More specifically, we will attempt to frame an approach to musical creativity based in an 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) understanding of cognition. In this article, we aim to contribute to this project by discussing musical creativity in light of recent developments in embodied cognitive science. Because music involves such a wide range of socio-cultural, bodily, technological, and temporal dimensions it is increasingly taken as a paradigmatic example for researchers who wish to explore creativity from this more relational perspective.
This has promoted new understandings of creativity, which is now often considered as a distributed phenomenon. More recently, however, researchers have begun to develop perspectives on creativity that highlight the patterns of adaptive embodied interaction that occur between multiple agents, as well as the broader socio-material milieu they are situated in. While this research has produced many important insights, it has also traditionally tended to explore creativity in terms of the reception of products or outcomes, conceiving of it as a cognitive process that is limited to the individual domain of the creative agent. The phenomenon of creativity has received a growing amount of attention from scholars working across a range of disciplines.
In conclusion, we briefly consider possibilities for future research and practice. Our data focus on three aspects of M4M: "mutual collaborations," "non-verbal communication," and "sense of togetherness." Taking the "enactive" approach to cognition as a theoretical background, we argue that M4M helps to promote a sense of community that goes beyond the distinction between "individuality" and "collectivity." M4M encourages participants to meaningfully engage in collective forms of artistic activities, and develop new perspectives on their cultural identities that can play a key role for their flourishing as musical beings. Our study explores how M4M promotes self-expression, creativity, social understanding, and artistic development through a number of interviews that we collected with the "facilitators"-those who help guide the heterogeneous ensemble of participants without being committed to a fixed and pre-defined teaching content. M4M is a low-threshold community-based program where participatory sessions dedicated to different artistic activities are freely offered to people from different social and cultural backgrounds. In this paper, we report on a qualitative study based on the "Meet4Music" (M4M) project recently developed at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria. Musical Bodies, Musical Minds also considers the important practical implications of this approach for music education and everyday life.
In doing so, it provides alternative ways of thinking about musical perception, the development of musicality in infancy, its emergence in human evolution, as well as the nature of musical emotions and musical creativity. This approach highlights the situated, distributed, and corporeal dimensions of the musical mind. It explores musical cognition as a form of embodied ‘sense-making’ that is central to the ways living agents interact with the socio-material environments they inhabit and actively shape. The ‘enactive’ approach developed in Musical Bodies, Musical Minds offers a radically different perspective. Accordingly, musical cognition is often thought to involve internal neural mechanisms acting in response to external events – a causally linear process that entails the internal (in-the-head) representational recovery of an external musical environment. Traditionally, the study of the musical mind has been guided by a perspective that sees cognition as information-processing confined to the brain of the perceiver. Musical Bodies, Musical Minds presents a fascinating new approach to human musicality based on recent developments in embodied cognitive science. Goal: Book project in preparation for MIT Press.
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