16. The Agile Musical Mind: mapping the musician’s act of creation

Coessens, Kathleen

doi:10.1515/9783110295290.335

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Whereas network analysis of sounds in a piece or compositional process has apparently not been undertaken previously, constructing pieces on this basis is well known, as elaborated by Trevor Wishart (1985Wishart ( , 1994, and discussed more recently (Cancino 2013). Data such as here could be a compositional tool for choosing novel networks while making EAM and sound art (where environmental sounds are common).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexibility Conceiving Relationships between Timbres Revealed by Network Analysis

2023

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Perceived relationships between timbres are critical in electroacoustic music. Most studies assume timbres have fixed inter-relationships, but we tested whether distinct tasks change these. Thirty short sounds were used, from five categories: acoustic instruments, impulse responses, convolutions of the preceding, environmental sounds and computer-manipulated instrumental sounds. In Task 1, 46 non-musicians formed a ‘cohesive’ sonic ordering of unlabelled icons (sounds attached). In Task 2, they categorised the icons into four boxes. In Task 3 listeners separately ordered the sounds from each of Task 2’s boxes using the approach of Task 1. Tasks 1 and 2/3 revealed distinct orderings, consistent with conceptual flexibility. To analyse the orderings, we replaced conventional distance by adjacency measures, and described each system as a network (rather than spatial positions), confirming that the two task outcomes were distinct. Network analyses also showed that the two systems were mechanistically distinct and allowed us to predict temporally changing networks, modelling the observed networks as successive perceptions. Further simulated networks generated with the temporal model readily encompassed all possible pairings between the sounds and not just those we observed. The temporal network model thus confirms conceptual flexibility even in untrained listeners, clearly suitable for a composer to use.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexibility Conceiving Relationships between Timbres Revealed by Network Analysis

2023

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“…In the few isolated cases that have investigated musical performance as a creative act in itself (e.g. Coessens, 2013), composing and performing are considered as temporally and spatially distinct processes, and so are performing and listening. By and large, music blending studies have predominantly relied on formal, post-hoc analysis of musical artefacts (usually scores and recordings), drawn from a canon of Western Art Music repertoire or widely established popular culture contexts (see e.g.…”

Section: Questions Of Scope and Diversitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The way we blend: Rethinking conceptual integration through intermedial and open-form scores

Stefanou

2017

Musicae Scientiae

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The article overviews the basic assumptions and limitations of conceptual blending theory (CBT) as applied to music, and reconsiders the implications of the theory for musical creativity. CBT accounts of music have until now relied quite extensively on examples of music-as-product, and rarely considered the various levels of mediation between composition, performance and listening. It is therefore argued that an investigation of more process-based paradigms could hold significant ramifications for CBT. This argument is elaborated through a discussion of three intermedial, open-form scores by Earle Brown, Pauline Oliveros and Jennifer Walshe. The scores are considered as documents of situations where one or more performers partake, as active agents, in the composition, completion and elaboration of new crossdomain blends, as well as in the disintegration of already blended concepts. This conscious disintegration or unpacking of blends in performance is discussed as a significant aspect of the musical blending process as such, and one that deserves further consideration in creative conceptual blending research.

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“…Although early on the theory was used to study combinations of concepts activated by the music and words of 19th-century Lieder (Zbikowski, 1999), the focus of that work was not on creativity as such but on the processes through which concepts drawn from two very different domains (music and language) could give rise to unique forms of knowledge that combined elements from both music and language. More recently, however, the theory of conceptual blending has been used as the basis for computational models of creative processes in contexts that extend to musical practice (Cambouropoulos, Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, & Tsougras, 2015; Coessens, 2013; Sambre, 2013; Schorlemmer et al, 2014), suggesting not only the applicability of blending theory to the study of creativity but also ways that it might be implemented computationally.…”

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confidence: 99%

Conceptual blending, creativity, and music

Zbikowski

2018

Musicae Scientiae

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This article explores the use of conceptual blending theory for the study of creativity, especially as creativity is manifested in musical utterances. The first part of the article offers an overview of blending theory and describes two aspects of the theory that present challenges to the study of creativity in general, and to music in particular. The second part of the article offers an application of blending theory to Dido's lament from Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, with an emphasis on the ways concepts prompted by language and music blend together to create a rich, and highly creative, world for the imagination.

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16. The Agile Musical Mind: mapping the musician’s act of creation

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Flexibility Conceiving Relationships between Timbres Revealed by Network Analysis

Flexibility Conceiving Relationships between Timbres Revealed by Network Analysis

The way we blend: Rethinking conceptual integration through intermedial and open-form scores

Conceptual blending, creativity, and music

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