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