Musical Creativity – Multidisciplinary Research in Theory and Practice

Creativity, alongside awareness and intelligence, is one of the most di
ffi
cult
issues currently facing scienti
fi
c psychology. Study of creativity is relatively
rare in the cognitive sciences, especially in arti
fi
cial intelligence, where some
authors have sometimes actively argued against even beginning a research
programme
. Nonetheless, in recent years, some success has been achieved.

However, much of this success has been in areas of creativity related to
science, architecture, visual arts and literature (or at least “verbal” activity).
Music has not often been viewed as an object of study in the creativity
fi
eld,
except in the area of education, which is surprising, because in at least one
sense it has a major advantage: it is usually possible to study music and
musical behaviour without the added complication of referential meaning,
which, while it may illuminate the output of other creative processes, also
may obfuscate the mechanisms that underpin them.
The objective of this anthology is to help initiate a research dynamic specif
ically concerning musical creativity.