Defining Inspiration? Modelling non-conscious creative process

What composers do The title of this collection, ‘The Act of Musical Composition: Studies in the Creative Process’, might be taken to carry with it some suppositions about the nature of possible answers to the questions it implies. The purpose of this chapter is to deconstruct some aspects of those suppositions and to tease apart the tangled and inscrutable network of happenings that constitute the construction of a piece of music by a musician. The narrative here is intended to propose a hypothesis accounting for human musical creativity, which is a large-scale endeavour. For that reason, I do not present detail of the computational mechanisms on which I rely for evidence, nor of the empirical work done to validate them as cognitive models. The interested reader is invited to learn about the detail in the various published papers that I cite along the way. My colleagues and I have argued elsewhere12 that music needs to be studied as a primarily psychological construct, for it is from the psychology that music’s equally

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