Musical imagery in the creative process

We know that music a person has heard in the past can be retrieved from memory and mentally re-experienced with high precision and accuracy. Most people, including those without musical training, fall victim to ‘earworms’ 1 and can acknowledge the faithfulness with which these intrusive representations of familiar tunes replicate the original. Yet at the same time, as we re-present existing music in our mind’s ear, the ability to imagine novel musical patterns is an important part of the creative process for skilled musicians. While there have been copious studies of creativity at large, and a substantial subset devoted to music, few have focused on the contribution of the conscious processes involved in imagining music. Our current understanding of the conscious, endogenous representation of music known as musical imagery is rudimentary, and a study of its relationship to imagination and creative musical practice has barely begun. This chapter will examine musical imagery in its relationship to musical imagination. Imagination is defined as ‘the faculty or action of producing mental images of what is not present’, but also as ‘creative mental ability’. 2 Imagination is a mysterious human capacity, seeming to defy our natural tendency to schematise and reaching beyond perceptual experience. The relationship between imagery or imaging (for example re-presenting a sequence of just-heard notes in the mind) and imagination or imagining (for example creating a new sequence of notes in the mind) has a long history of philosophical and literary study, yet cognitive science has neglected this relationship, 3 and psychological research has generally focused on visual imagination at the expense of other domains, including auditory. With respect to music, there are plenty of anecdotal accounts of ‘hearing’ new musical ideas in imagination, 4 but there has been very little psychological research into musical imagination and creation. Mountain 5 addresses what she terms the ‘myths and realities’ of composers’ use of mental imagery, but does not go much beyond a review of famous examples of composers describing their inner hearing of musical ideas. Such a reliance on self-report limits our understanding of the experience of musical imagery in compositional activity to a handful of articulate composers who have been willing to translate a non-verbal process into a verbal description. 6 To begin to redress this balance, we will provide an overview of the creative functions of musical imagery, with a particular focus on the musical imagery of composers. Different orders of imaging as they relate to composition are then described. We will ask how it is that musical imagery can at once liberate and constrain, and how models of ‘imagination imagery’ (that is, mental imagery characterised by an element of novelty, see Khatena 7 ) translate to the case of musical composition. Our general propensity to imag(in)e music will be explored, and an account will be provided of a recent experience sampling survey, which found that respondents with no musical training imagine original compositions in the course of everyday life