This paper discusses and presents some preliminary results from an ongoing artistic research project by the author called “Folk Song Lab” based on artistic performance concepts found in Swedish traditional folk singing. The project is collective and interactive. The two interlinked explorative research questions concern the potential of traditional folk song as a source for creativity today as well as the potential of creating folk song based on new concepts with improvisation as a foundation, hence stimulating using the folk song musical “language” freely.

The project explores different ways to by improvisation stimulate the attitude towards the song as a cognitive framework which is recreated by the singer in the performance moment, by interactive group sessions. This takes its point of origin from certain conceptual qualities found in traditional folk song, connected to the ethnological concept “performance” (e.g. Kvideland 1981). A creative, non-analytic and open attitude is stimulated using flow-inducing concepts (Csikszentmihalyi 1992), such as risk, mimicry, play and reorientation, interpreted in musical terms and without written instructions.

The project raise question regarding the influence of time for the creativity and flow to appear during improvising sessions. Some of the methods explored in the project, such as "mirror-singing" might be related to neuro-scientific findings regarding the function of mirror-neurons, hence reflecting the possibilities in human creativity in a collective way.