from negative to positive

My recent blog posts have been concentrating on good intentions - what I could do better from now on. Maybe its time to take a step back and concentrate on what I did achieve academically last term, even with the very heavy demands on my time.

1. I wrote my first journal paper!! Just waiting to see if it gets accepted. The paper was a follow-on from the interdisciplinary Musicology conference in Greece that I went to last summer (CIM08), and of course it couldn't just be a rewrite of the conference paper. The original conference paper presented a musical accompaniment program which used artificial intelligence to track the performer being accompanied, and play the accompaniment to fit their performance. I extended this work by interviewing 8 human accompanists and comparing my artificial accompanist to the typical strategies that I found from the interviews. How on earth I got time to do these interviews I'll never know, but I was really pleased with the results. I'll talk about this more when I hear back the feedback from the journal reviewers. It's in for the Journal of New Music Research. fingers crossed...
2. I got masses of experience in teaching and marking... At the start of the term I was quite nervous about marking computer science type scripts, but given the amount of marking I did last term this is now definitely not an issue for me.
3. Job with Open University. Somehow I found enough time to apply for, and get, a tutor job with the Natural and Artificial Intelligence course for the Open University. I'm just waiting now to see if enough students enrol in the South East England region to justify running the course this February.
4. After seeing the ESCOM conference for 2009 (European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music) and especially seeing the keynote speakers - David Huron, Ani Patel, Marc Leman and others - I really want to get to this conference. So submitting two abstracts (one talk, one poster) was a major thing for me to do last term. I need to work on what I submitted, to get the work mature enough for this conference, but now that I'm finding more time, these two abstracts give me concrete structures to work around.

That's all that springs to mind right now, but it's been quite good to filter out some points that I'm really pleased with from last term: adds a positive note to the blog as well.

floundering under a sea of books

Looking at the pile of books around my desk at the moment, I am finding several that I really haven't gotten around to reading yet, that I have had out on loan from the library or have acquired some other way, for a shameful amount of time. 

Some of these books have been key references for me - Wiggins and Delieges book on musical creativity, Lerdahl and Jackendoff's book A Generative theory of tonal music, various books on creativity or emergence, Bregman's Auditory Scene Analysis - the list goes on and on.

Let's face it - even if I sat down and did nothing else but read the books in my shelves, I still couldn't read all of them properly, page-by-page, and in any case I don't have that luxury with time. 

So a new approach is required - I'm going to train myself to be able to pick and choose content better from these books. I need to be stricter and really focus my attention on my research area of musical creativity. Which means, for example, that the Lerdahl and Jackendoff book is only useful to me (right now) for a small project I'm doing on the crossover between musical creativity and creativity in language use, so I should give it the appropriate level of attention and then return it so other people can read it. 

I've kept very sporadic notes from the reading I have done so far, so as of now I'm going to keep these notes electronically and file them together, otherwise they're impossible to find. I guess this blog would be a good place to do this, so quite a few future posts will be my thoughts and notes from books I've read over the past year and a half as well as future books. In a way this will be good anyway, to review what I have read - I'm sure that 75% at least of this reading has gone out of my head by now...

Work priorities for this term

1. ESCOM work

2. Funding applications

3. Submission for Computational creativity conference (NB if either submission for ESCOM doesn't get accepted, can they be reworked for this conference?) (Where is this conference this year... is it happening?)

learning from last term

So last term was a little bit crazy. I took on too much teaching, marking, gigs, rehearsals, and assorted 'other stuff', at a time when family commitments became quite pressing as well. So my DPhil work really suffered.

However... I still managed to write one journal paper (being sent off for review as I speak/write) and submit two abstracts for the ESCOM conference on music cognition in Finland, which I really hope to go to (some amazing keynote speakers and I am quite interested in Jyvaskala university as well, which is hosting the conference).

So the plan for this term is:

1. To actually have a plan for the term...

2. To be more efficient, sorting things out or plan them as they arrive, so I'm on top of things (particularly emails that I put off replying to - if they're small things I should just do them rather than procrastinating)

3. To organise my academic (and personal) life so that I know where I'm supposed to be and what I'm supposed to be doing, at any one time. (this one is going quite well so far.)

4. To be a bit more ruthless about what I accept and take on - if I can't do it, or if it's not worth the effort, I won't do it... no point in trying to please everyone if my own stuff suffers.

Lets see how this goes... will be interesting to come back to this post in a few months time and see how I'm doing.

time to resurrect this blog... new year's resolution perhaps?

Issues arising from reading Bundy's 1994 paper

• Read the other papers from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences volume in 1994. 
• Read Chapter 3 of Boden, and other chapters, to pin down Boden's definitions of the two concepts (real creativity and mere novelty) as Bundy has cited them. 
• Check my interpretation of modelling vs simulation... when thinking about this paper's comments, I constantly got confused between the two. I need to clarify this in my head.
• Follow up citations of Bundy's work, to see if anyone has actually taken these ideas of the need for complexity measuring and self-reflection in creativity further in a practical way (As of the time of writing, haven't found anything yet... possibly i could?)

Bundy: What is the difference between real creativity and mere novelty?

This is a paper published in 1994 as part of a collection of commentaries on Margaret Boden's 'The Creative Mind' book, which had been published 4 years previously. (At some point I really need to sit down with this entire journal section and read through it, when I know the Boden book better...)

Alan Bundy has seized on two distinct concepts from Boden's book, of 'real creativity' and 'mere novelty', and has critically examined both Boden's viewpoint and other ideas on the distinction between these two.

Boden's definitions of the two, as quoted by Bundy, are:

Real creativity: "mapping, exploration and transformation of conceptual space"

Mere novelty: "Generation of new objects from existing conceptual space"

(I haven't found these exact quotes in the Boden book yet so can't add page numbers yet)

From reading the paper,  I think that Bundy's point is that the difference between the two (definition wise) is that real creativity involves some changing of the conceptual space parameters (i.e. the realm of all possible ideas in that domain). So he challenges Boden, saying that real creativity can be present even when new ideas are generated without changing the conceptual space. However I think Boden's definition of real creativity acknowledges this, under the use of the words 'mapping' and exploration'?

This paper does give a very thought-provoking discussion of what is needed to justify labelling something novel as being creative. Bundy suggests that the complexity of new objects being generated is important in how creative they are perceived to be, and that there has to be some kind of self reflection on the part of the creator, to judge the worthiness of such new objects. 

Some points for consideration:

Why isn't mere novelty creative? Is this the right distinction to be making? What is creativity if it isn't just mere novelty? (the paper deliberately only hints at an answer to this question rather than attempting to solve it comprehensively; little has been done to follow up Bundy's suggestions). Assuming creativity must incorporate novelty, what must else it have to distinguish itself as definitely creativity rather than just the generation of novel but uncreative ideas?

I can't find the definition of 'real creativity' that Bundy cites, in Boden's book, although I can find the definition of mere novelty easily enough. I would like to see this definition for myself in Boden's own words.

Interesting sentence: '"Real" intelligence appears to arise from the interplay of a number of relatively mundane processes.' (preceeded by: 'it is usually a mistake to regard one aspect of an intellectual process as the key with the others playing only a supporting role')

This sentence makes me think: is Bundy confusing creativity with intelligence in this paper (deliberately or accidentally) - and actually where is the distinction here, the dividing line?or is creativity a sub-part of intelligence? or is creativity = novelty+intelligence? or less guided? more guided?

(but also this sentence links in with some ideas I have had on creativity emerging from concurrent processes, linked to Koestler's bisociation matrices perhaps....)

Is Bundy presenting creativity as intelligent generation of new concepts/ideas? I think he is. Do I agree with this? What are the alternatives? Seems a logical viewpoint to have.