Analysis of the skills acquisition process in musical improvisation: an approach based on creativity

The aim of this thesis is to investigate and identify a relationship between musical ability and creative musical thinking in free-improvisation by means of a digital instrument. So that, a set of learning metrics have been designed where the technical skills are computed as the product of the spatial, frequential and cinematic analysis of each performance, weighting the final value according to its error, and the creative skills are computed as the product of the variables novelty, surprise and value. This last parameter is calculated according to the coherence, fluency and error correction of the segment being studied.

In order to evaluate the learning metrics, two experiments were designed and carried out. The first one, which was score-based and executed by the author, helped in proving the orthogonality between the variables through a statistical X-2 test, as well as evidenced the optimal translation of the gestural data into low-level descriptors and its progress to high-level descriptors through the metrics. The second experiment was carried out by a group of ten people, five musicians and five nonmusicians. An affirmative correlation between the Technical Skills and the Creativity variables was determined by means of the statistical Spearman Coefficient.

In addition, some tendencies were shown in the experimental results, as the preference of participants to explore effects on frequencies rather than long distance scans. Likewise, a clear learning curve was revealed in what respect to the technical skills for both groups, as well as in the error correction analysis demonstrated by the non-musicians.

To sum up, some contributions and improvements are included in the last chapter. One of those is the necessity of improving the fluency calculations, where the window shifting seems to need some recalibration.

So that, this document arises from the seek of a quantitative relationship between the musical ability acquisition and the creative musical materials, succeeding in finding an affirmative and detailed answer to the research question, an proving the potential of the proposed metrics.