al., 2014). Here the cognitive agents act as “constraints” on each other to maintain the shared system they co-enact—they “work” to transform energy into
With this in mind, the theoretical and mathematical tools offered by DST may help us better understand musical creativity in terms of the 4E framework just discussed. Put simply, DST describes how self-organizing, complex, systems emerge and develop over time. In doing so it reveals aspects of the system that tend to converge and diverge as patterns of relative stability and instability. These are referred to as
This research revealed that aspects of self-organizing behavior in living systems could be described using differential equations that express the magnitude of variability between pairs of (non-linearly) coupled components. And indeed, this approach has been enhanced in various ways, resulting in frameworks that describe a much wider range of behavioral, perceptual, and cognitive phenomena (Kelso, 1995; Schöner & Kelso, 1988a; for an overview see Chemero, 2009). Importantly, DST has been used to explore learning as a type of
The introduction of entropy to the system can be the result of the willful activity of the agent, or involve perturbations in the environment the agent must deal with—perhaps brought about by other agents, social and cultural developments, or other thermodynamic factors. Here the concept of a
In all, the DST perspective offers important tools for describing how agents develop new repertoires of meaningful action through interactions with the extended socio-material environments they are embedded in. As such, it can provide third-person descriptions that are relevant to a 4E perspective. In turn, the 4E approach can provide a useful framework exploring DST data in phenomenological terms. As we considered above, the ways agents develop new forms of corporally-based understanding unfolds in terms of their history of coupling with the environments they inhabit and actively shape. This occurs though sustained adaptive
With these ideas in mind, we now turn to consider a preliminary study by Walton and colleagues (2017) that examines interacting improvisers through the analytical tools of DST. In line with our interest in looking beyond the traditional focus on products, outcomes, and processes confined to individual creators, this will allow us to extend our discussion of creativity in a more explicitly social and collaborative direction that aligns with a 4E orientation.
Creative musical interaction: an example of an empirical study employing DST
As we have begun to explore, the possibilities of DST extend well beyond pairs of wagging fingers and limbs to how embodied agents couple with the extended socio-material environments they are embedded in through the development of patterns of activity with the objects and other agents they interact with. This resonates with the work of researchers who examine musical listening as a process of “dynamic attending” that integrates neural, social, bodily, and ecological dimensions (Large & Jones, 1999; Large, Kim, Flaig, Bharucha, & Krumhansl, 2016; see also McGrath & Kelly, 1986). In the context of improvising musicians, however, numerous variables (i.e., control parameters) are associated with shifts or changes in expression (phase transitions) that emerge in musical performance. The unpredictable and fluctuating nature of improvised performances, in addition to their multiple interacting components, makes it such that identifying the dynamics of the phase transitions involved in such contexts is not a straightforward task. Because of this, developing truly meaningful analyses of multi-agent improvised performance will require analytical tools that can capture how non-linear interactions between multiple components evolve over various time scales. Recent developments in the mathematical analyses of dynamical systems are particularly well suited for these types of problems (Demos, Chaffin, & Kant, 2014; Walton et al. 2014). Here we discuss an example of how these tools were used to study the patterns of coordination that emerge between improvising musicians in different contexts, and how these kinds of measures might be used to identify such dynamics in relationship to creativity. We then consider how future studies of this kind might draw on the 4E framework.
Walton and colleagues (2017) observed changes in the coordination of the movements of pairs of pianists who were asked to improvise together in two different performance contexts. In doing so, they analyzed the relationships between coordinated motion, musical phase transitions, and the perception of creativity in participants. For half of the performances, the participants played over a backing track with the chord progression of the jazz standard
Results demonstrated that when improvising with the drone backing track the musicians showed more coordination in their movements than when improvising with the swing backing track. This aligns with the fact that as the musicians adapted to the performance environments, improvising with the drone required more co-creation of rhythmic structure. Indeed, such activity appeared to demand the co-enactment of higher levels of constraint in their music and movement as they worked together to create and keep time. This study also suggests that the cooperative development of a stable musical environment may also support the moment-to-moment emergence of “freer” or more punctuated melodic and rhythmic expressions from each performer.
This is interesting when considered in light of the musicians’ reported experience in their post-session interviews. Musicians described having more “freedom” when performing with the drone as compared with the swing track. They claimed they could work together to “create time” and felt the opportunity to “truly interact” with one another (Walton et al., 2017). The freedom musicians reported when they could create time together demonstrates how the constraints on the temporal and social dimensions of musical interaction are highly interrelated. Musical environments that allow musicians to mutually constrain each other’s creative production—to obtain a balance between individual expression and group cohesion—may afford more creative opportunities for extended or “distributed” music-making (Linson & Clarke, 2017). Another interesting aspect of this study is the lack of a significant effect concerning visual information between the participating musicians. In other words, it seems that the degree of coordination may not always be affected by whether musicians are able to observe each other or not. A possible interpretation here is that the emerging musical environment does not necessarily require the integration of visual aspects for it to become self-sustaining. Rather, it may be that as long as certain basic requirements are met (e.g., “having a sense of freedom while performing” or being open to interact) musical creativity may develop in a range of contexts.
This moves our discussion above regarding the roles of stability and entropy for creativity and the enactment of new (musical) actions (finger wagging, drum-kit learning, and so on) into an explicitly shared, participatory, or socially extended context. Here we can hypothesize that the experience of freedom in music improvisation may involve the negotiation of a balance between stability and entropy—higher entropy does not necessarily indicate more creativity. This said, it appears that the introduction of entropy into the system is required to help to keep it creatively vital—it prompts participants to develop new meaningful relationships when previous ones become too repetitive or boring. 11 It is likely that anyone who has engaged in collective musical improvisation should be able to relate to this interpretation from experience. As we have discussed, this activity involves the constant negotiation of interactive dynamics—where periods of instability may sometimes be willfully introduced and developed by the players as a way of keeping the music “alive” (for related discussions in the context of jazz and free improvisation see Bailey, 1993; Berliner, 1994, p.378; Borgo, 2005; Corbett, 2016; Iyer, 2002, 2004a, 2004b; Toop, 2016). In such contexts, creativity entails in-the-moment “play” with the levels of entropy and stability in the system—a skill that master improvisers become highly adept at. And so, while the kind of improvised creative activity associated with the drone track just discussed might be understood as indicative of a gradual kind of evolution, other forms of improvising involve more radical, “punctuated” types of development that require the system to adapt in unexpected ways. Exploring such processes could offer an interesting “next step” for experiments of this kind. 12 Another challenge for future studies involves identifying more precisely where phase transitions reflect novel insights or new modes of activity. In addition to audio and video documentation and interviews with the performers, this might also entail conducting surveys with experienced listeners to have them identify major changes in the musical activity and then seeing if these correlate with changes in dynamical measures, such as entropy.
A 4E approach could be useful in framing and interpreting such research as it offers a way for the dynamics of corporeal and ecological (social, instrumental, sonic) dimensions to be examined within an overlapping, relational framework. As the preliminary experiment involving the improvising keyboard players suggests, correlations may be made between: The The The The
While aspects of these dimensions can be objectively correlated and compared using DST, the 4E framework may afford more nuanced first- and second-person analyses. Integrating both perspectives could offer rich multidimensional accounts that describe and compare the dynamics and experience of musical creativity from a wider range of “lived” perspectives.
Dynamical heuristics
Before we conclude, we would like to develop our discussion in a more philosophical and heuristic context by suggesting a few ways that DST and 4E concepts might be applied in terms of thinking about musical creativity in cultural and historical domains. One way to do this involves the idea of a musical
Along similar lines, one might explore the subset of an agent’s worldview associated with musical style.
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In this case, the DST concept of a “strange attractor” we considered above could be used to represent a set of stylistic configurations that are similar and coherent—once the state of an agent is inside one of these attractors, they can freely move within its parameters. For example, one might think of an attractor for Baroque music and another for late Romantic music. Here the music of Vivaldi might be understood as confined to (or “embedded in”) the Baroque attractor. His musical evolution explores different flavors of Baroque music that correspond to different points within the Baroque attractor. The evolution of a composer like Schoenberg, however, highlights a different possibility as his development is characterized by a more radical change in compositional style from late Romantic music to dodecaphonic serialism. This could be thought of as a change (or addition) of attractors in the composer’s musical worldview—that is, from the late Romantic attractor towards the “dodecaphonic basin.” In line with our discussion of improvisers above, these two examples suggest the possibility of (at least) two general types of (stylistic) evolution; namely,
Here, readers may note a similarity between the concepts of gradual/punctuated evolution and those of exploratory/transformational creativity as defined by Boden (2004; see above). Exploratory creativity is a form of gradual evolution, where an agent creates new artefacts within a given conceptual space (i.e., an attractor). Transformational creativity, by contrast, is a form of punctuated evolution in that it entails the generation of new possibilities for perception and action (and resulting artefacts) that are substantially different from those previously generated (i.e., motion from one attractor to another). However, from the 4E perspective, such dynamic evolution cannot be confined to an individual. Rather it is inextricably linked with his or her history of coupling with the embedded environment (Varela et al., 1991). This could involve macro-level shifts whereby an agent’s society comes in contact with or becomes more open to other cultures. Changes in worldview can also be associated with the emergence of new technologies (e.g., the pianoforte, electronics, the computer), socio-cultural transformations (e.g., free jazz and the civil rights movement; commodification and mass production) or when artists push against the boundaries of existing macro-level (cultural) attractors associated with aesthetics and practice. For example, consider how Beethoven’s late string quartets were highly criticized by his contemporaries for their bold use of quasi non-tonal harmonic structures (Knittel, 1998)—owing, perhaps, to a visionary shift in the musical worldview of the composer (brought about by decades of engagement with music) that many of his contemporaries found incoherent with their own. Today these works are generally considered to be masterpieces and arguably paved the way for later developments in Romantic and post-tonal music. One might trace the development of Coltrane or Hendrix in similar ways. Both were
And so, while creative musical agents do enact musical actions that imply simpler attractors (e.g., playing a repeating rhythm), and move within more established basins of activity associated with a given style, they can also willfully destabilize such attractors. In doing so, they can create music that (a) approaches completely chaotic dynamics or involves stochastic or aleatoric processes (e.g., Luciano Berio, John Cage); (b) involves the “collision” of multiple (e.g., stylistic, rhythmic) attractors (e.g., Charles Ives, Ornette Coleman); or (c) they can co-enact new basins of attraction characterized by new sets of bodily, sonic, and social relationships (e.g., through free improvisation; see Borgo, 2005). Put another way, transferring the properties of complex systems to living music agents allows us to think of them as being able to function at
To summarize, from this perspective musical agents and environments can be understood as self-organizing dynamic systems that develop through histories of interactivity—agents and environments are structurally coupled in a non-linear way and are therefore co-evolving. Thus, the enactment, maintenance, and development of stable basins of practice and understanding, as well as emergence of new ones cannot be reduced to the agent or the products they create. As the discussion above suggests, this approach might offer useful possibilities for thought and analysis in the context of case studies in the development of musical creativity (e.g., instrumental practice and compositional development) and for historical and cultural musicology. For example, the approach taken in the study by Walton and colleagues (2017) might be further extended to explore the development of individual performers or ensembles over different time scales (in both professional and educational contexts). This could involve the comparative analysis of (historical or field) video and audio documents through the lenses of DST and the 4E framework. Again, this could result in the useful integration of a range of perspectives (DST analysis, 4E/phenomenological perspectives, historical and cultural accounts, and more).
Conclusion
The study involving interacting improvisers discussed above offers a preliminary, but nevertheless highly promising example of how DST might be developed in empirical contexts. Using DST methods to measure changes in the structure of variability in musicians’ behaviors when they experience higher levels of creative freedom could help us to better identify how certain environmental constraints give rise to dynamics that provide the “right” kind of tensions—the right kind of pushes and pulls between a system’s components—for this to occur. Among other areas, this has implications for music education in terms of understanding what kinds of environments may foster creativity. It may also have a great deal to offer for researchers in music performance studies. For example, the framework we introduced here might shed light on how a musical ensemble develops the relevant shared patterns of action and perception required to perform a difficult piece of music—how they enact unique ways of communicating as enmeshed components of a communal musical environment by adapting to and/or instigating moments of entropy and nudging the system into new shared basins of attraction. As we have also seen, this approach allows us to integrate aspects that are not limited to the sonic dimension—including bodily engagements, social and cultural developments, and the ways creative activity extends to the objects and other agents that constitute the musical ecology. Likewise, as we suggested, the notion of musical worldview and other dynamical/4E concepts might offer useful ways of thinking about and describing the creative development of musical agents and musical cultures—for example, how the perceptual boundaries of music, as well as what is recognized to be musically creative, depend on the musical worldviews of agents in interaction with the environments they are embedded in, and how such views evolve over time through the dynamic interaction of a range of components. This might be developed in the context of case studies of living musicians, as well as with historical figures. Importantly, all of this does not mean that the examination of creativity should eschew the idea of products and the study of processes associated with individual creators. Indeed, the approaches discussed at the outset all offer useful insights into various aspects of creativity. However, we suggest that these aspects should not be studied in isolation and that richer accounts are possible when a range of dimensions are juxtaposed.
In line with this, we have introduced here a few examples of how DST and 4E cognition might model the “preferences” and potentials for creative (musical) activity over a range of interacting dimensions. We have also considered how these orientations offer a multidimensional approach that could help better accommodate the complex range of phenomena we refer to with the words “music” and “creativity.” On a more fundamental level, we have also suggested that this orientation may help us better understand creativity as continuous with the self-organizing processes by which all living creatures reach out to, communicate with, and, in the process, enact viable (meaningful) relationships with a changing world. In all, we hope to have added new layers of descriptive possibility to the distributed and emergent approach to creativity discussed above, and that future research and theory will develop this more fully. Indeed, while DST models cannot describe the rich phenomenology of musical experience, we suggest that they can be used as “guides to discovery” (Chemero, 2000, 2009) for a number of musically relevant processes. That is, they can provide general levels of analysis and description that may help to guide research and theory in more specific contexts. The 4E framework, for its part, does offer a way for relevant dimensions of creative activity to be examined and discussed from situated first-person perspectives—it could be used to interpret data and as a way of framing research questions in qualitative contexts (e.g., interviews). It may thus offer an important phenomenological grounding for DST. Taken together, then, these two approaches may offer a range of important insights in years to come.