Abstract
CHAMELEON is a computational melodic harmonization assistant. It can harmonize a given melody according to a number of independent harmonic idioms or blends between idioms based on principles of conceptual blending theory. Thus, the system is capable of offering a wealth of possible solutions and viewpoints for melodic harmonization. This study investigates how human creativity may be influenced by the use of CHAMELEON in a melodic harmonization task. Professional and novice music composers participated in an experiment where they were asked to harmonize two similar melodies under two different conditions: one with and one without computational support. A control group harmonized both melodies without computational assistance. The influence of the system was examined both behaviorally, by comparing metrics of user-experience, and in terms of the properties of the artifacts (i.e., pitch class distribution and number of chord types characterizing each harmonization) that were created between the two experimental conditions. Results suggest that appreciation of the system was expertise-dependent (i.e., novices appreciated the computational support more than professionals). At the same time, users seemed to adopt more explorative strategies as a result of interaction with CHAMELEON based on the fact that the harmonizations created this way were more complex, diverse, and unexpected in comparison to the ones of the control group.
Highlights
This was quantified by a metric that we refer to as the Overall Creativity Index (OCI) which was estimated as the average score of all the post-task questions for each participant
Back to our main experiment, we recently presented a comparative analysis between the computationally supported harmonizations and the favored CHAMELEON examples of each participant that identified a number of different strategies for the creative exploitation of CHAMELEON (Zacharakis et al, 2020) in a melodic harmonization task
Through a combination of user experience assessment and computational characterization of the produced harmonizations it has been shown that the use of CHAMELEON resulted in more explorative approaches on a melodic harmonization task, but was appreciated more by novices than experienced composers
Summary
The desire to define and measure human creativity (e.g., Stein, 1953; Rhodes, 1961; Mooney, 1963; Boden et al, 2004; Wiggins et al, 2015) or even further to identify neural underpinnings of creative behaviors (e.g., Rosen et al, 2020; Boccia et al, 2015; Luft et al, 2018) has a long history in which music has had a prominent position (e.g., Johnson-Laird, 1988; Odena and Welch, 2009; Boccia et al, 2015; Rosen et al, 2020). Co-creating With CHAMELEON becoming more creative (e.g., Wiggins, 2006, 2008; Colton and Wiggins, 2012; Jordanous, 2012; Agres et al, 2016). This has, in turn, mandated the rigorous evaluation of artificial creativity which, like the evaluation of human creativity, poses a challenging problem. Unlike other fields of artificial intelligence (e.g., game-playing, computer vision, etc.), the generation of an aesthetic artifact does not have a strictly defined goal (such as winning a game of chess), making the assessment of its merit a rather challenging problem. Breaking down creativity into several—easier to assess—constituent dimensions such as novelty, divergence, value, problem solving ability, etc., constitutes a reasonable approach for the evaluation of creative systems (e.g., Jordanous, 2012)
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