Mental imagery boosts music compositional creativity

We empirically investigated the effect of mental imagery on young children’s music compositional creativity. Children aged 5 to 8 years participated in two music composition sessions. In the control session, participants based their composition on a motif that they had created using a sequence of letter names. In the mental imagery session, participants were given a picture of an animal and instructed to imagine the animal’s sounds and movements, before incorporating what they had imagined into their composition. Six expert judges independently rated all music compositions on creativity based on subjective criteria (consensual assessment). Reliability analyses indicated that the expert judges demonstrated a high level of agreement in their ratings. The mental imagery compositions received significantly higher creativity ratings by the expert judges than did the control compositions. These results provide evidence for the effectiveness of mental imagery in enhancing young children’s music compositional creativity.