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Previous studies have shown that creative individuals tend to prefer complex stimuli. This study examined the relationship between creative potential, aesthetic response to music, and musical preferences. Seventy-four participants completed two creative potential tests. They listened to three repertoire pieces of different complexity, and rated them on perceived complexity, liking, and interest. Finally, they completed a musical preference questionnaire. Results suggest the relationship between complexity, on the one hand, and liking and interest, on the other, differs between the pieces. Creative potential was found to be related to preference for the more complex musical pieces. Moreover, musical preferences were found to be related both to creative potential and to ratings of the three musical pieces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that a critical toehold for understanding the formation, modernization, and popularity of Highlife in the 1950s is its transnational dimension. To corroborate this claim, the paper puts emphasis on Highlife musicians in the UK, especially London, during this time, their musical activities and productions there, and the effects of their journeys on popular music. The growing evidence that cultural practices and processes in different locales, across national and continental boundaries, were interrelated in the making of Highlife, asks for a multi-sited study of Highlife especially with regard to the musical creativity and productivity of 1950s and 1960s. It requires further research into how the journeys of musicians, the 'transport' of culture, and the resulting interplay of musical styles affected the popular African music Highlife. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: This article examines creativity, in particular the success of the British pop group The Beatles. The results suggest that The Beatles should not be seen as creative geniuses but as a creative process. Seeing creativity as a process suggests that experimental studies of one creative act may have limited value to real-world creativity. Behind The Beatles creative process were two dominant forces. First was the importance of rivalry as a contributor to creative enhancement. Second was the nature of the working team that possessed high levels of exchange and complimentary blends of expertise and thinking styles. This article also suggests that the structure of incentives is important in determining the nature of creative output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The automatic classification of music fragments into style classes is one challenging problem within the music information retrieval (MIR) domain and also for the understanding of music style perception. This has a number of applications, including the indexation and exploration of musical databases. Some technologies employed in text classification can be applied to this problem. The key point here is to establish the music equivalent to the words in texts. A number of works use the combination of intervals and duration ratios for this purpose. In this paper, different statistical text recognition algorithms are applied to style recognition using this kind of melody representation, exploring their performance for different word sizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores more than 60 years of crying sound recordings. Philosophical overview of crying themes; Factors that make crying sound recordings appealing; Mix of singers and musical styles that contribute to popular culture's deluge of tearful tunes.