AI is coming for music, too

What has emerged is less a grand unified theory of how a creative idea originates and unfolds in the brain and more an ever-growing list of powerful observations. We can first divide the human creative process into phases, including an ideation or proposal step, followed by a more critical and evaluative step that looks for merit in ideas. A leading theory on what guides these two phases is called the associative theory of creativity, which posits that the most creative people can form novel connections between distant concepts. STUART BRADFORD “It could be like spreading activation,” says Roger Beaty, a researcher who leads the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Laboratory at Penn State. “You think of one thing; it just kind of activates related concepts to whatever that one concept is.” These connections often hinge specifically on semantic memory, which stores concepts and facts, as opposed to episodic memory, which stores memories from a particular time and place. Recently, mo ... Read full article.