Creative Interactions in Collaborative Songwriting

This Element offers insight into the creative interactions that shape collaborative songwriting in the twenty-first Century. It explores how musical creativity is distributed and affectively framed by interactions between people, spaces, tools, and industrial forces. It features the analysis of in-depth interviews with professional songwriters and integrates conceptual resources from phenomenology, enactive cognitive science, and ecological psychology to offer a novel understanding of creative consciousness as involving individual and shared affective resonances and atmospheres. Section 1 explores how patterns of affect are manifest and regulated in creative interactions. Section 2 confronts the relation between affective experience and musicians' senses of autonomy and agency. Section 3 illuminates songmakers' experiences of solitary and shared worlds during collaborations with a focus on environment and creative atmospheres.