Conceptual Blending and Creativity
New concepts may
be invented by ‘exploring’ previously unexplored regions of a given
conceptual space (exploratory creativity) or transforming in novel ways
established concepts (transformational creativity) or by making
associations between different conceptual spaces that are not directly
linked (combinational creativity) (Boden 2009).
Conceptual blending is a cognitive theory developed by Fauconnier and Turner
(2003;
Blending and Conceptual Integration webpage) whereby elements from diverse,
but structurally-related, mental spaces are ‘blended’ giving rise to
new conceptual spaces that often possess new powerful interpretative
properties allowing better understanding of known concepts or the
emergence of novel concepts altogether. It relates directly to Boden’s
notion of combinational creativity.
In the context
of the
COINVENT project (
Schorlemmer et al., 2014) a model is being developed
that is based on Goguen's proposal of a Unified Concept Theory (Goguen,
2006), inspired by the category-theoretical formalisation of blending that employs the category-theoretical colimit operation
to compute blends. This methodological framework incorporates important
interdisciplinary research advances from cognitive science, artificial
intelligence, formal methods and computational creativity.
Evaluating CHAMELEON - in the context of the (MIS 5005182) project
There is an ongoing projet for "Evaluating the contribution of the CHAMELEON system in human musical creativity" (MIS 5005182); more information can be found in
this page. More information will be available after the results have been published: disclosing details to potential participants at this point, would jeopardize the integrity of possible complementary experiments that might be necessary in the near future.
The CHAMELEON harmonisation assistant
As an
illustration of the COINVENT model’s potential, a proof-of-concept
computational creative system is developed that learns harmonies from
diverse idioms, generates novel harmonisations of given melodies in the
learned harmonic styles or in blended spaces of diverse harmonic
idioms.
The CHAMELEON harmoniser is a melodic harmonisation assistant that is
• adaptive: learns from data (Kaliakatsos-Papakostas et al., 2016a),
• general: can cope with any tonal or non-tonal harmonic idiom (Cambouropoulos et al., 2014),
•
modular: learns different aspects of harmonic structure
(Kaliakatsos-Papakostas et al., 2016) such as chord
types (Cambouropoulos et al., 2014), chord transitions
(Kaliakatsos-Papakostas and Cambouropoulos, 2014), cadences and
voice-leading (Makris et al., 2015),
•
creative: not only generates novel harmonies for a given melody in a
selected learned harmonic idiom (Kaliakatsos-Papakostas et al., 2016a), but may also blend different harmonies
generating novel harmonic spaces altogether (Kaliakatsos-Papakostas et al., 2016b).
The various
components of the proposed model are explained in a number of
papers, and, examples of creative harmonisations of
different melodies are presented:
•
Description of Harmonic Dataset for learning diverse harmonic styles
•
Examples of Input Melodies
•
Examples of melodic harmonisations in diverse harmonic idioms
•
Examples of melodic harmonisation based of blended harmonic spaces
•
Examples of creative use of the CHAMELEON assistant by composers
