Cognition, Interaction, and Creativity in Songwriting Sessions: Advancing a Distributed Dual-Process Framework

Abstract

This article develops a microsociological framework of cognition, interaction, and creativity to identify group processes that alternatively facilitate automatic and deliberate cognitive processes in ways that drive the creative process forward. Analyzing interactions and cognitive processes by drawing on ethnographic observations and video recordings of 46 songwriting sessions, I find individuals sustain awareness of their collaborators’ cognitive processes and interact with others to, alternatively, sustain the automatic cognitive processes of their collaborators and compel them to be more deliberate. When new musical ideas provoke enthusiastic reactions among multiple members in a collaborative group, this moment of resonance can lead to “resonance in motion” if it is punctuated by a subsequent moment of resonance. The microsociological framework advanced in this article synthesizes sociological dual-process models with the distributed cognition framework to enhance future analysis and theorizing in sociology and social psychology on cognition, interaction, creativity, and cultural production.