Approach

This Element brings together our creative and research practices. Adam Martin is a music producer, writer, educator, and researcher. He has taught collaborative songwriting for over a decade and has been involved in over twenty songwriting camps across Europe. Professionally, he has also worked in various creative collaborations across the past fifteen years and continues to make music with others, ranging from electronic popular music, experimental improvisation through to writing music to enhance cross-modal relationships. Remy Haswell-Martin’s research focuses on musical consciousness in music-making and listening contexts. Remy’s interdisciplinary research spans musicology, philosophy, and music psychology. The authors share an interest in understanding music creation as an experienced process, and, within this, a deep curiosity about the sociality of creative practice. This is the primary motivation for this Element.

For this reason, the study adopts a phenomenological approach to exploring collaborative songmaking. In the simplest terms, this means exploring the phenomena of collaborative creativity through the experiences of working songmakers. To this end, it became crucial that we spoke to those that do. Contributors to this study are all generative music-makers who work collaboratively in different settings and contexts of the music industry. We did not chase superstar music-makers. The reason for this is that the experiences of these individuals are often removed from the ‘on-the-ground’ reality of most people in professional music-making roles. Texts such as Paul Zollo’s Songwriters on Songwriting (Reference Zahavi2003) and More Songwriters on Songwriting (2017), Marc Myers’ Anatomy of a Song (2017), Howard Massey’s Behind the Glass: Top Record Producers Tell How They Craft the Hits (2000), as well as the popular podcasts Sodajerker and Song Exploder cover this ground and provide a platform for famous musicians to share their experiences. Through professional networks, we identified a sample of nine music-makers – songwriters, artists, producers, topliners – at various stages of their careers, a sample that represents the ‘day in, day out’, working of collaborative creativity in songwriting. Our method is influenced by phenomenologically grounded approaches where sample sizes can vary significantly between studies (Høffding et al., Reference Høffding, Heimann and Martiny2023). The goal, in this form of study, is to first capture a rich description of a particular experience, whether from one or ten participants. For our study, the experience in question was that of being involved in the business and practice of professional songwriting with others – that was the criterion for entry into this sample set. All participants have been anonymised, as it typical for the method, to ensure it is their detailed articulations of experience, rather than an awareness of context and autobiography that influences analysis and interpretation. Despite anonymisation, it is useful context to acknowledge that eight of the contributors are based in the UK, and one works across the Benelux though many of them collaborate internationally. To specify a genre associated with each would be a disservice to their professionalism and versatility as professional songwriters but across the nine there are active proponents of pop, rock, dance, hip-hop, electronic dance music (EDM), and indie. As discernible from their chosen pseudonyms (Rosie, Chloe, Lili, Emmie, Laura, Clive, Ian, Christian, and Jason), there are five female and four male participants. The limited sample size of this study and phenomenology in general does come with necessary and important limitations. Our aim for the phenomenological interviews is detail, individuality, and depth rather than scale and transferability. With a different sample of nine songwriters, our discussions would inevitably have taken different turns at points. We do, however, fondly view this as a strength of the method, as it allows for individuality and nuance over generalisation. Where we are analysing words captured with this initial commitment to idiography, these observations and discussions may pertain more widely and be applicable to various creative groups, cultures, and communities. Similarly, such analyses are not intended to conflict with or challenge other individual and group experiences of a phenomenon: the qualitative phenomenological approach taken here takes the structures of experience evident in the dataset seriously. With our sample of nine professional songwriters, we hope to be able to present and suggest things that might be worthy of attention in future studies and point to areas where the sample converges or diverges in their articulation of experience. That is the epistemological limit of our chosen approach.

Given our work’s explicit allegiance to the discipline of phenomenology, ‘the method of studying experience par excellence’ (Høffding et al., Reference Høffding, Heimann and Martiny2023), we draw on conceptual resources from this alongside related areas, notably enactivism, to form the grounding and frame for analysis. This is an empirical project, and whilst creativity and creative interactions between musicians can resist straightforward ‘measurement’, they can, nevertheless, be confronted through rigorous analysis of qualitative material with a view to moving beyond first-person ‘subjective’ experience to understanding – and this is crucial to any truly phenomenological project – structures of experience. Empirical analysis of the kind presented in this Element involves working with others’ experiences and, as such, demands engaging in a second person method; that is, interacting ‘with other subjects as subjects’ (Høffding et al., Reference Høffding, Heimann and Martiny2023: 2).

In the introduction to a recent special collection of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Simon Høffding, Katrin Heimann, and Kristian Martiny (Reference Høffding, Heimann and Martiny2023) usefully outline a range of approaches that bring together qualitative research and phenomenological interests. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is perhaps the best known (Smith et al., Reference Smith, Flowers and Larkin2022) of these. In IPA, the analysis of interview data, supported by the researcher’s own ethnographic observations and records, enable the systematic exploration of experience and, from this, the identification of experiential themes. Connections between IPA and the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, including key theory are, however, typically sparse but this method has wide appeal in qualitative research and is well placed to explore all kinds of experiences (Høffding et al., Reference Høffding, Heimann and Martiny2023). The strengths of other frameworks, for our purposes, rest on a deeper interaction of qualitative procedures and philosophical discussion. Our methodological approach is guided by a framework introduced by Allan Køster and Anthony Vincent Fernandez (Reference Køster and Fernandez2023) called Phenomenologically Grounded Qualitative Research (PGQR). This is distinct in that it more fully integrates conceptual resources from phenomenology and related fields to ground qualitative study design and inform analysis. Key theory and concepts for this study are introduced in the Conceptual Resources section.

We conducted semi-structured, phenomenological interviews (Høffding & Martiny, Reference Høffding and Martiny2016), each lasting between forty-five and eighty minutes. In line with PGQR, these interviews aimed to elicit descriptions of collaborative experiences where participants were encouraged to explore and tangent within their responses, however they wished, so that we could gain a rich insight into their experiences. In preparation for the interviews, we asked each participant to choose a track they had recently collaborated on as a prompt for stimulating reflection rooted in a specific musical project. We asked for participants to make the session or digital audio workstation (DAW) file available in the interview, where possible, so that we could focus on specific moments and creative interactions that they identified as meaningful.

The interviews were all transcribed and we then followed a coding approach that aims to identify salient experiential themes from each of the participants. Our coding process begins with an ‘emic’ analysis – that is, the treatment of the experiential accounts that emerge from the interviews taken in their own terms. However, in moving from ‘emic’ to ‘etic’, connections to conceptual resources from current phenomenology and related fields become increasingly significant (Høffding et al., Reference Høffding, Heimann and Martiny2023). Throughout each section, we regularly engage with participants’ statements, exploring their meaning but also implications for theoretical understanding.

Three core areas that emerged through the coding process make up the main analysis sections of this Element. These sections offer an introduction to the analytical possibilities of key conceptual resources as well as highlighting specific insights from our interview data about the nature of creative interactions. In Section 1, affective interactions are foregrounded and, from this emerges themes of affective framing, atmosphere, resonance, and alignment within creative interactions. In Section 2, we explore notions of autonomy and agency through the application of Shaun Gallagher’s 4As (agency, affect, affordance, and autonomy) social interaction framework (Reference Gallagher, Robinson and Thomas2021a). This frames discussions of motivation, the division of labour in collaboration, and industrial realities, including ownership and songwriting splits. The focus of Section 3 is environmental interactions and confronts songwriters’ self-awareness, embodied experience, and interactions with material elements.

Conceptual Resources

This section provides an overview of some relevant conceptual resources from psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science. We offer this here to front load the key theory and concepts that shape our empirical approach and that provide tools for analysis of the creative, affective, and social dimensions of collaboration. We start with positioning our work within a broad 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognition framework. Following this, we look to recent ecological and enactivist perspectives on action, affect, and intersubjectivity. Along the way, several key phenomenological dynamics and concepts are also foregrounded, helping focus attention on environmental interactions and experiences of affective atmospheres. The section closes by sketching Shaun Gallagher’s account of social cognition which can be readily applied in the case of collaborative songwriting.

4Es and the Musical Mind

What guides our study, in theoretical terms, is an enactive-ecological outlook. This follows recent interdisciplinary directions in music research that adopt a 4E framework for music cognition (Matyja & Schiavio, Reference Matyja and Schiavio2013; Krueger, Reference Krueger2014; Schiavio & van der Schyff, Reference Schiavio and van der Schyff2018; Kozak, Reference Kozak2020; Martin & Nielsen, Reference Martin and Nielsen2024; Haswell-Martin et al., Reference Haswell-Martin, Upham, Høffding and Nielsen2025) and, from this, creativity (van der Schyff et al., Reference van der Schyff, Schiavio, Walton, Velardo and Chemero2018). What ties varied but complementary 4E work across cognitive science, philosophy, and musicology is a move away from dominant, brain-based (‘information-processing’) accounts of music cognition and sense-making (Clarke, Reference Clarke2005) and, with this, theories of creativity (Glăveanu et al., Reference Glăveanu, Lubart and Bonnardel2013). This is demonstrated in noteworthy collections in the field including The Routledge Companion to Music Interaction (2017), The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body (2019), and Music and Consciousness 2: Worlds, Practices, Modalities (2019). In short, these contributions point towards how musicians (and listeners) actively orientate themselves within specific settings, adapting their attention and behaviour to exploit opportunities for action and interaction.

Collaborative musicians are embodied agents in the sense that they have capacity for instrumental action. In collaboration, musical ideas are communicated in various embodied ways, including through gesture and body language, but through their embodied subjectivities, musicians also contribute to and shape creative encounters that are affectively resonant (van der Schyff et al., Reference van der Schyff, Schiavio, Walton, Velardo and Chemero2018). Our study foregrounds the felt, lived bodies of musicians, in doing so addressing the too often overlooked centrality of emotion and affect in framing collaborative interactions, senses of agency (Moran, Reference Moran2024), and shared creative atmospheres. An enactive-ecological outlook also centres relations between creative musicians with and within creative spaces; that is, creativity is always the result of musicians’ actions embedded in an environmental niche. Such a view demands that we always understand creative practice as situated, as the result of the interdependence of agents, spaces, and materials. In this way, we follow other researchers in taking an interest in how the work of human creators shapes and is shaped by the environments they inhabit (Malinin, Reference Malinin2019: 3). Understanding creative ecologies requires acknowledgement of interactions between what musicians bring to creative encounters – including skills, tools, behaviours, feelings – and how particular locational, social, and industrial contexts guide creative consciousness and action. When it comes to contemporary popular music collaboration, we must account for complex, ‘shattered, scattered’, as Mark Slater puts it (Reference Slater2015: 57), creative entanglements in varied situations (in-person, remote) and temporalities (synchronous, asynchronous).

To assert the importance of action to creativity (Glăveanu et al., Reference Glăveanu, Lubart and Bonnardel2013; Malinin, Reference Malinin2016) is to acknowledge that creative musical consciousness is enacted within specific settings. Enactive cognition, as summarised by Dylan van der Schyff and colleagues ‘highlights the active role creatures play in developing patterns of (sensorimotor, neural, metabolic, interactive) activity that allow them to maintain a viable existence’ (2018: 6). This simultaneously accounts for the autonomy we experience in our lives, as well as our fundamental coupling with our material, social, and cultural surrounds. In their work, they present jazz ensemble performance as one musical example of this (van der Schyff et al., Reference Schiavio and van der Schyff2018). In this setting, individual and collective musical action forms the ‘whole’ dynamic system and must be constantly negotiated and adapted in order to keep the performance ‘living’ in a coherent and meaningful way. As the authors point out, this is a rich, cross-modal system constituted of individual and collective attention (to the music, to each other, and to the audience), intention, gesture, and instrumental action. While enaction in (live) performance is often the focus in recent 4E-oriented studies, here we offer an empirical exploration of the enactive musical mind as manifest in contemporary collaborative songwriting, where interactions can be less immediate, less intimate (in terms of the proximity of collaborators), and less pre-defined in terms of instrumental roles. Our data offers insight into what collaborative musicians do, and all that musicians negotiate, individually and together – whether in the room or via remote idea sharing – to drive creative projects forward, to sustain productivity, and to regulate the emotional valence of a creative interaction.

Furthermore, 4E studies posit the (musical) mind as extended. Kevin Ryan and Andrea Schiavio summarise this as mental life scaffolded by the environment, and cognition as oriented towards action in the world, extending beyond the brain and body of the individual to ‘loop into the world’ (2019: 8). Conceiving of an extended musical mind is relatively straightforward. Moving beyond the head, it is obvious that gesture plays an important role in musical creativity. Bodily movement, for example, aids the negotiation of passages of music in performance and can carry particular expressive and communicative power. It is not that gestures necessarily mirror internal mental processes either, but rather that they can complement or facilitate them (Ryan & Schiavio, Reference Ryan and Schiavio2019: 10). Think also of the basic objects songmakers use to aid memory and the communication of musical ideas: notebooks, physical and digital chord and lyric sheets, scratch recordings, and so forth. In collaborative settings, it is perhaps even clearer how the musical mind is extended beyond the individual musician. Collaborations are sites of distributed music cognition where particular niches are established socially and through couplings and shared interactions with creative tools. A collaborative niche evolves over time, with ‘external’ components such as DAW project files, WhatsApp exchanges, and Dropbox folders becoming a ‘malleable yet permanent’ (Ryan & Schiavio, Reference Ryan and Schiavio2019: 11) part of the environment. In sum, the individual musician involved in collaborative work is not an autonomous agent; rather, the extended mind thesis leads to an understanding of their autonomy as relational, and possibilities for creative interaction, and corresponding senses of agency, decentralised.

Ecology and Affordance

The ‘ecological’, of enactive-ecological, also points to specific theory. The most obvious, and influential, point of connection here is the work of psychologist James J. Gibson. Gibson’s ecological theory of perception and action (Reference Gibson1966, Reference Gibson1979) has had a major impact on current directions in cognitive science (including 4E cognition) and, as part of this, also assumes a central role in recent phenomenologically oriented research. Ecological theory provides a relational view and for an account of (musical) phenomena that looks beyond the internal (cognitive) processes of individuals and instead foregrounds organism–environment mutualism, situated perception, and (inter)action. Direct perceptual contact, rather than indirect ‘processing’, and meaning making characterise the ecological view. It offers an account of how agents strive for meaningful contact – resonance – with (material, social – creative) environments. As Eleanor J. Gibson explained, perceptual faculties are progressively tuned (Gibson, Reference Gibson2000) to what particular environments afford, to utilities and associations that are of instrumental value to the organism (Thompson-Bell et al., Reference Thompson-Bell, Martin and Hobkinson2021). Recent writing has, as Clarke notes, embraced ‘a potentially bewildering array of perspectives on what music affords’ (Clarke, Reference Clarke2024: 57) from the perceptual to the creative. Music listening, for instance, affords opportunities for emotional regulation (Krueger, Reference Krueger, Herbert, Clarke and Clarke2019) and empowerment (Gamble, Reference Gamble2021) as well as embodied interaction and exploration (Kozak, Reference Kozak2020; Martin & Nielsen, Reference Martin and Nielsen2024; Haswell-Martin et al., Reference Haswell-Martin, Upham, Høffding and Nielsen2025; Høffding et al., Reference Høffding, Haswell-Martin and Nielsen2025).

What, then, of ‘affordance’ in the context of music creation? It is straightforward to think of material affordances for music making. James Mooney views musical instruments and related tools in terms of what they allow us to do, as ‘frameworks’ that afford ways of creating (Reference Mooney2011: 141). A guitar, for instance, offers its player the ability to easily sound six simultaneous pitches, whereas a clarinet commonly affords just one. A snare drum affords the performer an exceptionally quick attack time in a way that a flute cannot. A condenser microphone affords the recordist the capture of upper frequencies above 16 kHz in a way that is not afforded to the user of a regular dynamic microphone. The piano, or pianoforte, crucially afforded the performer dynamic control over their instrument, in contrast to the earlier harpsichord. Moving forward, granular synthesis affords the user the ability to fragment, manipulate, and shape any sound of their choosing to reimagine sonic worlds. Each of these tools offers the user an array of creative opportunities and limitations; however, it is down to the aesthetic preferences of the user whether to embrace such limitations or whether to gravitate to other tools or approaches in order to fulfil their needs. Some creators relish the impact that limiting affordances has on their process (for instance, Matthew Herbert’s manifesto for composition, the Scandinavian film movement of Dogma 95, and one of the author’s own collaborative projects, Nightports, based on limitation), whilst others innovate in different ways to open up new creative directions. Following philosophers Erik Rietveld and Julian Kiverstein (Reference Rietveld and Kiverstein2014), it is important to acknowledge that levels of ability and expertise determine what a specific environmental niche affords. This is especially obvious in music-making situations, and it’s unsurprising that interviewees frequently reflected on their own instrumental, technical, and technological strengths and weaknesses and how collaboration extends and distributes musical expertise, in turn and over time, opening up new creative affordances.

We can observe how tools are both enabling and constraining – they afford usage, and the user is in an active, agential, artistic position involving both choice and management; however, the conceptualisation of affordances should not exclusively be limited to items, tools, or technologies. Environments and spaces also afford certain actions, behaviours, and attributes. Recording drums in a basement affords a different sonic quality to recording a kit at Nashville’s Blackbird Studio. Similarly, social interactions may also involve affordances with regard to skill sets, temperaments, and personality. A collaborative pair with perfectly complementing creative and technical skills affords each other a wide range of creative opportunities when compared to a duo who both possess the same skill set, sense of taste, and style of personality. Each interaction and element of a collaborative, creative endeavour affords a complex variety of options, opportunities, and restrictions. Explaining the concept of affordances can sometimes feel simplistic. Articulating that a chair, for example, affords sitting can verge on the patronising. This simplicity, however, is not the point or value of the approach. The concept of affordances, and its usage here, is to provide a way to discuss the direct, agential relationship creators have with objects, places, and others. Rather than relying on the idea that a chair affords sitting, from an ecological perspective we can then begin to think of where the chair allows one to sit, how that may impact the environment of the sitter, and how one can better understand the function and impact of the chair itself. There is a further complexity to consider here, namely what Glăveanu identifies as the ‘developmental trajectory of creativity’ which involves ‘first becoming able to observe and make use of affordances in the surrounding environment and then mastering this use and altering affordances, adapting what already exists and creating new artefacts with new affordances’ (Reference 61Glăveanu2013: 76). In many of our interviews, participants took time to sketch the trajectory of their own collaborative practice and how this involves adaptations in creative practice and, with this, the illumination of new creative affordances.

An ecological outlook, then, which foregrounds what tools, spaces, and interactions afford makes clear that musical consciousness (and, thus, creativity) does not unfold purely ‘in the head’ of the creator; it is a matter of creative action (Glăveanu, Reference 61Glăveanu2013). Nor are affordances purely external, or ‘out there in the world’. Action is shaped by an entanglement of agent and environment, between, as classic phenomenology tells us (Zahavi, Reference Zahavi2019), mind and world. To return to music making, the point here is also that the setting for a particular collaboration – in the studio, in the garage, or working remotely on a laptop – is not merely a (passive) backdrop but constitutes the very material of creative action. An ecological orientation allows us to account for the phenomenon of collaborative creativity within an interconnected whole, and leads us away from previously appealing accounts of the isolated creator. When we speak of ‘environments’ in the context of collaborative music making, we also must not understand this as simply the physical ingredients of a space. Environments for collaborative music making involve emergent social interactions and dynamics as well as cultural and affective resonances. This Element sketches such a relational aesthetics of collaborative musical creativity.

From Environment to Atmosphere

Looking at perspectives from philosophy deepens and helps define this embodied, relational outlook. The philosopher Yuriko Saito argues that relationality ‘may be best illustrated by the aesthetic experience of things that lack the usual sense of clearly defined or framed object-hood’ (Saito, Reference Saito2022: 54). As such, collaborative creativity provides an excellent case study. Of course, we can say that collaborative creative situations are oriented towards ‘the music’. But, as our qualitative analysis reveals, musicians’ experiences of creativity involve awareness of, feelings towards, and attention to many other things. Understanding what the musical ‘object’ is in a writing collaboration is not a simple matter. Are we talking about instrumental acts of creation, such as playing through chord progressions on an acoustic guitar? Is the object of creativity a DAW project file? Is the object of collaboration the other musician(s) or specific technologies? Is it the WhatsApp voice note that delivers feedback on the latest mix? Collaborative creativity unfolds in a rich, complex frame, and it highlights how experiences of creativity are often not clearly defined in relation to discrete aspects of ‘the music’, but are also frequently framed in terms of emotion and feeling.

Moving from ‘environment’ to ‘atmosphere’ leads us into new intellectual terrain, to a phenomenology where shared affectivity is foregrounded. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but distinction is worthwhile at this point. On the surface, environment seems to point to materiality, spaces, and objects: things that are ‘out there’. In other words – and this is to put ecological theory aside for a moment – it seems possible to talk about an environment whether or not there is a human subject to experience it. For example, we can conceive of the physical configuration of technologies and spaces in Abbey Road Studios without being there. By talking about environments, we can describe what a space looks like and how it may function, but this doesn’t tell the full story of what it’s like to be creative there. The danger is that a focus on ‘environment’ misses experiential and relational aspects of creative encounters.

Atmosphere, on the other hand, commonly evokes something more elusive, less obviously material, something that is not just ‘out there’, but rather is something sensed and, as such, that human agents constitute. Brown et al. offer a neat synthesis of this relation, writing that ‘atmospheres exist between subjects and objects. They depend on both the features of the environment and that of the persons who engage with them, but cannot be reduced to either’ (Reference Brown, Kanyeredzi, McGrath, Reavey and Tucker2019: 10). Also drawing on Gernot Böhme’s aesthetics (Reference Böhme2017), Saito understands human agents as being part of the ‘creative force’ (2022: 55) of atmospheres. Experiencing agents, not passive recipients, make sense of atmosphere. They are simultaneously experienced and actively constituted through the actions, embodiment, and articulation of actors. Saito lists sound, light, smell, and temperature in addition to human interactions, as constituting the climatic conditions of an atmosphere (2022). We can add to this list senses of health and wellness, emotional attunement, or even the shadow of current affairs. Similarly, Friedlind Riedel, a key voice in recent phenomenology of music, conceives of an atmospheric situation as a ‘structure of reality’, an environmental and situational whole, and a feeling in the world (Reference Riedel, Riedel and Torvinen2020: 4–6). Atmospheres, Riedel writes, ‘permeate overall situations and are not simply a quality of music or sound’ (Reference Riedel, Riedel and Torvinen2020: 3). While a creative musical atmosphere may be impacted by playback volume in the room, it could also be shaped by worries about how the finished music will be credited and renumeration split, feelings of collective fatigue, a distracting reflection in studio glass or a shared awareness of the hourly cost of the creative space being used. The list goes on. Riedel offers even more provocative claims on the relation between affect, music making, and atmosphere, including that ‘atmospheric feelings are not an ancillary effect of music-making, but that music (making) is chiefly about atmosphere’ (Riedel, Reference Riedel, Riedel and Torvinen2020: 3). Some of our interview data can certainly be interpreted as supporting this premise.

Affect, Emotion, and Atmospheric Feeling

What has been highlighted up to this point, and is substantiated in our interviews with musicians, is the breadth of experiential interactions, the climatic conditions, and flow of feeling that defines the ‘whole’ of creative encounters. This makes for a complex picture of felt experience and, as such, some basic definition of ‘affect’, ‘emotion’, and ‘atmospheric feeling’ is worthwhile at this stage. Affect provides a useful umbrella term that allows us to confront creative environments as spaces of feeling. As music psychologist Ruth Herbert notes, affect covers all ‘valenced’ (positive and negative) states (Herbert, Reference Herbert2018). Affect, firstly, speaks to the feelings of collaborators within their creative environments. The interviews conducted for this Element offer insight into musicians’ shifts in mood within and across projects. Affect also encompasses emotional experiences which, in comparison to mood, are often taken as short-lived, more intensive, and defined in relation to specific ‘objects’ in our surrounds. In his definition of emotion, Patrik Juslin understands emotion as an affective reaction that involves several synchronised subcomponents (Reference Bennett2013: 236) including subjective feeling, physiological arousal (the phenomenon of musical chills, an emotional experience often accompanied by goosebumps and tingling sensations, is a notable example of this), expression (i.e. how emotion is enacted), action tendency (e.g. you want to carry on working on the song for another two hours) and regulation (e.g. you try to calm yourself by taking a break after a frustrating conversation in the songwriting room). For the sake of clarity, we will largely be using the term ‘affect’ to include mood and emotion, amongst other experiential dimensions that define creative situations.

Useful theory is readily available. Especially noteworthy is philosopher Michelle Maiese’s powerful concept of affective framing (Maiese, Reference Maiese2014: Reference Maiese2016). This puts emotional experience at the centre of how we engage with, and make sense of, our surroundings and situations. It bears some relation to the ecological concept of resonance; that is, how we make contact with our surroundings to optimise possibilities for meaningful engagement and action. Maiese introduces affective framing as a way of ‘discriminating, filtering, and selecting information that allows us to the reduce the overwhelming clutter of information to something first-personally manageable and confer upon it specific cognitive significance’ (Reference Maiese2014: 524). But while ecological psychology foregrounds perceptually guided action, this enactivist perspective points to the deeper role of sensation and affect in directing consciousness (Read & Szokolszky, Reference Read and Szokolszky2020). Affective framing acknowledges the affective allure of our consciousness. When experiencing an emotion, Maiese explains, an individual’s framing of a situation, another person, or object is ‘infused with affect’ (Reference Maiese2014: 524). In Section 1, we explore ways in which the creative projects discussed in our interviews were affectively framed variously in relation to vulnerability, fear, anxiety, excitement, rejection, and affirmation. These interviews reveal how affective framing shapes what stands out, what sticks in the memory of musicians when asked to reflect on particular interactions. This is not a simple story of causality, of spaces inducing certain feeling responses. Affect is not just an outcome of creative encounters (e.g. ‘we spent two hours writing together in the studio and I’m happy we did’). What we are interested in is how musicians bring feeling (in)to spaces, how musicians’ changing feelings guide creative action. In other words, affect defines the very character of creative situations, what occupies musicians’ attention and thoughts during sessions and what comes to matter to musicians within particular collaborative interactions.

As in ecological accounts of perception, where embodied agency is acknowledged (Costall, Reference Costall, Ziemke, Zlatev and Frank2007), Maiese posits affective framing as not just a matter of brain processes (2014). Rather, it is distributed across brain and body. It can be in the foreground and on show. It can be embodied in the facial expressions of a songwriter observing their musical ideas brought to life by a producer, in the body language of a songwriter growing increasingly frustrated by a collaborator’s repeated rejections, in the posture of a musician waiting anxiously at the computer for the latest bounce to arrive, in the willingness of a musician to grab a relatively unfamiliar instrument and try out ideas knowing they’re in a safe space for experimentation. But it is always, at least, a backdrop, a framework for the appraisal of our situation. Changes in affective framing guide us to what is worthy of our attention, our concern, our care (Maiese, Reference Maiese2014: 524–25).

Phenomenologies of atmosphere point to a different kind of affective relation. Atmosphere provides a powerful conceptual resource to explore how collaborative creative spaces can be affectively charged. Böhme defines atmosphere as a ‘spatially extended quality of feeling’ (Reference Böhme2017: 15), whereas Riedel proposes that an atmospheric situation is a ‘feeling that fundamentally exceeds an individual body or conscious subject, and instead pertains primarily to the overall situation in which a multiplicity of bodies cohere’ (Reference Riedel, Riedel and Torvinen2020: 4). This is a ‘trans-individual’ atmospheric feeling that ‘can be noticed in a musically charged situation irrespective of how each individual might feel about it’ (Riedel, Reference Riedel, Riedel and Torvinen2020: 4). Senses of this collective feeling, this ‘tuned space’, as Böhme (Reference Böhme2017) puts it in Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces, were frequently a point of discussion in the interviews conducted for this Element. Indeed, songmakers show a particular sensitivity to atmospheric feeling – and ability to recall its character – and to the way aspects of the collaborative environment impose on and radiate into the space, defining its arrangement and creative potential.

4As and Creative Interaction

Ecological writing on perceptual agency and action, phenomenologies of aesthetic atmosphere, and enactivist accounts of affect all point to our deeply invested, embodied entanglements with the world. They help us move well beyond thinking of songmaking creativity as residing in the head of musicians, and instead as manifest and enacted through interaction with(in) creative environments that are affectively resonant. Social musical activity – or musicking (Small, Reference Small1998) – within a particular collaborative niche always carries an affective allure which partly defines senses of creative agency. All of this conceptual material points to a complex mesh of social and intersubjective interactions, one where it would seem a sense of the individual contributor may somehow be lost. The danger here is thinking that when we collaborate, individuals dissolve into each other or are somehow subsumed into an all-encompassing intersubjective space. This need not be the case. It is possible, indeed important, to consider both the individual and the shared in collaborative situations. To conclude this section, we introduce a conceptual resource which facilitates this, namely Shaun Gallagher’s (Reference Gallagher, Robinson and Thomas2021a) account of social interaction, which emphasises the interconnectedness of autonomy, agency, affect and affordance.

Starting with autonomy, and to recall a point made previously in this section, in collaborative settings it’s vital to acknowledge an individual musician’s autonomy as relational; that is, their individuated sense of self and identity is embedded in a particular context and is subject to the social, cultural, and material forces of that context. This was a dominant theme in our qualitative analysis and something interviewees showed particular sensitivity to. Discussions often centred around challenges to senses of self, self-regard, and creative identity, which impact the vitality of a collaboration.

Our phenomenological analyses affirm Gallagher’s observation that in social interactions, autonomy is closely related to (individual and shared) agency (Reference Gallagher, Robinson and Thomas2021a). As Gallagher notes, interacting with others may enhance a sense of agency by extending the quantity or range of affordances generated (Reference Gallagher, Robinson and Thomas2021). In other words, collaborative interactions, which extend the technical skill range and stylistic knowledge beyond the individual musician, can open up new possibilities for the generation of musical ideas. All of the musicians in our study pointed to this vital benefit of collaborative practice. But the way in which creative affordances and agency ‘co-vary’ (Gallagher, Reference Gallagher, Robinson and Thomas2021a: 366) does not necessarily result in a positive outcome. It is equally the case that a ‘decline in agency and a constriction of affordances can easily lead to a decline in autonomy’ (Gallagher, Reference Gallagher, Robinson and Thomas2021a: 366). Being ‘shut down’ by collaborators, whether verbally or through particular body language, is a common example of this negative dynamic and one acknowledged by several of our study participants.

What of affect, then? In the mesh of social interaction – in line with the enactive and phenomenological perspectives sketched in Conceptual Resources – affect infuses all other dimensions of experience. Affective changes in a social situation, Gallagher notes, modulate senses of autonomy and agency, and with this, possibilities for creative activity (Reference Gallagher, Robinson and Thomas2021a). The ‘attunement’ (or ‘alignment’) of musical collaborators can be shaped by the empathetic resonance in their affective conditions. As our phenomenological interviews reveal, this has significant consequences for the creative success, and longevity, of particular collaborative projects. It also shapes body language and, as a result, the physical vitality of creative interactions.

In summary, while 4E cognition provides an overarching account of cognition, Gallagher’s 4As framework falls within this, offering a more focussed resource for understanding dimensions of social interaction. Acknowledging the covariance of agency, affect, autonomy, and affordance provides a useful tool for analysing key dynamics in songmaking collaborations, as demonstrated in Section 2.

With key conceptual resources established, we move now to apply these in the three core analysis sections of this Element, beginning with affective interactions.

1.1 Affective Framing

Affect is not only an outcome of, or response to, creativity. Musicians’ affective states, concerns, and surroundings shape creative encounters and what is possible within them. To explore patterns of feeling, we promote the concept of affective framing. This is, first, an acknowledgement that in the interviews conducted for this Element, collaborative projects were typically framed by descriptions of felt experience; that is, how working with particular people in particular spaces towards particular goals was experienced (and not the ‘success’ of the outcome). Second, we will explore how the application of Michelle Maiese’s account of emotion and cognition (Reference Maiese2014; Reference Maiese2016) offers a powerful explanation for how affect drives what we are drawn to in the world, how the world shows up meaningfully for us, and what our surrounds afford in terms of (inter)action. This is, we believe, an important enactivist intervention that takes seriously the centrality of emotion and feeling to creative practice, rather than seeking to negate, underestimate, or ignore it.

To some experiential framings, then. One prevalent framing of collaboration across the dataset was that it can be scary and uncomfortable. Laura views this as a natural, even necessary, dimension of collaborative songmaking:

Laura points to the challenging emotional demands of collaborative work. For Laura, such ‘discomfort’, however, does not undermine the creative benefits that working with others can afford. Laura not only accepts the uncomfortable emotional aspects of collaborative songwriting but points to such discomfort as necessary and ‘the point of it’. This seems to suggest that Laura views such uncomfortable aspects within a wider, more positive, picture of what is gained through collaboration. Approaching things in new ways, absorbing different influences and styles of communication, can all create varying senses of discomfort in people that have established ways of working. For Laura, however, within this confronting of difference lies the value of collaboration. In short, affective risk is part of the process that gives rise to novel ideas.

Amanda notes that ‘collaboration can be scary because you all come at it from different levels of experience, or different perspectives or different things that you bring’. Difference and multiplicity, then, are not guaranteed positive aspects of collaborative practice and can even feel scary. Bringing together different expertise and creative interests always carries some risk. Amanda’s statements also hint at self-vulnerability, or danger of exposure, which was a common experiential framing across the interviews. Here, an awareness of what you bring in comparison to others can define how a collaboration is framed, at least initially. This frame shapes and modulates a collaborator’s experience of the encounter. Relatedly, Jason considers challenges to self-regard, noting how ‘there is that initial ego at the beginning of wanting to prove yourself’. For Christian, a fear of judgement often colours experiences of his work with others: ‘the feeling of being judged by peers is always quite scary in that collaborative context’. Christian also points to how starting out in a collaboration involves fear, but for him, this is typically counterbalanced by excitement: ‘a mix of nerves and excitement is what it usually is whenever I’m doing any collaboration, to be honest, unless it is someone I’ve done loads of stuff with and then there are a lot less nerves there’. Here, Christian also emphasises how collaborations are framed very differently when he is very familiar with a collaborator, a common qualitative theme which is explored further in Section 1.2.

Vulnerability-, fear-, frustration-, anxiety-, and excitement-frames – as well as other more positively valenced frames – serve as the backdrop for many of the collaborative experiences discussed by interviewees. But beyond universal themes, it is important to note how affective frames also result from, and manifest in, very particular experiences. Clive reflects openly on patterns of feeling that impact his professional practice:

Clive’s statement exemplifies Maiese’s view of both the cognitive and bodily (felt) aspects of emotions at play in affective framing (Reference Maiese2016). For Clive, anxiety or depression impact significantly on decision-making and leads him to be unsure of his evaluations of (musical) work. He notes being unsure of how to separate the intrinsic creative potential of the work and his own negative feelings towards self during the process of evaluation. In other words, Clive suggests that obtaining an objective view is a challenge. As noted in the literature, there is the potential for affective framing to support ‘maladaptive habits of mind’ (Maiese, Reference Maiese2016: 10) and an emotional reactivity that confuses accurate appraisal. As Maiese notes, ‘once we understand emotion’s role in providing us with an interpretive lens, the danger of evoking emotions that lead to a warped outlook becomes readily apparent’ (Maiese, Reference Maiese2016: 10). Clive’s reflection exemplifies another aspect of the concept of affective framing. Affective framing not only defines how we feel in certain situations, but also our understanding and appraisal of specific aspects of – and ‘objects’ in – them. In this way, affective framing does not always remain merely an experiential backdrop. Maiese explains how affective framing can come to the foreground, adding ‘content and valence to what lies in at the focal point of our experience’ (Maiese, Reference Maiese2014: 525). In Clive’s statement, it is a particular musical idea that is the focal point and the object that is affectively framed. The impact of an affective ‘filter’ on the appraisal of musical ideas and specific creative material was a theme that frequently emerged in interviews and suggests an awareness, from collaborators, of how their sense of mood or affective frame can impact their creativity. What stands out in Clive’s reflection is his wariness of his own emotionally filtered appraisal which seems to be a necessary means of self-regulation that enables him to sustain music making despite significant affective challenges. As we shall see in the next section, songwriters not only employ strategies to support self-evaluation, but also to regulate the wider affective framing of collaborative interactions.

1.2 Affective Regulation and Reframing

Our analysis reveals songwriters’ sensitivity to and awareness of affective framing, but also their regulation of it. In this section, we look at how songmakers cope with the emotional demands of collaboration and some of the ways that they regulate collaborative situations. This section will also consider resilience as an attribute demonstrated by many of the interviewees, where they articulated ways in which they were able to cope with discomfort, uncertainty and insecurity in order to collaborate.

Several key practices enabling affective regulation emerge from our analysis. The first involves the preparation of musical ideas outside of co-writing sessions. Several musicians emphasised the anxiety and vulnerability that can frame collaborative sessions when musical ideas need to be generated on the spot. Clive discusses this in the context of writing to a commercial brief:

Clive understands that having prepared ideas ready to hand when entering co-writing situations is an act of self-protection. He is taking active steps to avoid the scenario of being put on the spot and asked to generate ideas in real time. This challenging situation, as anyone who has been in that position can attest, can be quite a vulnerable and anxiety-inducing experience and one that Clive clearly wants to avoid having to engage with. He doesn’t position this action as a strategy for enabling greater creativity or musical productivity but rather as a means to ease the anxiety-frame that he reports as common in his experience. It is about making him feel better in the room, rather than anything to do with the potential results it might yield. That, in turn, a strategic regulation of the feelings that Clive carries into a co-writing session can enhance creative (inter)activity is, however, implicit. In Section 1.2, we saw how affective framing was foregrounded in Clive’s appraisal of particular musical ideas, whereas this statement reveals how affective regulation is required to maintain a sense of contentment and comfort within the collaborative process.

The need to regulate a vulnerability-frame was emphasised by several other collaborative songwriters. Here, too, working on ideas in isolation ahead of collaborative sessions was identified as a key strategy. Laura offers an especially rich reflection on creative coping, where the need for space to write individually was necessary for overcoming feelings of vulnerability. While Clive understands affect in terms of a ‘filter’, for Laura it is identified as a ‘veil’ over creative activity:

Laura describes an affect-action loop that will be familiar to music-makers, where high levels of discomfort can stifle creative action and how, in turn, a lack of productivity leads to negative self-appraisals. And so it goes. As Laura notes, when this dynamic is played out socially, in a collaborative setting, the impact on creativity can be devastating. This is a loop that exemplifies the interrelation of affect, agency, autonomy, and affordance in social interactions (Gallagher, Reference Gallagher, Robinson and Thomas2021a), a dynamic that is explored further in Section 2. Laura’s reflection, then, points to a less frequently discussed interaction revealed in our analysis, namely, between the private and the social dimensions of collaborative working life. While the benefits of being with others in music-making sessions were asserted by all of the creative musicians we interviewed, it is also clear that for some musicians, the sociality of co-writing needs to be balanced with the preservation of ‘private’ spaces within collaborative projects (we pick up this theme again in Section 3.2). For Laura, having private space and time to generate initial musical ideas was significant emotionally as well as creatively and seems to be an important part of her collaborative process. Similar to Clive, having time and space to work on potential ideas and evaluate them free from the charged social environment seems to be of benefit to Laura’s sense of creative confidence and comfort. Indeed, affective regulation is posited here as a process. Processing affectively- framed music-making in private enables musical creation without the veil of vulnerability in social settings. Notice also how affective regulation and routine alter Laura’s sense of expectation for the generation of ‘good’ ideas right off the bat. Once again, affect determines appraisal and, in this instance, a modulated, more positively valenced affective frame seems to open up space for healthier, more patient music-making free of severe judgement, at least in the initial steps.

Self-reflection is another tool for regulating the affective frame of collaborative projects as well as a source of development for professional songwriters. Within our phenomenological interviews, we probed musicians’ awareness of their own feelings and behaviours while in creative sessions as well as their propensity to reflect on their practice. Some were keen to assert the importance of reflection to their practice and as something that they’ve developed during their career. For Chloe, regular reflection is central to enhancing how collaborations feel:

Here, appraisal of the success of the collaboration is connected to what Chloe (and almost all interviewees) defined as the ‘vibe’. This can be understood as not only her inner feelings, but a collective affective frame, a feeling that is more ‘out there’ or ‘in the room’ and speaks to the phenomenological concept of ‘atmosphere’. As such, Chloe is sensitive not only to understanding her own emotional experience, but also to potentially shared feelings. We also notice that the aim is to enable things that can help people feel ‘better’ during collaboration. Chloe is actively taking steps to be able to reframe collaborative interactions to enable effective collaboration through what she, herself, has experienced. Reflection on this is also clearly an important part of her development and what she aims to bring to new musical collaborations. She frames this in terms of stealing from what others do to radiate positive feelings.

An emphasis on the social and affective dimensions of songwriting is not purely theoretical. These dimensions are frequently at the forefront of songwriters’ reflections on particular projects. Clive’s report suggests how social resonances, rather than technicalities or what music is made, often dominate his self-evaluation and reflective thinking during creative collaborations:

Once again, affective framing is not only a background to Clive’s experience of collaboration. It comes to the fore in reflective appraisals of his own work and behaviour. In reflecting on his behaviour, body language, and language, Clive shows a sensitivity to how his own (Maiese, Reference Maiese2016: 11) might impact on his collaborators and, by extension, their creative interactions. This kind of reasoning and critical reflection, not only ‘plays a pivotal role in the cognitive processes associated with self understanding’ (Maiese, Reference Maiese2016: 11) but also – and this is especially important in the context of collaborative music making – social cognition. Critical – and as healthy as possible – reflection allows agents to find new perspectives and new ways of feeling in particular situations, including with others. Furthermore, reflection can afford affective reframing and, from this, the emergence of new patterns of thought, feeling, and interaction. In this account, we can observe how Clive is attempting to regulate his affective frame by actively reflecting on his own actions within the wider social context of the group. It is a form of developmental trajectory that Clive’s account speaks to that is seemingly important for the continuing refinement of his collaborative creativity.

1.3 Attunement and Alignment

Recent enactivist accounts have foregrounded forms of embodied and social interaction as foundational to meaning-making and creativity. A focus on entrainment is a common and promising thread. While coupling between agent(s) and music is typically central, texts such as Schiavio et al. (Reference Schiavio, Witek and Stupacher2024) invite an extended understanding of social interaction beyond rhythmically coordinated, synchronous musicking (Small, Reference Small1998). A major experiential theme that emerged in our qualitative analysis was the importance of social connection between collaborators. In many reports, senses of social resonance appear important to the affective frame of collaborative encounters and to the potential for creative emergence.

We conceive of this in terms of social attunement and alignment. Attunement is an active process where individuals modulate their behaviour – including their bodily affective style (Maiese, Reference Maiese2016) – and actions to suit the perceived needs of others and environments. It is about social sensitivity, being responsive to others, and involves affectively ‘dialing-in’ to creative interactions. The dynamic we have in mind is guided by phenomenologist Shaun Gallagher’s adoption of a view of social cognition as a performance where ‘attunement, loss of attunement, and re-established attunement maintain both differentiation and connection between individual agents. These processes result in the enactment of meaning that goes beyond what each individual qua individual can bring to the process’ (Gallagher, Reference Gallagher, Robinson and Thomas2021a: 358). This can be applied to the social (inter)action involved in collaborative songmaking.

Alignment refers to potentially existing connections that can be established and developed between individuals. This can include points of (creative) agreement, shared goals, overlapping taste, distribution of skills, similarities in personality, or conversation style. Alignment can also refer to creative and affective allure and how some collaborators are attracted to each other, to particular spaces and ways of making music or even particular sounds. Alignment is not perhaps an actively managed interaction in the way that attunement is, but together they offer ways to understand the connective tissues between individuals in collaboration. In this section, we will look at how collaborators actively try to achieve attunement and sense alignment.

Lili frames a particular project in the familiar terms of being ‘in tune’ with her collaborator. In the following statement, we see how different musical backgrounds and responses to musical ideas were negotiated productively:

Lili felt in tune with her collaborator despite acknowledging differing likes and dislikes along the way, with attunement fostered through respectful, open dialogue. Lili’s statement also suggests that more localised differences did not undermine a sense of alignment for the larger vision for the song’s development. Here we see a dynamic of differentiation and connection seemingly extending creative affordances. Lili highlights her excitement at the ‘sharing of learning’ as a part of collaboration. The exchange of ideas, knowledge, and skills from different musical backgrounds exemplifies how the musical mind can be extended through collaborative interactions (we return to consider extended creative cognition in Section 2.1.1). For Lili, the sharing of learning is a rewarding part of the collaborative process and, as in the project she discusses here, is part of her continuing development as a songwriter.

Other songwriters emphasised the importance of developing a connection with collaborators that goes beyond merely professional attachment. Chloe, for example, describes the process of getting to know a co-writer in a way that made her feel like she was writing with a friend:

As outlined, this scenario was the result of the collaborator suggesting an initial meeting outside of a creative setting. Chloe’s reaction suggests this was unusual for her, though she notes how it allowed them to establish a wider social-affective frame that was not immediately charged with the pressures of creation. Chloe compares this with experiences of songwriting camps where music making is time pressured and where writing goals – writing for a brief – are clearly defined. The result is, as Chloe puts, a ‘very professional’ environment. ‘Professional’ here defines an alternative affective framing where affordances and patterns of (inter)action are guided by a creative brief rather than emerging as a result of the personalised connections between collaborators. In the scenario of speculatively writing with an artist, Chloe reflects on how important it is to have a relationship in place so that a sense of attunement is established prior to the creative work taking place.

Elsewhere, songwriters acknowledged overlapping personal and professional relations within creative life. Emmie discusses being friends with a collaborator and the effort that is required to maintain their personal and professional relationship simultaneously:

Emmie describes the practice of checking in with each other as a means of attunement that precedes practical creation. In writing sessions with other musicians, this check-in, prior to creation, is still practiced and, as Emmie describes it, opens up the possibility of a more attuned session. Giving space and time for honest dialogue around how musicians are feeling not only leads to more realistic expectations for the session, but it also allows for a potential affective reframing. Seeking some consensus around what collaborators want to work on also avoids unhelpfully broad starting points for creation (‘shall we write a song now?’) or putting an individual on the spot (‘have you got an idea?’). This links back to earlier accounts exploring the sense of vulnerability that can emerge when someone is put on the spot by being asked to generate new ideas in real time. In these instances, the conscious efforts to create a sense of attunement is seen as part of creating an atmosphere to enable effective collaboration. Establishing a shared frame for creation also seemingly affords more ‘natural’ interaction between collaborators which calls to mind Chloe’s comparison of professional co-writing and collaborations built on relationships. Similarly, Christian points to a need to feel comfortable in order to overcome initial nervousness and hesitancy when sharing musical ideas:

What emerges in Christian’s statement is not only that a comfortable feeling affords the co-generation of musical ideas, but rather, that such a frame opens up a more free flow of ideas between collaborators. Furthermore, being comfortable with each other seems to allow for greater risk taking, the generation of ‘out of the ordinary’ ideas and, thus, more novel creative possibilities. Furthermore, the initial affect–action interaction that Christian describes, seems to lead to a shared affective reframing of creative interactions to the point where sessions are ‘really fun now’ and not restrained by nervousness and hesitancy. We can also suggest that across this process we see how an increase in trust, as the relationship builds over time, plays a part of enabling more open creative dialogue between collaborators. Seana Moran and Vera John-Steiner note how important sharing and trust is for effective collaboration and how it ‘sets up the conditions for cooperation and higher performance to occur’ (Miell & Littleton, Reference Miell and Littleton2004: 21). They also observe, as we have seen across several accounts, how trust can often result in the emergence of friendships as well as professional relationships as it ‘moderates conflict, turning destructive tension into constructive controversy by forming a type of mutual regulation that creates bridges between different perspectives’ (Miell & Littleton, Reference Miell and Littleton2004: 21). We can observe an increase in the familiarity and trust in the relationship described by Christian as attunement and alignment between collaborators becomes more firmly established, thus enabling more open, playful collaborative interactions.

Senses of attunement and alignment, then, can alter the affective framing of collaborations and, with this, musicians’ comfort and willingness to share musical ideas and explore novel creative options. Within the interviews, it also emerged that senses of interpersonal attunement can shape songwriters’ appraisals of the aesthetic outcomes of creative interactions:

Rosie points to an alternative vulnerability-frame that is not emotionally fraught in the same way as posited by other interviewees, but is seemingly necessary to enable deeper creative connections (Miell & Littleton, Reference Miell and Littleton2004: 21). This vulnerability-frame cannot be understood simply in terms of negative valence; rather, vulnerability here is understood as a creative sensibility, an ability to take a deep dive and give voice artistically to an ‘inner journey’. There is also a creative intention behind this that goes along with figuring out what you want to say and ‘contribute to the world’. As such, Rosie foregrounds a songwriter’s autonomy as well as their ability to allow this to resonate with others in a collaborative setting. Without this shared frame, Rosie asserts, there is the risk of a generic outcome. This highlights how, for Rosie, the deep process of attunement and alignment is viewed as a pre-requisite for collaborations that hope to lead to something new. In this sense, the shape and structure of the social mesh of interactions has a direct impact on the aesthetic, meaning, and authenticity of the final product.

In this section, we have foregrounded affect in the framing of creative interactions. In line with recent directions in enactivist philosophy and cognitive science, we argue that affect is the experiential backdrop to musically charged encounters which guides action and shapes senses of autonomy, agency, and the possibility of novel creativity. Affective framing can also come to the fore, and define the appraisal of specific elements of creative work, notably musical ideas and behaviours. This section also charts several strategies that songwriters employ to regulate the affective demands of collaborative songmaking, potentially reframing affective patterns within a collaboration and, with this, its creative possibilities. Processes of adaptation and reorientation expand musicians’ creative explorations and connections and, in doing so, sustain creativity. In this section, we also highlighted the significance of interpersonal alignment and attunement to affective frames. Thinking in terms of affective framing not only accounts for individual musicians’ autonomous feeling and action, but how social-affective resonances radiate through collaborative practice.

2.1 Agency and Affordances

2.2 Self-identity and Affect

As established in Section 1, collaborative songwriters’ sense of self is often intertwined with their creative practice. Songwriters will often be writing about (or with a projected understanding of) their lives, relationships, insecurities, dreams, and passions. They will also be making music that they feel is somehow representative of their own identity and aesthetic. Making music, as we have also seen, can also be an intensely charged process. For these two reasons (sense of self and affective frame), this section seeks to explore collaborators’ experiences in relation to identity, both their own and other peoples, to understand how this shapes interactions in the creative environment. Chloe introduces the section by outlining how her sense of self can impact her mindset in a collaborative space:

We are reminded here of the previous section’s discussions around affective framing as we are given an insight into Chloe’s anxieties during a negative experience. Rather than looking around the room for contributing factors, Chloe turns inwards on herself and questions her own value within the collaboration. There is a sense of guilt and fear articulated across the account that highlights both the tension that can be experienced in the creative environment, but also how it can resonate so affectively with one’s sense of self. The account also shows how the feelings of anxiety are socially oriented. Chloe expresses concern both for the idea that her collaborators themselves might think she is ‘awful’, but also that they will subsequently tell their friends that the session was ‘really bad’. Her impacted sense of self is not merely a matter of inward reflection, but also a selfhood that is mediated through a perception of how others may judge her. As Fred Seddon notes, ‘whenever we reveal or display ourselves there is a need for affirmation of self’ (Miell & Littleton, Reference Miell and Littleton2004: 67). In this scenario, Chloe was in a vulnerable position and was not receiving validation or affirmation from the group. If we consider social interactions as performative acts, we can observe Chloe’s feelings undermining her sense of confidence and autonomy whilst trying to ‘perform’ as a productive member of the group. She is not outwardly expressing or sharing these feelings of insecurity with her collaborators, possibly to avoid adding weight to the environment or maybe to save face. Whatever the motivation, we can see that the result is the masking and concealing of her affective state from her collaborators, with an increased sense of anxiety being the result. Rosie, similarly, spoke of the ways in which feelings of insecurity can affect her sense of agency within the creative process:

By perceiving her collaborator as superior, Rosie’s sense of security in her own creative practice was undermined, which resulted in her feeling insecure and ‘scared’ to work. In this scenario, we can observe the extent to which the charged atmosphere and social setting of the collaboration rendered Rosie’s skills and professional experience redundant as she was left feeling unable to meaningfully contribute. Similar to Chloe’s account, Rosie notes how she put up a form of wall, as an attempt to affectively regulate her performative contributions to the social interaction in order to avoid other collaborators noticing or being affected by her feelings. Rosie reflects that during this process, there was a significant juxtaposition between her external behaviour and her internal feelings that her brain and soul were ‘on fire’. Rosie goes on to explain the importance she places on being present in the moment and ‘surrendering’ to her own sense of intuition. We can observe how this form of surrender must require confidence in one’s sense of self and comfort, and a sense of agency, in being able to express this within a social interaction. Rosie also reflects that at points where she thinks too hard, or becomes more conscious of her line of thinking, the creative ideas suffer as a result. At another point in the interview, Rosie discusses her feelings of insecurity in relation to roles within social interactions:

Rosie articulates the value she places on democratic and shared social interactions in relation to her role. The account suggests that roles being porous to the extent that some mingling between functions and input can create an effective setting where everyone involved is implicitly aware of the limits of these borders. There is a sense of general areas of demarcation being assigned to the roles involved in the collaboration that are maintained throughout. In this scenario, collaborators can feel supported and validated by others in their own areas but can be secure in feeling that others aren’t trying to dominate their space. For this reason, Rosie acknowledges the importance of working with ‘humble’ people who are able to maintain this form of egalitarian assemblage of roles that allows collaborators to have agency across different areas. From there, Rosie goes on to discuss how this ‘humble’ characteristic can, in her experience, go hand in hand with a lack of insecurity. She describes the challenges of working in a creative environment where someone is overcompensating as a result of their insecurities. As in the previous account, Rosie notes that when approaching a collaboration with an anxious-frame, she knows that she will ‘freeze’ or ‘block herself’, thus undermining her creative potential. Again, we see the significant impact of an affective frame and the importance of affective regulation for ensuring the possibility of collaborative creativity. By contrast, Rosie notes the ‘magic’ that can emerge in sessions where collaborators are ‘appreciative’ of one another and have a shared sense of purpose. She notes the superior quality and sense of authenticity that songs emerging from such creative atmospheres will possess. Across this example, we can observe how the presence and protection of self and the tendency to overcompensate can negatively impact the creative atmosphere in the way it forces a reorganisation of autonomy across the group. In Rosie’s utopian collaboration, there is a sense of equality and egalitarianism that is shared across the group in a form of flexible autonomy rather than the pushing and pulling forces of dominance and passivity. Lastly, Jason discusses his understanding of ownership changing with experience:

Jason speculates on the origin of a desire for ownership that can be present towards the start of a musical career, where learnings, developments, and initial forays can perhaps feel more personal and related to senses of self. This correlation between experience, self-identity, and insecurity, along with the feelings of needing to prove oneself, is noted as diminishing with experience and across time. There is a sense that as Jason has become more involved with different projects, the notion of his identity being tied to specific musical projects gradually becomes untenable, and conceptions of ownership and self-regard, derived from this relationship, subsequently shift as a result. This perhaps points to the benefits of approaching collaborations from a point of musical maturity and distance, where one is not attaching too much self-worth to the work, as this may result in challenges of insecurity and ownership. This account brings two dimensions to the forefront: ego and autonomy. There is a sense from Jason that having less autonomy within a project, even to the extent of ‘farming stuff out’ to other people, is an effective way to work, hence his working practice is moving consciously in that direction. On the flip side, where one seeks autonomous agency due to feelings of attachment between self and the developing project, we have seen how collaborative complications can arise. Dominance can lead to insecurity, whilst increases in one’s autonomy can undermine the agency of others.

We have seen across this section how the dimensions of agency and autonomy can be impacted in relation to each other amongst the wider mesh of social interaction (Gallagher, Reference Gallagher, Robinson and Thomas2021a). We initially explored the ways in which collaboration can be seen to extend creative cognition through the presence of complementary skills, unpredictable approaches, and intersubjectivity. Secondly, we considered the impact of feedback on creative interactions, which can be experienced as both positive and negative in different scenarios. On the one hand, many collaborators noted the importance and value of external validation and how this led to a shifting relationship between autonomy and agency. In such instances, whilst collaborators were delegating their autonomy to someone else, their sense of agency was increased through the creative confidence granted through external validation. Contrastingly, we also considered accounts that highlighted how feedback can have a negative impact on creative mindset and motivation. Negative feedback, or the absence of timely feedback, can lead collaborators to lose confidence in their developing ideas and potentially impact the sense of intersubjectivity with collaborators. The shift from ‘we’re all in this together’ to ‘this is what I think of what you’ve done’ is significant and affecting for collaborative relationships and the developing musical materials. Finally, we examined aspects of self-identity, insecurity, and vulnerability throughout the creative process. Participants reported the stifling affect that insecurity could bring within the creative process and the extent to which anxiety can make it challenging to meaningfully contribute to a creative collaboration.

3.1 Environment and Positioning

3.2 Solitary and Shared Worlds in Collaboration

In this final section, we shift our approach to consider the experience of what we call solitary and shared worlds during collaboration. This may appear somewhat contradictory in a text about collaboration and creative interactions and yet, it appears as a pertinent theme across interviews relating to creative environments. The focus here is on how collaborators work together and share ideas to build a project in different formations of environment, often facilitated by tool use. We observed that collaborations are often distributed between shared worlds, where intersubjectivity is key, but also solitary worlds where people want to work on their own and have space outside of the group. We will focus on how collaborators experience and curate these shared and solitary worlds and how this is an important adaptive practice that helps sustain creative interaction. This practice exemplifies a form of creative autopoiesis, to recall the enactivist conceptual lens, which involves adaption to changing environments, self-exploration, and self-definition, being able to imagine other possibilities, and, when needed, the capacity to emancipate oneself from certain situations and environments (Maiese, Reference Maiese2022: 59). Ian discusses his experience of the shared and the solitary in his practice:

Ian describes the tool of the Google Doc as allowing for a shared virtual space during collaboration. Whilst valuing the affordances of this shared world, he also acknowledges that some collaborators still value the intimacy and isolation that is afforded through solitary interaction with a piece of paper. There seems here to be value in the capability of creating a rupture between these two states and the shifting autonomy this affords. He observes that one collaborator has some days where he intuits that they would rather work in their own solitary world, rather than immediately sharing ideas through the Google Doc. Ian suggests that he is happy to work around this splitting of collaborative worlds as he understands the sense of autonomy it can provide to collaborators where they can feel more independent and free from external judgement or control. We have seen, across this section, how a laptop can impact the sense of interconnectivity and how a piece of paper can afford a sense of solitude. These are tools that mediate and affect the social interactions of collaborative songwriting. This also speaks to two, continually interacting worlds: ‘inside’ the group (and all of its intersubjectivities and interpersonal happenings) and ‘outside’ the group. Ian’s account also suggests when shifting from the solitary to the shared, there can sometimes be a hesitation to share ideas as this may cause feelings of vulnerability. Ian observes how the Google Doc affords a sense of anonymity to help this process and admits that he himself will sometimes contribute lines to the bottom of the working document so that others can consider it but are not necessarily aware of where it can from. This speaks to both tension of transitioning between solitary and shared worlds of collaboration but also how tools can help to negate the potentially negative impacts of this. Laura shares the following on solitary moments during collaboration:

Laura acknowledges the importance, for her, of being able to work in her own time and solitude in preparation for a session. She describes how the benefit of this solitary work lies in her not having to come up with new ideas whilst in the shared, collaborative space. Laura notes that she likes to instead use the shared space to go through existing ideas (generated during her solitary experience) to explore their potential application and distillation rather than generation. Here, we can again observe interactions and transitions between the ideas and processes from the solitary and the shared worlds of collaborative experience. It is worthy of note that both accounts, so far, acknowledge the value of solitary work, specifically in relation to the development of lyrical ideas. Rosie also describes how she valued working in a solitary setting when writing:

Rosie shares the importance she places on lyrics within her songwriting and how she favours being able to temporarily ostracise herself from the interactions of the group in order to work on her phone to develop the topline. Highlighting the importance of positioning, Rosie notes how she likes, at this point in the process, being sat away from the group and in her own space. This suggests the value in collaborators not always feeling the need to involve every member of the group at all times. Stepping out of the communal space need not imply a sense of detachment from the project, instead it is seemingly able to afford the construction of a temporary, private world to enable a better contribution to the overall process. This split, fractured approach to affording solitary work as a temporary reconfiguration of the group seems of benefit when collaborators need time and space to be imaginative, particularly, as it seems, when writing lyrics. Laura outlines another collaborative scenario where solitary and shared interactions framed her experience of lyric writing:

As we know from her previous accounts, Laura likes to have some lyrical ideas prepared in solitude before the session. We can observe how upon entering the shared, co-present collaboration, Laura gets to experience and react to the emerging musical ideas of the group through playback. From this she is then able to react and interpret it in relation to the feelings it evokes for her in combination with her existing lyrical ideas. Laura goes on to describe a situation where ideas can go back and forth and become developed through the collaborative sharing of subjectivities and interpretations. In this instance, we can observe the benefits, from Laura’s perspective, of ideas that were conceived when emancipated from the group, interacting back and forth within the shared, collaborative setting. Whilst the solitary world afforded Laura a sense of psychological safety and removed a sense of pressure, the shared setting afforded unpredictability through her subjective interpretations and reframing of her collaborator’s response to her stimulus.

One final account provides insight into the various and complex interactions that can shape contemporary collaboration in songwriting. When discussing a project formed of remote and co-present collaboration over time, Ian considers interactions between collaborative worlds:

Ian paints a picture of the mosaic of interactions, between people, tools, and musical materials, that shape contemporary collaborative practice. We can observe a distributed process of interactions across geographical borders and temporal context that is characterised as a continually shifting and developing practice. Ian refers to the ‘gradients of inspiration’ that combine, through various interactions between contributors and their respective ideas, to shape a result that would be inconceivable without this mesh of actions and reactions. He highlights that collaborations can impart the benefit of these ‘different directions’ onto the material when they blend together. The various musical inspirations, technical capabilities, and performative qualities are able to create something unique as a result of the nature of its assemblage and shifting formation.

Across this section, we have sought to explore songwriting environments as varied and affectively resonant. This pertains to the physical materials that make up an environment, including the bodies within it, as well as the social environments that shape the collaborative experience. We have observed how interactions are framed and actively shaped by the environments that house them and many collaborators noted that their mood and abilities were able to be both enhanced and constrained as a result of such environmental conditions. We have observed how environment and collaborators’ embodied experience of being in them, and being aware of themselves in them, shape their behaviours and approaches towards collaboration. Lastly, we explored how solitary practice is valued as it can afford a sense of autonomous agency (Maiese, Reference Maiese2022), away from the shared spaces of collaboration.