Abstract
We empirically investigated the effect of mental imagery on young children’s music compositional creativity. Children aged 5 to 8 years participated in two music composition sessions. In the control session, participants based their composition on a motif that they had created using a sequence of letter names. In the mental imagery session, participants were given a picture of an animal and instructed to imagine the animal’s sounds and movements, before incorporating what they had imagined into their composition. Six expert judges independently rated all music compositions on creativity based on subjective criteria (consensual assessment). Reliability analyses indicated that the expert judges demonstrated a high level of agreement in their ratings. The mental imagery compositions received significantly higher creativity ratings by the expert judges than did the control compositions. These results provide evidence for the effectiveness of mental imagery in enhancing young children’s music compositional creativity.
Highlights
Creativity has long been recognised to be intimately linked to acts of creation and innovation across a wide range of domains such as scientific research and discovery, art and, of particular interest to the present research, music composition
We empirically investigated the effect of mental imagery on young children’s music compositional creativity
The mental imagery compositions received significantly higher creativity ratings by the expert judges than did the control compositions. These results provide evidence for the effectiveness of mental imagery in enhancing young children’s music compositional creativity
Summary
Creativity has long been recognised to be intimately linked to acts of creation and innovation across a wide range of domains such as scientific research and discovery, art and, of particular interest to the present research, music composition. Eminent composers such as Mozart and Beethoven have been hailed as “geniuses”, a term first used in the 18th century to describe individuals who displayed remarkable imaginative powers and creative ability [1,2]. Applied in the context of music composition, a composer’s creativity can be said to be guided by individual differences in creative ability (the creative person), as well as environmental factors (the creative press) such as one’s physical surroundings, schooling experiences, and cultural background that may meaningfully interact
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