Scalability of the Creative System in the Recording Studio

Abstract

The systems model of creativity includes three specific elements — domain, field and agent — that dynamically interact in an ongoing process of circular causality (Csikszentmihalyi 1988). The agent must draw from the domain during creative work in order to select a suitable arrangement of ingredients from this body of knowledge and symbol system. This selection of ingredients is then presented to the field, the social organization that recognizes, uses and alters the domain, for evaluation (Csikszentmihalyi 1997). In the context of commercial record production this process occurs when the completed record is released to the public and the field of record production (TV, radio, popular-music press, other musicians, engineers and producers, etc.) decides upon the record’s novelty and its relevant addition to the domain through a complex and non-linear process. However, during the production of a record, the scale of the systems model of creativity appears to be too large to be applicable to the participants inside the recording studio. For this reason, the generation of ideas, and the internal evaluative processes that occur on an individual basis, have been largely ignored in the literature in relation to a systems approach. Relatively few of the group processes too that occur during a collaborative situation, such as making a recording in the studio, have been explored using a systems framework (Sawyer 2000, 2003). Susan Kerrigan’s revised systems model (2013) provides a solution to this apparent difference in scale by suggesting that the domain and the field can be re-contextualized so that they apply to the specific context of the creative task. The interaction between the system’s elements can then be observed in action as a group of people collaborate on a creative product.