Creative cognition in composing music

Abstract

In this paper we presented an overview of theoretical and empirical research in a domain of cognitive psychology of music, psychology of creativity and interdisciplinary studies concerning the creative cognitive processes in composing music, with an intention to bring them into connection and to raise questions about further research. We brought into focus the cognitive processes in composing music since the key role of cognitive mechanisms and processes, next to the emotional experience and imagery, was shown in our previous research. The wide scope of knowledge, within a time span of some 35 years, was introduced covering the following themes - generative models of creative cognition, metacognitive strategies in composing, the relation between creativity, knowledge and novelty, creativity in the social-economical context. We paid attention to the several crucial theoretical models, some of them developed on the basis of exploration of compositional practices, one of the first being John Sloboda's psychological Model of typical compositional resources and processes (1985), that gave a global overview of the relevant components of the composing behavior. Psychology of creativity gave several process models that can be applied in a field of composing music. One of them, developed by Wallas (1926) and adapted for music making by Lehmann, Sloboda and Woody (2002), is the well-known theory of the creative process stages. We considered as the most prominent the Creative cognition approach formulated by Smith, Ward and Finke (1997) and their Geneplore model (1992). The authors listed a wide range of processes that are crucial for creativity, nevertheless they are engaged in the generative or exploratory phase. In our paper, we discussed metacognitive strategies engaged in a process of composing while considering music creation as a self-regulated activity. Further on, the relation between immersion, knowledge, the production of heuristic ideas and the cognitive strategies of problem solving were brought into focus. It was pointed out that quality of the creative outcomes will be influenced by the extent of the person's long-term knowledge structures, drawn intentionally or intuitively during the process, and by the manner in which the elements of that knowledge are accessed and combined. The social and cultural factors were considered in a frame of several confluent models, first of all Csikszentmihalyi's systems theory of creativity (2004), focused less on the creative person but on involving multiple factors. Simonton took into account massive and impersonal influences from the Zetgeist or Ortgeist and grouped them into four categories: cultural factors, societal factors, economic and political factors (2004). Further on, models and concepts, new research methodologies and new technology, that were developed specifically in a domain of music creation, as well as their results, were presented.