The Realisation of Creativity in Artificial Music Improvisation and Interpretation

How is creativity manifested in improvisation? And how do musicians interpret music in a creative

way? We have an intuitive understanding of the concept of creativity that we can use introspectively to

suggest answers to these questions, both in theory and during performance. If, though, we want to

program a computer to generate music in a creative way, the computer does not understand what

creativity is. We cannot ask the computer to behave creatively unless we also give some definition of

what such behaviour entails. So the problem becomes: how to define what musical creativity is to a

computer.

This work uses empirical methods borrowed from linguistics to capture the words which we strongly

associate with creativity. An analysis of the language used in dictionary definitions and academic

papers on creativity, as compared to everyday language use, has produced a list of words which we

commonly use to discuss creativity, e.g. innovation, openness, divergent. Considering these words in

the context of music improvisation and interpretation, I derive key attributes of creativity in this

musical domain which can be used to guide an artificially intelligent musical system towards

generating creative musical behaviour.