Collective creativity of melodies and images
How creative products emerge when many individuals iteratively generate, rate, and modify cultural artifacts.
Creativity is often studied as an individual capacity, yet many cultural products—from melodies to visual styles—emerge through the interaction of large numbers of people over time. This project investigates how novelty, structure, and aesthetic quality arise when creativity becomes a collective process.
By formalizing creative environments as evolving cultural systems, we study how feedback, selection, and iteration jointly shape the trajectories of cultural artifacts. Our goal is to identify the interaction rules that support originality without sacrificing cumulative improvement.
What we do
- Design large-scale online paradigms where participants create, rate, and iteratively modify cultural artifacts (e.g., short melodies, visual patterns).
- Manipulate feedback and selection rules to test when systems diversify, stabilize, or converge.
- Track cultural lineages across many generations to quantify innovation rates, structural complexity, and cumulative change.
- Compare dynamics across modalities (music vs. images) to identify shared computational principles of creativity.
Why it matters
Collective creativity underlies cultural evolution, scientific progress, and artistic innovation. Understanding how large populations generate novel and structured outputs provides insight into the emergence of culture, the dynamics of creative markets, and the design of systems that support collaborative innovation. These findings inform theories of cultural evolution, collective intelligence, and human–AI creative systems.
Related publications and links
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