Identifying Style-Types in a Sample of Musical Improvisations Using Dimensional Reduction and Cluster Analysis

Creativity research examines both the processes and products of creativity. An important avenue for analyzing creativity is by means of spontaneous improvisation, although there are major challenges to characterizing the products of improvisation because of their variable nature. A useful concept missing from the analysis of improvisation is the idea that the products of a corpus can be organized into a series of “style-types,” where each type …