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Musical contexts6/4/2023 ![]() (2015) illustrate this point by referring to Newton’s blending of “celestial and terrestrial forces” and to how “Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism in one single force called electromagnetism.” In the natural sciences, for example, the synthesis of diverse theories into generally accepted canons has been often associated with increased knowledge and scientific improvement. By bringing together insights from complementary as well as contrasting schools of thought, such integrative accounts usually appear well-positioned to offer richer understandings of the range of phenomena under examination. Hence, the process of fragmentation poses the fascinating challenge of whether findings observed in resulting sub-fields generalize across them, and how they could be fruitfully integrated to expand their explanatory reach. ![]() Explorations within specialized fields can facilitate insights on very specific aspects of a problem, which sometimes only apply in this very context, and sometimes bear relevance to overarching issues. The proliferation of novel enquiries, theories, and methodologies emerging within a research domain, often gives rise to a multiplicity of sub-areas exhibiting narrower focus and increased specialization. With its focus on embodiment, plurality, and adaptiveness, our account points to a structured unity between living systems and their world, disclosing a variety of novel analytical resources for research and theory across different dimensions of (musical) creativity. In doing so, we draw from a range of scholarship in music and enactive cognitive science, and propose that creative cognition may be best understood as a process of skillful organism–environment adaptation that one cultivates endlessly. In the present article, we compare previously posed theories of creativity in musical and non-musical domains to lay the basis of a conceptual framework that mitigates the tension between (i) individual and collective and (ii) domain-general and domain-specific perspectives on creativity. Among the latter, musical practices have recently drawn the attention of scholars interested in its creative properties as well as in the creative potential of those who engage with them. ![]() But while such accounts have gained important analytical leverage for describing the overall conditions and mechanisms through which creativity emerges and operates, they necessarily leave contextual forms of creativity less explored. This work has favored the emergence of unifying theories on domain-general creative abilities in which the main experiential, behavioral, computational, and neural aspects involved in everyday creativity are examined and discussed. ![]()
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