Abstract
The “Different Hearing” program (DHP) is an educational activity aimed at stimulating musical creativity of children and adults by group composing in the classroom, alternative to the mainstream model of music education in Czechia. Composing in the classroom in the DHP context does not use traditional musical instruments or notation, instead, the participants use their bodies, sounds originating from common objects as well as environmental sounds as the “elements” for music composition by the participants’ team, with the teacher initiating and then participating and coordinating the creative process, which ends with writing down a graphical score and then performing the composition in front of an audience. The DHP methodology works with a wide definition of musical composition. We hypothesized that the DHP short-term (2 days) intense workshop would induce changes in subjective appreciation of different classes of music and sound (including typical samples of music composed in the DHP course), as well as plastic changes of the brain systems engaged in creative thinking and music perception, in their response to diverse auditory stimuli. In our study, 22 healthy university students participated in the workshop over 2 days and underwent fMRI examinations before and after the workshop, meanwhile 24 students were also scanned twice as a control group. During fMRI, each subject was listening to musical and non-musical sound samples, indicating their esthetic impression with a button press after each sample. As a result, participants’ favorable feelings toward non-musical sound samples were significantly increased only in the active group. fMRI data analyzed using ANOVA with post hoc ROI analysis showed significant group-by-time interaction (opposing trends in the two groups) in the bilateral posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus, which are functional hubs of the default mode network (DMN) and in parts of the executive, motor, and auditory networks. The findings suggest that DHP training modified the behavioral and brain response to diverse sound samples, differentially changing the engagement of functional networks known to be related to creative thinking, namely, increasing DMN activation and decreasing activation of the executive network.
Highlights
Creativity is one of the essential human-specific constructs and it has been consensually defined as an ability to produce novel and useful/appropriate/valuable ideas/works, both in the general public and among researchers (Runco and Jaeger, 2012).Creativity applies to specific domains such as music, visual arts, sciences, and industry, and to many details of daily work and life, high creativity has a big impact on the society and quality of many scenes in human life.Domain-general creativity can be enhanced by training of a certain modality, such as musical creativity, embedded in the process of composing
We focus on the development of musical creativity through group compositional techniques in children and students
Our hypothesis addressed the differential effect of time between the active and control groups, which was captured by the group-by-time interaction (F-test 4)
Summary
Creativity is one of the essential human-specific constructs and it has been consensually defined as an ability to produce novel and useful/appropriate/valuable ideas/works, both in the general public and among researchers (Runco and Jaeger, 2012).Creativity applies to specific domains such as music, visual arts, sciences, and industry, and to many details of daily work and life, high creativity has a big impact on the society and quality of many scenes in human life.Domain-general creativity can be enhanced by training of a certain modality, such as musical creativity, embedded in the process of composing. Creativity is one of the essential human-specific constructs and it has been consensually defined as an ability to produce novel and useful/appropriate/valuable ideas/works, both in the general public and among researchers (Runco and Jaeger, 2012). We focus on the development of musical creativity through group compositional techniques in children and students. Against the background of the many proposed definitions of musical creativity (see, e.g., Cook, 2011; Burnard, 2012; Hargreaves, 2012), our work defines creativity operationally as the ability to include non-musical sounds and silence to make music, to engage in group composing, yielding a concrete result (composition), subsequently presented in public and providing satisfaction to participants, teachers/instructors as well as to audience (which was not part of the composing process)
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