{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.022444360618634477, 'fraction_numerical': 0.012636740852508488, 'mean_word_length': 5.404589371980676, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 2, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Analysing Group Creativity: A Distributed Cognitive Study of Joint Music Composition

Analysing Group Creativity: A Distributed Cognitive Study of Joint Music Composition Shahin Nabavian (shahin@dcs.qmul.ac.uk) Nick Bryan-Kinns (nickbk@dcs.qmul.ac.uk ) Department of Computer Science: Queen Mary University of London London E1 4NS, UK Abstract improvisational music and theatre as it “exaggerated the key characteristics of all group creativity: process, unpredictability, intersubjectivity, complex communication and emergence”. The principle idea of improvisation is that the process is the product. Sawyer's theory of analysing improvisation is based on semiotic mediation, which relates to linguistic ideas of deictics and indexical entailments. This theory helps illustrate how a person makes some presumption about a future action and is therefore a suitable way of understanding the improvisational process, be it in conversation or music. However, there are numerous collaborative situations such as Joint Music Composition (JMC), in Western contemporary music, where synchronous interaction such as improvisation plays a major part, yet it is not the product. Indeed the product in JMC, where 2 or more musicians collaborate to compose, is a song (composition) that retains a structure once it is deemed complete. JMC is product creativity that develops over time and in a group context. At this stage, our research is not focussed on understanding how individuals come to make predictions on future actions. We are interested in the role of information processing and how it impacts the creative process. We investigated the processes involved in an instance of group creativity by conducting a pilot study that looked closely at a group of expert musicians creating musical compositions over a period of time. We used Distributed Cognition principles to investigate how information propagates and transforms and how it impacts the compositional process. We identified three key processes (attainment, experimentation and structuring) that help the group achieve a successful operation in creating compositions together over a period of time. This approach has implications for how we investigate group creativity in general. By focussing on the propagation and transformation of information, we can gain a more systematic understanding of how groups come to create products together. Analysis from this pilot study demonstrates that an individual’s creative musical idea possibly bears less influence on group creativity than the group’s ability to transform that idea in a desirable manner. Therefore, information processing within Joint Music Composition has a major impact in how groups create compositions. This view sheds light on how we view the notion of group creativity. It can inform how we design tools to support it and how we design experiment to investigate it. Keywords: Group Creativity; Distributed Cognition; Music Composition Distributed Cognition The principles of Distributed Cognition (DC) have been around for over a decade and have primarily been utilised in workplace settings (Nardi, 1996; Hutchins, 1995a, 1995b; Heath and Luff 1997). More recently DC has been employed in new directions. For example, Kirsh's (2004) design principles for a visual e-learning environment are based on the notion that metacognition can sometimes be associated with external processes; hence metacognitive decisions are sometimes distributed between the internal and external and can be affected by a visual tool. We illustrate the process of JMC using Marr’s (1982) computation, algorithmic and implementation levels of description in similar manner to how Hutchins (1995a) and Flor and Maglio (1997) utilised it. Our findings are based on a pilot study that was conducted with a group of expert musicians who were given the task of writing songs over a period of three weeks. At the computational level we describe the constraints that need to be satisfied to achieve a successful operation in JMC. At the algorithmic level we specify three levels that help encode the propagation and transformation of information for key processes within the system. At the implementation level we shall illustrate details of how the representations are actually realised in the system. Introduction Many researchers have discuss the contested nature of what constitutes creativity and how it can be viewed in different domains (Boden 1992, 1994; Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Sternberg, 1999; Schneiderman, 2000; Sawyer, 2003; Paulus and Nijsatd, 2003). However, what is yet to materialise is a practical application of theories that can be used to investigate the phenomenon of individual or group creativity. Group Creativity Research The term group creativity can be attributed to a number of diverse situations in which a group of people communicate and/or work together. Our research defines group creativity as situations that are not scripted beforehand and therefore have an improvisational element where members of the group collaborate together to shape the emerging flow of interaction (Sawyer, 2003) and where the creation of a product requires a distribution of cognitive and physical labour. Studying musical groups provides an opportunity to investigate group creativity. Sawyer studied