BP Sequencer: A Low-Barrier-to-Entry Assessment Tool for Musical Creativity

This paper introduces a newly designed sequencer of music in the Bohlen-Pierce (BP) scale to assess creative perception and cognition. We begin with a brief overview of scientific studies on musical creativity, leading up to a gap in the field that is unaddressed by traditional studies that compare different forms of musical training and instrument-dependent output for understanding creativity. We then introduce the novel BP sequencer, an experimental interface that affords generating and rating the creativity of novel musical sequences that are uniquely composed in the Bohlen-Pierce scale. We then report three preliminary experiments in which we quantify the number of sequences generated by each individual and isolate the musical-informatic features that were rated as more creative. Participants showed a wide range of creativity in generating novel sequences. Sequences that were rated as more creative were generally longer, had more unique pitches, and had more different interval sizes. Furthermore, a preliminary electrophysiological (EEG) study quantifies three distinct candidate biomarkers for the perception of musical creativity. This novel sequencer of Bohlen-Pierce scale music can provide a useful tool for assessing creative perception and cognition. The code for this tool is freely available, along with video tutorials and documentation.