Musical creativity and the embodied mind

Abstract

The phenomenon of creativity has received a growing amount of attention from scholars working across a range of disciplines. While this research has produced many important insights, it has also traditionally tended to explore creativity in terms of the reception of products or outcomes, conceiving of it as a cognitive process that is limited to the individual domain of the creative agent. More recently, however, researchers have begun to develop perspectives on creativity that highlight the patterns of adaptive embodied interaction that occur between multiple agents, as well as the broader sociomaterial milieu they are situated in. This has promoted new understandings of creativity, which is now often considered as a distributed phenomenon. Because music involves such a wide range of socio-cultural, bodily, technological, and temporal dimensions it is increasingly taken as a paradigmatic example for researchers who wish to explore creativity from this more relational perspective. In this article, we aim to contribute to this project by discussing 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 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) understanding of cognition. We suggest that this approach may help us better understand creativity in terms of how interacting individuals and social groups bring forth worlds of meaning through shared, embodied processes of dynamic interactivity. We also explore how dynamical systems theory (DST) may offer useful tools for research and theory that align closely with the 4E perspective. To conclude, we summarize our discussion and suggest possibilities for future research.

Music Teachers’ Perspectives and Experiences of Ensemble and Learning Skills

“…Consider how one can develop a particular fingering solution that is easier when practicing alone but can then be re-explored and modified to account for a particular expressive necessity that only emerges when playing with others, leading to online adaptive regulations, or how a phrasing choice can be revisited to convey a better sense of tension, which may be further developed via open discussion with peers and teachers. "Listening" (to themselves and to others) becomes then an enabling condition for meaningful music making, a tool for sonic discoveries that is negotiated and transformed collectively to serve a variety of creative functions (see also van der Schyff et al, 2018;Gutierrez, 2019). Students and performers need to be attuned to their peers, be aware of the environment in which they perform and learn, and adapt themselves to what such a setting may offer.…”

Exploratory expertise and the dual intentionality of music-making

“…Music-making, in particular, consists of culturally mediated forms of skillful coadaptations which involve a negotiation between the maintenance of an individual "perspective" or "point of view", and the capacity to explore and develop novel experiences and strategies, depending on the context of the performance van der Schyff et al 2018). Even when a particular piece or pattern is repeated over and over, we generally consider it to be an "exploration" over and above a "repetition".…”

Evolutionary Musicology Meets Embodied Cognition: Biocultural Coevolution and the Enactive Origins of Human Musicality

“…In line with such concerns, other scholars (Cross, 1999 , 2001 , 2003 ; Killin, 2013 , 2016a ; van der Schyff, 2013a , b ; Currie and Killin, 2016 ) have offered alternative “biocultural” approaches to the nature and origins of human musicality—where the question of whether either biology or culture should account for deeply social and universal human activities that require complex cognitive functions (e.g., music) is replaced by a perspective that integrates the two. For example, Cross ( 1999 ) suggests that musicality is an emergent activity—or “cognitive capacity”—that arises from a more fundamental human proclivity to search for relevance and meaning in our interactions with the world.…”

“…These last claims are questioned by those who argue that they may reflect a rather narrow perspective on what musicality entails—e.g., the assumption that musical activity necessarily requires special forms of training, or that music is a pleasure product to be consumed at concerts or through recordings (for discussions see Small, 1999 ; Cross, 2003 , 2010 ; van der Schyff, 2013a , b ; Honing et al, 2015 ). With regard to this point, ethnomusicological and sociological research has revealed musical activity around the world to be central for human well-being—it is inextricable from work, play, social life, religion, ritual, politics, healing, and more (Blacking, 1973 , 1995 ; Nettl, 1983 , 2000 ; DeNora, 2000 ).…”

“…Recent research has also tended to weaken the modular hypothesis by emphasizing the plastic and self-organizing properties of the (musical) brain (Jäncke et al, 2001 ; Pantev et al, 2001 ; Münte et al, 2002 ; Lappe et al, 2008 ; Large et al, 2016 ). The past two decades have also seen the development of a “biocultural” hypothesis for the origins and nature of the musical mind that looks beyond the traditional nature-culture dichotomy (Cross, 1999 , 2003 ; Killin, 2013 , 2016a , b , 2017 ; van der Schyff, 2013a , b ; Tomlinson, 2015 ). This approach draws on a range of research in theoretical biology, neuroscience, embodied and ecological cognition, and dynamical systems theory (DST), positing a more integrated model that sees biological and cultural dimensions as aspects of the same evolving system.…”