Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Research Publications
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ItemMusical Activity as Avoidance-Based Emotion Regulation During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence Across Continents(SAGE Publications, 2023)Argentina and Australia endured among the most severe COVID-19 lockdowns globally. This study examined which artistic creative activities (ACAs) Argentinians in the Buenos Aries region used to support their mental health and wellbeing and compared these findings with existing data for Australians (primarily from Victoria) across a similar period. Adult Argentinians ( N = 86) responded to an online survey regarding 27 listed ACAs, as well as ratings of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. While “watching films and television” was the most commonly reported ACA, it was not rated as effective in supporting mental health and wellbeing. Conversely, musical ACAs were ranked highest. We consider evidence from Australia, North America, and South America that musical ACAs (especially music listening) have been most effective at supporting mental health and wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic by way of avoidance-based emotion regulation. We also conclude from the data that Argentinians tended to place greater importance on music-based ACAs than Australians.
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ItemHow Can Music Engagement Address Loneliness? A Qualitative Study and Thematic Framework in the Context of Australia's COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdowns(MDPI, 2023-01)Social isolation and loneliness are serious public health concerns. Music engagement can strengthen social connections and reduce loneliness in some contexts, although how this occurs is not well understood; research suggests that music's capacity to manipulate perceptions of time and space is relevant. This study adopted a qualitative perspective to examine how music engagement shaped the experiences of residents of Victoria, Australia, during conditions of restricted social contact during the lockdowns of 2020. Semi-structured interviews explored participants' lived musical experiences while giving focus to perceptions of time and space (e.g., how music helped restructure home and workspaces in response to lockdown regulations, or punctuate time where older routines were no longer viable). Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of the interview transcripts identified five themes representing the key findings: (1) a super-ordinate theme of perceived control, which comprises four themes: (2) dynamic connection; (3) identity; (4) mobility; (5) presence. Each theme describes one generalised aspect of the way music engagement shaped participants' perceptions of time and space during lockdown and supported their processes of adaptation to and coping with increased social isolation. The authors argue that these findings may inform the way music can be used to address loneliness in everyday life.
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ItemCreativity in lockdown: Understanding how music and the arts supported mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic by age group(FRONTIERS MEDIA SA, 2022-10-06)Recent research has indicated that many people around the world turned to artistic creative activities (ACAs) to support their mental health during COVID-19 lockdowns. However, studies have also shown that the negative psychosocial impacts of the pandemic have disproportionately affected young people, suggesting that the use of ACAs to support mental health in lockdown may have varied across age groups. This study investigated how Australians in four different age groups (18-24, 25-34, 35-54, and 55+) engaged in ACAs to support their mental health during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns. Participants (N = 653) recruited from the general public completed an online survey between May and October 2020, in which they reported which ACAs they had undertaken during the pandemic using an established list. Participants subsequently ranked undertaken ACAs in terms of effectiveness at making them "feel better," and those who had engaged in musical ACAs also completed the Musical Engagement Questionnaire (MusEQ). Additionally, ratings of anxiety (GAD7) and depression (PHQ9) symptoms were obtained and examined for potential variations across four diverse variables: age, exercise, gender and state/territory of residence. ACA rankings showed that younger participants overwhelmingly rated musical activities as most effective, while, with the exception of singing, those aged 55+ rated non-musical activities as being most effective. These differences were further supported by ratings for all six MusEQ subscales, with responses strongly indicating that the youngest participants (aged 18-24) used music in significantly different ways during the pandemic than participants in all other age groups. Specifically, these youngest participants were more likely to integrate music into daily life, use music for emotion regulation, respond to music in embodied ways, and use music to perform a social identity. In line with prior research, further analyses indicated that symptoms of anxiety and depression were lessened for older participants, as well for those who reported exercising more during the lockdowns. These findings provide insight into how ACAs can support mental health during a pandemic crisis for specific age groups, which may inform future policy directions, and suggestions for how this can be done are provided.
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ItemThe role of artistic creative activities in navigating the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia(Frontiers Media, 2022)During the COVID-19 pandemic some Australians turned to artistic creative activities (ACAs) as a way of managing their own mental health and well-being. This study examined the role of ACAs in regulating emotion and supporting mental health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic, and also attempted to identify at-risk populations. We proposed that (1) participants would use ACAs as avoidance-based emotion regulation strategies; and (2) music engagement would be used for emotion regulation. Australian participants (N = 653) recruited from the general public completed an online survey, which included scales targeting anxiety (GAD7 scale), depression (PHQ9 scale) and loneliness (two UCLA Loneliness Scales, referring to “Before” and “Since” COVID-19). Participants reported which ACAs they had undertaken and ceased during the pandemic using an established list and ranked their undertaken ACAs in terms of effectiveness at making them “feel better.” For their top-ranked ACA, participantsthen completed the Emot on Regulation Scale for Artistic Creative Activities (ERS-ACA), and if participants had undertaken any musical ACAs, also the Musical Engagement Questionnaire (MusEQ). The results supported both hypotheses. ANOVAs indicated that participants ranked significantly higher on the “avoidance” ERS-ACA subscale than the other subscales, and that participants ranked significantly higher on the emotion regulation and musical preference MusEQ subscales than the other subscales. Additionally, while ACAs such as “Watching films or TV shows” and “Cookery or baking” were common, they ranked poorly as effective methods of emotion regulation, whereas “Listening to music” was the second-most frequently undertaken ACA and also the most effective. “Singing” and “Dancing” were among the most ceased ACAs but also ranked among the most effective for emotion regulation, suggesting that support for developing pandemic-safe approaches to these ACAs may provide well-being benefits in future crises. Additionally, correlation analyses howed that younger participants, those who took less exercise during the pandemic, and those with the highest musical engagement reported the poorest well-being.We conclude that ACAs provided an important resource for supporting mental health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia and could potentially support mental health and well-being in future crises.
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ItemThe Impact of Biographical Information About a Composer on Emotional Responses to Their Music(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2022-09)This study investigated whether reading biographical information about the composer Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679–1745) before listening to his music would influence listeners’ self-reported emotional responses. The study involved 179 participants who completed an online listening exercise in which they read either a negative or a neutral biography of Zelenka, or no biography, before listening to two short excerpts of his music. After listening to each excerpt, participants completed a 27-item questionnaire concerning their emotional responses and were then asked to describe in their own words how the music made them feel. Two-factor analyses identified five factors underlying the emotional responses of participants for each musical excerpt. Generalised Linear Mixed Model analyses indicate that the biography condition affected participants’ emotional responses with regard to memories, associations, and mental images. Positive emotional contagion was also a significant predictor variable for several of the emotional factors that were identified. A thematic analysis of participants’ free-text responses supported both the BRECVEMAC model and persona theory as interpretative frameworks, albeit with caveats. Additionally, a chi-square test of contingencies revealed that participants who read the negative biography of Zelenka were more likely to make use of negative language to describe their emotional responses to the music, and that participants who read no biography were more likely to use neutral language. The findings suggest that contextual biographical information about composers (e.g., in programme notes) can have an impact on the emotional experiences of listeners.
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ItemIntroducing a Psycho-Historical Approach to the Study of Emotions in Music: The Case of Monteverdi's 'Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda'(The Society for the History of Emotions, 2017)This essay addresses the challenges of reaching a historically informed understanding of the emotional experience of seventeenth-century musical performance by applying a recent theoretical account of the psychological emotion mechanisms that underpin music perception. A short work by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) is taken as a case study, to investigate the ways that structural elements of the music engage emotion mechanisms. Since modern-day listeners also draw on emotion mechanisms, a modernday exploration of behavioural responses to the historical work – albeit performed and perceived through different personal experiences and perhaps with different emphases according to the many different socialcultural factors influencing modern perception – enables the identification of which mechanisms are activated in modern perceivers. While the authors acknowledge that emotional responses to music are highly susceptible to a whole range of complex and dynamic socio-cultural experiences and different historical contexts, the research undertaken nonetheless enables the development of some parameters on which to build a modern-day performance that emphasises the mechanisms most likely to arouse affect.