Abstract
Popular songs have arguably a huge impact on society. It is therefore legitimate to investigate the nature of the creative act underlying popular song composition. Ethnographic experiments in song composition are difficult to conduct. This chapter describes an experiment addressing the role of feedback in the lead sheet composition process. To what extent can peer feedback affect the quality of a music composition? How does musical experience influence the quality of feedback during the song composition process? Participants compose short songs using an online lead sheet editor, and are given the possibility to provide feedback on other participants’ songs. Feedback can either be accepted or rejected in a later step. Quantitative data were collected from this experiment that can be used to estimate the relation between the intrinsic quality of songs (estimated by peer evaluation) and the nature of feedback. Results show that peer feedback can indeed improve both the quality of a song composition and the composer’s satisfaction about it. Also, composers tend to prefer compositions from other musicians with similar musical experience levels.
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