Creativity through Style Manipulation: the Flow Machines project

Flow Machines intend to boost individual creativitity for sequential content creation such as music composition and litterary text writing. This paper introduces the main concepts underlying the Flow Machines project. Starting from Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow theory, we posit that the main driving force of individual creativity is not to acquire more skills nor to create individual artefacts, but lies in the creation of individual styles, and that creative artefacts are merely instances of novel styles. Flow machines intend to assist users in style creation by allowing them to explicitly manipulate styles as computational objects. Such an endeavour raises complex technical issues related to the exploration of statistical models of styles under arbitrary constraints. We illustrate these ideas through examples in music composition and text writing.