UC Irvine

This dissertation is a stepping stone into an in-depth study of group creativity. The foundation for this work concerns collective musical improvisation, and the project grew from an experiment with improvising musicians on networks of controlled listening. This experiment served as a source for intuition and its many sessions records of the unfolding creative and collaborative process in real-time.

A literature review of related themes suggested potential games as a starting point for the theoretical modeling due to their embodiment of the many facets of coordination, undeniably a strong force in music and group creativity. The current status of these games proved to be insufficient for the goal of this thesis. For this reason, the beginning of this thesis, chapter 2, provides a fairly complete picture of 2-strategy potential games for any number of agents, and for 2-agent 3-strategy games.

In chapter 3, to show the power of the coordinate system developed for potential games in chapter 2, issues in the literature involving possible conflicts between measures of ``good" group outcomes are elucidated. Finally, in chapter 4, the collective improvisation experiment is described followed by models of an improvising trio, an orchestra, and the collective generation of information. Admittedly, the work in chapter 4 is still in progress, and will be improved on in the years to come.