Beyond Togetherness: Interactional Dissensus Fosters Creativity and Tension in Freely Improvised Musical Duos

Thomas Wolf, Louise Goupil, Clément Canonne

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

While coordination in joint-music making is often associated with synchronized and converging behaviors, research on group creativity routinely emphasizes the importance of dissensus and individual autonomy in collective creative endeavors. When musicians perform together, there might thus be a tension between the demands of coordination and that of creativity, which could lead them to inject some degree of dissensus in their interactions to foster the creativity of their musical output. In this article, we investigate in two listening experiments the possibility that dissensual interactions between musicians might increase the perceived creativity of the musical output, using collective free improvisation as a paradigm for creative joint action. Relying on a recorded corpus of forty tracks in which improvisers annotated their performances in terms of the various interactional intents they had toward one another (playing “with,” “against,” or “without” the other), we show, first, that musical snippets exhibiting interactional dissensus were rated as more creative by expert third-party listeners than consensual snippets, and second, that the degree of interactional dissensus between the performers predicts the tension perceived within the music by expert third-party listeners. Taken together, our results provide additional empirical ground to the idea that dissensus might play a key role in enabling group creativity, and extend its relevance to artistic situations relying on nonverbal communication.

Original languageEnglish
JournalPsychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts
DOIs
StateIn press - 2023

Keywords

  • dissensus
  • group creativity
  • improvisation
  • interactions
  • musical tension

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