Visual materials are a widely used tool for stimulating creativity. This paper explores the potential for visual stimuli to support novices’ creative engagement with multimodal digital musical interfaces. An empirical study of 24 participants was conducted to compare the effect of abstract and literal forms of graphical scores on novices’ creative engagement, and whether being informed or uninformed about meanings of symbols in the score had any impact on creative engagement. The results suggest that abstract visual stimuli can provide an effective scaffold for creative engagement when participants are not informed about their design. It was found that providing information about visual stimuli has both advantages and disadvantages, depending largely on the stimuli’s visual style. Being informed about the meaning of a literal visual stimuli helped participants in making interpretations and gaining inspiration, whereas having information about abstract stimuli led to frustration. Qualitative data indicates that both forms of visual stimuli support creative engagement but at different stages of a creative process, and a descriptive model is presented to explain this. The findings highlight the benefits of visual stimuli in supporting creative engagement in the process of music making – a multimodal interaction domain typically involving few or no visual activities.

视觉材料是一种广泛使用的激发创造力的工具。本文探讨了视觉刺激支持新手创造性地参与多模式数字音乐界面的潜力。对 24 名参与者进行了一项实证研究，比较抽象和文字形式的图形乐谱对新手创造性参与的影响，以及了解或不了解乐谱中符号的含义是否对创造性参与有影响。结果表明，当参与者不了解其设计时，抽象视觉刺激可以为创造性参与提供有效的支架。研究发现，提供有关视觉刺激的信息既有优点也有缺点，这在很大程度上取决于刺激的视觉风格。了解字面视觉刺激的含义有助于参与者做出解释并获得灵感，而了解抽象刺激的信息会导致沮丧。定性数据表明，两种形式的视觉刺激都支持创造性参与，但处于创造性过程的不同阶段，并且提出了一个描述性模型来解释这一点。研究结果强调了视觉刺激在支持音乐制作过程中的创造性参与方面的好处——这是一个通常涉及很少或不涉及视觉活动的多模式交互领域。