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.
This Element brings together the authors' practice experience and theoretical interests to offer insights into how musicians collaborate to make new songs and how they experience their practice through creative interactions. It explores how musical creativity is distributed and shaped by rich affective interactions.
