Abstract
This chapter introduces the vision and the technical challenges of the Flow Machines project. Flow Machines aim at fostering creativity in artistic domains such as music and literature. We first observe that typically, great artists do not output just single artefacts but develop novel, individual styles. Style mirrors an individual’s uniqueness; style makes an artist’s work recognised and recognisable. Artists develop their own style after prolonged periods of imitation and exploration of the style of others. We envision style exploration as the application of existing styles, considered as texture, to arbitrary constraints, considered as structure. The goal of Flow Machines is to assist this process by allowing users to explicitly manipulate styles as computational objects. During interactions with Flow Machines, the user can create artefacts (melodies, texts, orchestrations) by combining styles with arbitrary constraints. Style exploration under user-defined constraints raises complex sequence generation issues that were addressed and solved for the most part during the first half of the project. We illustrate the potential of these techniques for style exploration with three examples.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
“Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beaten track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractions and discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly introduced into a seething caudron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity, where partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine is unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law” (In Horn 2014; Becker 1995).
- 2.
“One day…he started work on the famous bull. It was a superb, well-rounded bull. I thought myself that that was that. But not at all. A second state and a third, still well-rounded, followed. And so it went on. But the bull was no longer the same. It began to diminish, to lose weight… Picasso was taking away rather than adding to his composition… He was carving away slices of his bull at the same time. And after each change we pulled a proof. He could see that we were puzzled. He made a joke, he went on working, and then he produced another bull. And each time less and less of the bull remained. He used to look at me and laugh. ‘Look,’ he would say, ‘we ought to give this bit to the butcher. The housewife could say: I want that piece or this one…’ In the end, the bull's head was like that of an ant. At the last proof there remained only a few lines. I had watched him at work, reducing, always reducing. I still remembered the first bull and I said to myself: What I don't understand is that he has ended up where really he should have started! But he, Picasso, was seeking his own bull. And to achieve his one line bull he had gone in successive stages through all the other bulls.” (An account of Picasso’s assistant quoted in “Picasso’s Lithograph(s) ‘The Bull (s)’ and the History of Art in Reverse”, Irving Lavin, Art without History, 75th Annual Meeting, College Art Association of America, February 12–14, 1987).
- 3.
- 4.
This constraint actually originates from the second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern), and the invention of the serial, dodecaphonic music principle, which states that all 12 pitch classes should appear the same number of times in a musical piece. Boulez was a major proponent of this school in France.
- 5.
Generated leadsheets can be found at www.flow-machines.com/leadsheetGeneration.
- 6.
See www.francoispachet.fr/markovconstraints/markov_applet_style/lyricsgenerator.html to explore all the generated lyrics.
- 7.
See www.flow-machines.com/harmonization for more examples of harmonisations.
References
Ackerman, P. L. (2007). New developments in understanding skilled performance. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(5).
Adaman, J., & Blaney, P. (1995). The effects of musical mood induction on creativity. Journal of Creative Behavior, 29(2), 95–108.
Adams, J. L. (1986). Conceptual blockbusting, a guide to better ideas. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Alexakis, A., Khatchatourov, A., Triantafyllaki, A., & Anagnostopoulou, C. (2013). Measuring musical creativity advancement. In Stockholm Music Acoustics Conference (SMAC) and Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC), July 30–Aug 3, 2013, Stockholm, Sweden.
Amabile, T. M. (1982). Social psychology of creativity: A consensual assessment technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43(5), 997–1013.
Albert, R. S., & Runco, M. A. (1999). The history of creativity research. In R. S. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of human creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Baas, M., De Dreuk, C. K., & Nijstad, B. A. (2008). A meta-analysis of 25 years of mood-creativity research: Hedonic tone, activation, or regulatory focus? Psychological Bulletin, 34(6), 779–806.
Barbieri, G., Pachet, F., Roy, P., & Degli Esposti, M. (2012). Markov constraints for generating lyrics with style. In Luc De Raedt et al. (Ed.), ECAI (pp. 115–120).
Barron, F., & Harrington, D. (1981). Creativity, intelligence, and personality. Annual Review of Psychology, 32, 439–476.
Bartezzaghi, S. (2013). ll falò delle novità (The bonfire of the novelties), UTET.
Becker, M. (1995). Nineteenth-century foundations of creativity research. Creativity Research Journal, 8(3), 219–229.
Berlyne, D. E., & Ogilvie, J. C. (1974). Dimensions of perception of paintings. In E. Berlyne (Ed.), Studies in the new experimental aesthetics: Steps towards an objective psychology of aesthetic appreciation. New York: Hemisphere.
Boden, M. (1990). The creative mind: Myths and mechanisms. London: Weidenfield and Nicholson.
Boden, M. (1999). Computer models of creativity. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), The handbook of creativity (pp. 351–372). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Burke, J. (1995). Connections. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.
Boring, E. G. (1971). Dual role of the Zeitgeist in scientific creativity. In V. S. Sexton, & H. K. Misiak (Eds.), Historical perspectives in psychology: Readings. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole (Originally published in 1955).
Bruininks, R. H., & Feldman, D. H. (1970). Creativity, intelligence and achievement among disadvantaged children. Psychology in the Schools.
Campbell, M. R. (1991). Musical learning and the development of psychological processes in perception and cognition. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 107, 35–48.
Castro, L., Perez, R., Santos, A., & Carballal, A. (2014). Authorship and aesthetics experiments. Comparison of results between human and computational systems. In Proceedings of Evostar.
Carlier, M. (1973). Differential study of one modality of creativity: Flexibility. Monographies Françaises de Psychologie, 25, 105.
Colton, S., & Wiggins, G. A. (2012). Computational creativity: The final frontier? In ECAI.
Cravens, A., et al. (2014). Reflecting, iterating, and tolerating ambiguity: Highlighting the creative process of scientific and scholarly research for doctoral education. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 9, 229–247.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1965). Artistic problems and their solutions: An exploration of creativity in the arts. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Chicago, Chicago (quoted in Sawyer, K. (2006) Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation, Oxford University Press).
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1975). Beyond boredom and anxiety: Experiencing flow in work and play. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Conti, R., & Amabile, T. M. (1999). Motivation/drive. In M. A. Runco, & S. R. Pritzker (Eds.), Encyclopedia of creativity (Vol. 2). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Cox, C. M. (1926). Genetic studies of genius. The early mental traits of three hundred geniuses. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Dailey, A., Martindale, C., & Borkum, J. (1997). Creativity, synesthesia, and physiognomic perception. Creativity Research Journal, 10(1), 1–8.
Dudek, S. Z., Strobel, M., Runco, M. A. (1994). Cumulative and proximal influences of the social environment on creative potential. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 154, 487–499.
Dietrich, A., & Kanso, R. (2010). A review of EEG, ERP, and neuroimaging studies of creativity and insight. Psychological Bulletin, 136(5), 822.
Duff, W. (1767/1964). An essay on original genius and its various modes of exertion in philosophy and the fine arts, particularly in poetry. In J. A. Harris (Ed.), Quoted in the Oxford handbook of British philosophy in the eighteenth century (2013).
Eisenberg, J. (2002). Does individual motivation and creativity predict group creative performance? Yes, but with some surprises. In Proceedings of the International WAM Meeting, Lima, Peru.
Ericsson, K. A. (1996). The road to excellence: The acquisition of expert performance in the arts and sciences, sports and games. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associated Inc.
Feldman, H. D. (1994). Beyond universals in cognitive development. NJ, Albex: Norwood.
Feinstein, J. S. (2006). Creative interests and conceptions of creative interests. In The nature of creativity. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.
Florida, R. (2002). The rise of the creative class. New York: Perseus Book Group.
Furnham, A., & Bachtiar, V. (2008). Personality and intelligence as predictors of creativity. Personality and Individual Differences, 45(7), 613–617.
Gabora, L., O’Connor, B., & Ranjan, A. (2012). The recognizability of individual creative styles within and across domains. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 6(4), 351.
Gardner, H. (1970). Children’s sensitivity to painting styles. Child Development, 41, 813–821.
Glazer, E. (2009). Rephrasing the madness and creativity debate: What is the nature of the creativity construct? Personality and Individual Differences, 46(8), 755–764.
Gombrich, H. (1960). Art and illusion: A study in the psychology of pictorial representation. New York (Originally delivered in 1956 as the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington).
Gralewski, J., & Karwowski, M. (2013). Motivated creativity: motivational synergy of the youth’s creative attitude. Chowanna, 1(36) (English edition), 27–41.
Guilford, J. P. (1967). The nature of human intelligence.
Guilford, J. P. (1979). Some incubated thoughts on incubation. Journal of Creative Behavior, 13, 1–8.
Hedges, T., Roy, P., & Pachet, F. (2014). Predicting the composer and style of Jazz Chord progressions. Journal of New Music Research, 43(3), 276–290.
Hofstadter, D. (1985). Metamagical themas: Questing for the essence of mind and patterns. New York: Bantam Books.
Holyoak, K. J., & Thagard, P. (1995). Mental leaps: Analogy in creative thought. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Isen, A. M., Daubman, K. A., & Nowicki, G. P. (1987). Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(6), 1122.
James, W. (1880). Great men, great thoughts, and the environment. Atlantic Monthly, 46, 441–459.
Jones, B. F., & Weinberg, B. A. (2011). Age dynamics in scientific creativity. PNAS, 108(47), 18910–18914.
Kaufmann, G., & Vosburg, S. K. (2002). The effects of mood on early and late idea production. Creativity Research Journal, 14(3–4).
Keefe, J. A., & Magaro, P. (1980). Creativity and schizophrenia: An equivalence of cognitive processing. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 89(3), 390.
Kohanyi, A. (2009). Mood variability and mood regulation in student journalists and creative writers. In S. B. Kaufman & J. C. Kaufman (Eds.), The psychology of creative writing. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ludwig, A. M. (1995). The price of greatness: Resolving the creativity and madness controversy. New York: Guilford Press.
Lubart, T., & Georgsdottir, A. (2004). Creativity: Developmental and cross-cultural issues. In S. Lau, A. N. Hui, & G. Y. Ng (Eds.), Creativity: When East meets West. Singapore: World Scientific.
Lubart, T., & Sternberg, R. (1995). An Investment approach to creativity: Theory and data. In S. M. Smith, T. B. Ward, & R. Finke (Eds.), The creative cognition approach. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.
Lubart, T., Mouchiroud, C., Tordjman, S., & Zenasni, F. (2003). Psychologie de la créativité [Psychology of creativity). Paris: Armand Colin.
Marshall, N. A., & Shibazaki, K. (2011). Instrument, gender and musical style associations in young children. Psychology of Music, 40(4), 0305735611408996.
Martin, L., Ward, D., Achee, J., & Wyer, R. (1993). Mood as input: People have to interpret the motivational implications of their mood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(3), 317
Martindale, C. (1990). The clockwork muse: The predictability of artistic change. New York: Basic Books.
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370.
Murray, H. A. (1938). Explorations in personality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Niu, W., & Sternberg, R. (2002). Contemporary studies on the concept of creativity: the east and the west. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 36(4), 269–288.
Pachet, F., & Roy, P. (2011). Markov constraints: Steerable generation of Markov sequences. Constraints, 16(2), 148–172.
Pachet, F. (2012). Musical virtuosity and creativity. In J. McCormack, & M. d’Inverno (Ed.), Computers and creativity. Springer, Berlin.
Pachet, F., Suzda, J., & Martin, D. (2013). A comprehensive online database of machine-readable lead sheets for jazz standards. In ISMIR (pp. 275–280), Curitiba (Brazil).
Pachet, F., & Roy, P. (2014). Generation of stylistically imitative leadsheets with user constraints. In Proceedings of the 22th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), Prague, Czech Republic.
Pachet, F., & Roy, P. (2014). Non-conformant harmonization: The real book in the style of take 6. In Proceedings of ICCC 2014 (International Conference on Computational Creativity), Ljubljiana.
Papadopoulos, A., Roy, P., & Pachet, F. (2014). Avoiding plagiarism in Markov sequence generation. In Proceedings of the AAAI.
Raidl, M., & Lubart, T. (2001). An empirical study of intuition and creativity. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 20(3), 217–230.
Rothenberg, A. (1996). The Janusian process in scientific creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 9, 2–3.
Roy, P., & Pachet, F. (2013). Enforcing meter in finite-length Markov sequences. In Proceedings of AAAI.
Rossman, J. (1931). The psychology of the inventor. Washington: Inventors Publishing Company.
Rubinstein, G., (2008) Are schizophrenic patients necessarily creative? A comparative study between three groups of psychiatric inpatients. Personality and Individual Differences, 45(8), 806–810.
Runco, M. A., & Albert, R. S. (1986). The threshold theory regarding creativity and intelligence: An empirical test with gifted and nongifted children. Creative Child and Adult Quarterly, 11(4), 212–218.
Runco, M. A., & Basadur, M. S. (1993). Assessing ideational and evaluative skills and creative styles and attitudes. Creativity and Innovation Management, 2(3), 285–289.
Runco, M. A., & Pritzker, S. R. (Eds.). (1999). Encyclopedia of creativity. San Diego: Academic.
Runco, M. A. (2004). Creativity. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 657–687.
Runco, M. A. (2007). Creativity. Theories and themes: Research, development, and practice. Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press.
Schlesinger, J. (2014). 4 building connections on sand: The cautionary chapter. Creativity and Mental Illness, 60.
Schuldberg, D. (2001). Six subclinical spectrum traits in normal creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 13(1), 5–16.
Simonton, D. K. (1984). Genius, creativity, and leadership: Historiometric inquiries (pp. 1613–15). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Simonton, D. K. (1988). Age and outstanding achievement: What do we know after a century of research? Psychological Bulletin Copyright 1988 by the American Psychological Association, 104(2), 251.
Simonton, D. K. (1999). Creativity from a historiometric perspective. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), The handbook of creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Singer, J. K. (2010). Creativity in confinement, In D. H. Cropley, A. J. Cropley, J. C. Kaufman, & M. A. Runco (Eds.), The dark side of creativity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Sternberg, R., & Grigorenko, E. (2001). Guilford’s structure of intellect model and model of creativity: contributions and limitations. Creativity Research Journal, 13, 3–4.
Sternberg, R., & Davidson, J. E. (Eds.). (1995). The nature of insight. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.
Stohs, J. H. (1992). Intrinsic motivation and sustained art activity among male fine and applied artists. Creativity Research Journal 5(3), 245–252.
Sulloway, F. (1996). Born to Rebel. New York: Pantheon.
Tegano, D. W. (1990). Relationship of tolerance of ambiguity and playfulness to creativity. Psychological Report, 66, 1047–1056.
Torrance, E. P. (1968). A longitudinal examination of the fourth grade slump in creativity. Gifted Child Quarterly, 12(4), 195–199.
Torrance, E. P. (1974). Torrance tests of creative thinking: Directions guide and scoring manual. Massachusetts: Personal Press.
Voss, R. F., & Clarke, J. (1975). ‘1/f noise’ in music and speech. Nature, 258, 317–331.
Triandis, H. C. (1995). Individualism & collectivism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Wallas, G. (1926). The art of thought. New York: Harcourt Brace and World.
Wiggins, G. A. (2006). Searching for computational Creativity. New Generation Computing (Springer), 24(3), 209–222.
Zenasni, F., Besançon, M., & Lubart, T. (2008). Creativity and tolerance of ambiguity: An empirical study. Journal of Creative Behavior, 42(1), 61–73.
Zenasni, F., & Lubart, T. (2011). Pleasantness of creative tasks and creative performance. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 6(1), 49–56.
Horn, J. F. (2014). Creative confluence, linguistic approaches to literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Acknowledgements
This research is conducted within the Flow Machines project, which received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement n. 291156.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ghedini, F., Pachet, F., Roy, P. (2016). Creating Music and Texts with Flow Machines. In: Corazza, G., Agnoli, S. (eds) Multidisciplinary Contributions to the Science of Creative Thinking. Creativity in the Twenty First Century. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-618-8_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-618-8_18
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-287-617-1
Online ISBN: 978-981-287-618-8
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)