McIntyre, P. (2008) ‘The Systems Model of Creativity: Analyzing the Distribution of Power in the Studio’, 4th Art of Record Production International Conference, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, Nov 2008: published in Journal of the Art of Record Production, Issue 4 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The romantic and inspirationist understandings of creativity appear to be cemented into place in the music industry so much so that they have become common sense. However rationalist research does not support these views (e.g. . In fact these views have been described as myths (Boden, 2004) and are therefore explanations lacking veracity. If this is the case what is available to describe the phenomena of creativity in studio practice? Historically, most rational research into creativity has focused at the level of the individual neglecting the broader social and cultural structures that shape and enable creativity and cultural production . Nonetheless, recent research has been moving towards confluence models one of which is the systems model . According to this approach creativity comes about through the ongoing operation of "a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the domain, and a field of experts who recognise and validate the innovation" (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996:6). By taking this model and applying it ethnographically to what occurs in the recording studio, from preproduction through to production and postproduction, a greater understanding of the creative process, one that goes beyond common sense and mythic assumptions, may be forthcoming.
Morrow, G., 'The Psychology of Musical Creativity: A Case Study of Creative Conflict in a Nashville Studio', Colombo, B (ed.) The Psychology of Creativity, Nova Science Publishers: Hauppauge, New York, 2013., 2013
This chapter addresses the question of whether the conflict that occurred between the band Boy & Bear and the record producer Joe Chicarrelli, and within the collaborative web surrounding them, was necessary for the production of an album that became commercially successful. It is clear that a certain degree of conflict within this creative group was necessary for the production of a commercially successful album. However the album is less creative or ‘novel’ than the producers would have liked. This is because the conflict that occurred during the sessions was at times creative and at other times destructive. While conflict may not be a necessary part of making records in and of itself, ‘group flow’ (Sawyer, 2007) does necessitate there being a certain degree of creative conflict. This chapter contributes to our understanding of the ways in which conflict and power can be productive.
2019
Differences and similarities in the creative agency of the producer in the production process of urban pop music produced in a home studio, rock music produced in a conventional studio facility and classical concert hall music produced in a concert hall setting is explore in this paper. Starting from the premise of record production being a collaborative effort, I approach agency as the capacity to make and effect decisions within a structure or even to alter it to some extent, and creativity as contributing to the domain of existing works through exercising aesthetic decision-making. Based on these understandings of agency and creativity, I will examine how different cultures in different production settings and different studios conceived as cultural spaces affect the construction of the producer’s agency within creative communities in the production process. Furthermore, I will discuss how differences in understandings of the ontology of the music contribute to the level of creat...
Differences and Similarities the Role and Creative Agency of Producers in Pop, Rock and Classical
Proceedings of the 12th Art of Record Production Conference Mono: Stereo: Multi, 2019
Differences and similarities in the creative agency of the producer in the production process of urban pop music produced in a home studio, rock music produced in a conventional studio facility and classical concert hall music produced in a concert hall setting is explored in this paper. Starting from the premises of record production being a collaborative effort, I approach agency as the capacity to make and effect decisions within a structure or even to alter it to some extent, and creativity as contributing to the domain of existing works through exercising aesthetic decision-making. Based on these understandings of agency and creativity, I will examine how different cultures in different production settings and different studios conceived as cultural spaces affect the construction of the producer’s agency within creative communities in the production process. Furthermore, I will discuss how differences in understandings of the ontology of the music contribute to the level of creativity, i.e. the contribution to the domain of existing works, that a producer agent can possess. I base my presentation on extensive ethnographic fieldwork of three case studies on production processes, which took place in the course of 2015- 2017.
An intermediary between production and consumption: the producer of popular music
Science, Technology & Human Values, 1989
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Producing Music, Producing Myth? Creativity in Recording Studios
Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, 2016
This paper presents research on the power of myth (Barthes 1972) and commonly accepted beliefs, or "doxa" (Bourdieu 1977), in shaping creative practices inside recording studios. Drawing from two ethnographic case studies of rock and hip-hop artists in recording studios, this paper addresses the (re)production of myths during studio sessions. Through critical incident analyses, we challenge romanticized representations of studios as individualistic spaces and highlight how mythic representations of creativity influence musicians' technical expectations of recording processes. Additionally, we illustrate the circulation of, and moments of resistance to, myths from cultural domains outside of the studio that pervade practices within studios. In sum, we show that studios-sites involving the intense scrutiny of music-making-offer insightful contexts in which to examine how myth can shape recording processes and studio practices.
Creativity and Cultural Production: A Study of Contemporary Western Popular Music Songwriting
Creativity Research Journal, 2008
The contemporary Western popular music industry tends to work within a paradigm of creativity that runs counter to current academic research. This research into creativity can be categorized as falling along a continuum from individual to contextual responsibility and ranges across a number of disciplines including psychology, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and communication and media studies. However, it is the contention of this article that it is the systems model of creativity in particular, partially coupled with the similarly complex approach to cultural production presented by Pierre Bourdieu, which provides the most useful working platform to investigate the idea of creativity. Through the use of an ethnographic research methodology, this article investigates the systems model of creativity as it applies to contemporary Western popular music songwriting. It concludes that a contemporary Western songwriter's ability to make choices, and therefore be creative, is both circumscribed and facilitated by his or her knowledge of the domain of contemporary Western popular music and his or her access to, and knowledge of, the field that holds this knowledge that allows the conclusion, at the more philosophical level, that these ideas can also be presented as an account of the interdependence of agency and structure within the workings of the creative system.
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2017
This chapter argues that to understand the distributed nature of musical creativity we need to examine its connection to large-scale social structure and to capitalist relations of labour. These relations have a ‘downward’ causal impact on creative acts. Firstly, this is through the division of labour, which plays out in different ways across genres from classical to pop. Secondly, creative musical labour involves engagement with the concrete, material world. The distributed nature of creativity is determined not only by the drive to divide or consolidate music-making tasks but also depends on the nature of the musical materials to hand, and methods of dealing with them. Two methods are described in this chapter: translation and intensification. Each (sometimes they are combined) entails the making of relatively autonomous creative choices which are emergent from the structural and material conditions of musical labour.
Creative Production in the UK Music Industries
2011
Creative work is thought to offer a model for the future of all work as we move into a knowledge economy. But in what sense is creative work, itself, creative? This is the central concern of this thesis. Many have argued that our ability to be creative has, ironically, decreased with the rise of creative work. Researchers have suggested that the precarious labour conditions typical of creative work along with the growing role of large corporations in the creative labour market make it all but impossible for creative workers to be experimental and innovativethat is, to be truly creative. However, marking a distinction between creatively producing something and producing something creative, I argue that organising creativity is now an important creative activity in its own right and is intimately related to various ways of representing work. Drawing on ethnographic empirical research and my own experiences as an amateur musician I describe the ways in which working helps a specific group of people to creatively make music and provide an analysis of how positive and negative images of work help to structure and inspire this creativity.