About
What is creativity? What is intelligence? How does thinking both entangle us and free us? Creativity research at CCAM takes up the science of creativity, exploring how students and professionals can cultivate habits that move them into the flow of generative, inventive thought. Approaches draw from psychology, neuroscience, and artistic practice to put into action the latest research and creative strategies for thinking differently.
Project Lead
Courses
TDPS 4012: Creativity: Strategies and Practices for Getting Unstuck
TDST 359: Nature, AI, and Performance
Projects
I AM ALAN TURING
Can machines think? Human creativity meets AI to resurrect Alan Turing’s voice through live performance.
I AM ALAN TURING is an opera that fuses human artistry with artificial intelligence to reimagine the life and legacy of computing pioneer Alan Turing. Developed at Yale’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM), the work uses AI‑generated text and music to explore his visionary ideas and personal struggles.
I AM ALAN TURING is co‑created with a custom‑trained AI that echoes Turing’s own quest for intelligent machines. The score blends classical motifs with AI‑generated harmonies inspired by his studies in mathematical biology.
The piece debuted as a work‑in‑progress at CCAM’s Machine as Medium Symposium (Fall 2023), progressed through a developmental workshop at Yale’s David Geffen School of Drama (January 2024), and was the keynote performance at the “Envisioning AI at Yale” symposium (May 2025). Each performance paired live music with discussion, inviting audiences to examine technology, identity, and creativity together.
Collaborators:
Hugh Farrell, Wladimiro A. Woyno R., Emily Reilly, Sola Fadiran, Madeline Pages, Frederick Kennedy, Dakota Stipp, Tyler Kieffer, Jean-François Monnette, Liam Bellman-Sharpe, John Kao, Aura Michelle (Artists and Students/Alumni, David Geffen School of Drama at Yale)
Collective Animal Behavior
The Collective Animal Behavior project combines artificial intelligence with low-cost, open-source hardware to generate musical expressions of animal behavior and the ecosystems animals inhabit. By developing new data-sonification techniques and exploratory ways of listening, we translate movement and environmental signals into sound. The result is a research and public-engagement platform that helps people perceive patterns in wildlife data more intuitively. Our goal is to democratize data sonification and connect local communities to the changing natural world.
Listening to Climate Change
Listening to Climate Change is an after-school project and symposium funded by Yale Planetary Solutions through the Seed Grant Addressing Climate Change Through the Music of Bird Murmuration. Working with New Haven Public School students, the program translates environmental data—such as bird flocking patterns and shifting ecosystem conditions—into original musical compositions using AI-informed mapping tools developed with YPS support.
Through hands-on experimentation, students turn data into sound, rehearse, and perform their work in a spring concert at Yale. By treating music as both a creative practice and a communication tool, the project deepens students’ connection to issues like biodiversity and air and water quality, and empowers them to become Science and Climate Change Communicators alongside scientists, musicians, and educators.
Resounding Nature
In collaboration with Music Haven, Resounding Nature is an arts-driven research initiative that maps real-time ecological data from the forest into music and immersive soundscapes. This project allows us to listen to living systems as they change, aiming to uncover hidden dynamics and potential tipping points in ecosystems. Supported by a Yale Planetary Solutions grant (Listening to the Forest) and developed in partnership with Harvard Forest, Resounding Nature is developing a mobile app that enables audiences to experience the forest’s data-driven soundscape in real time.
Publications
"Birds, data, and violins," Yale University
"Novel course translates data from the natural world into art,", YaleNews
"Opera gives voice to Alan Turing with help of artificial intelligence," YaleNews
"The Creativity Lab," Maquette
Events
Resounding Nature x Now Exploratory Workshop
I AM ALAN TURING at the Machine as Medium Symposium: Matter and Spirit