Abstract. While music perception is frequently studied in psychological or cognitive scientific research, composition is given far less attention and, in either case, musical creativity is rarely discussed. In this paper we attempt to address this imbalance. Our overall goal is to arrive at a clearer understanding of the psychological mechanisms which support creativity in musical composition. We adopt a cognitive scientific approach to attaining this goal and accordingly our theory is derived from psychological studies of human composers at work. Our investigation is pitched at the computational (rather than the algorithmic or implementational) level(s) of description. Five tentative hypotheses are presented which form the basis of a cognitive theory of creativity in musical composition. Each of these hypotheses makes a specific claim about the functional characteristics of the cognitive processes which support creativity in musical composition. They are motivated by previous research in a number of areas (in particular the psychological, musicological and computational literature) which we discuss in detail. Following the cognitive scientific approach, we are engaged in the implementation of the theory as a computational model and the development of a framework for the objective evaluation of the behaviour of the implemented model. We describe how this framework may be used to refute or corroborate the hypotheses. 1
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