Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Research Publications
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ItemThe dynamics of musical participation(SAGE Publications, 2021)In this paper we argue that our comprehension of musical participation—the complex network of interactive dynamics involved in collaborative musical experience—can benefit from an analysis inspired by the existing frameworks of dynamical systems theory and coordination dynamics. These approaches can offer novel theoretical tools to help music researchers describe a number of central aspects of joint musical experience in greater detail, such as prediction, adaptivity, social cohesion, reciprocity, and reward. While most musicians involved in collective forms of musicking already have some familiarity with these terms and their associated experiences, we currently lack an analytical vocabulary to approach them in a more targeted way. To fill this gap, we adopt insights from these frameworks to suggest that musical participation may be advantageously characterized as an open, non-equilibrium, dynamical system. In particular, we suggest that research informed by dynamical systems theory might stimulate new interdisciplinary scholarship at the crossroads of musicology, psychology, philosophy, and cognitive (neuro)science, pointing toward new understandings of the core features of musical participation.
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ItemBy myself but not alone: Agency, creativity, and extended musical historicity(Routledge, 2022-11)In this paper we offer a preliminary framework that highlights the relational nature of solo music-making, and its associated capacity to influence the constellation of habits and experiences one develops through acts of musicking. To do so, we introduce the notion of extended musical historicity and suggest that when novice and expert performers engage in individual musical practices, they often rely on an extended sense of agency which permeates their musical experience and shapes their creative outcomes. To support this view, we report on an exploratory, qualitative study conducted with novice and expert musicians. This was designed to elicit a range of responses, beliefs, experiences and meanings concerning the main categories of agency and creativity. Our data provide rich descriptions of solitary musical practices by both novice and expert performers, and reveal ways in which these experiences involve social contingencies that appear to generate or transform creative musical activity. We argue that recognition of the interactive components of individual musicking may shed new light on the cognition of solo and joint music performance, and should inspire the development of novel conceptual and empirical tools for future research and theory.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableEditorial: Community Series: Towards a Meaningful Instrumental Music Education. Methods, Perspectives, and Challenges – Volume II(Frontiers Media S.A., 2023-11-02)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableEudaimonia and Music Learning(Frontiers in Psychology; Frontiers in Education; Frontiers in Cultural Psychology, 2021-08-18)
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ItemEditorial: Community series: towards a meaningful instrumental music education. Methods, perspectives, and challenges, volume II(Frontiers Media SA, 2023)Our Community Series introduces a comprehensive and dynamic perspective within the evolving field of instrumental music education. The first volume of this series, entitled Towards a meaningful instrumental music education: methods, perspectives, and challenges, examined a range of pivotal topics including technology, meaning, and expression. Likewise, the 11 contributions to this second volume are collaborative and draw upon a diverse spectrum of perspectives—they integrate empirical insights, engage robust theoretical frameworks, and develop reflective insights from pedagogical practice. In doing so, they enrich our comprehension of music's role within broader pedagogical contexts and showcase possibilities for catalyzing transformative shifts within music education itself. Like the first volume, this Research Topic provides insights that resonate with educators, researchers, and students alike.
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ItemEmbodying Dynamical Systems in Music Performance(Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, 2023-11)The present contribution introduces a theoretical framework to explore music performance from a perspective inspired by the conceptual resources of two orientations known as Dynamical System Theory and Embodied Cognitive Science. We discursively elaborate on how music performance might be conceived of as a complex, multi-component system that deals with evolving patterns of stability and instability, and examine how a combination of cognitive, motor, and affective skills stands at the heart of the performer’s capacity to optimize their performance. In doing so, we consider how musicians often generate different interpretative “hypotheses” with little or no pre-planning and use their body to selectively navigate the range of possibilities such hypotheses entail. In conclusion, the relevance of this perspective is discussed in relation to current research in music performance and music education to outline continuities and differences between the two domains.
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ItemChallenges and understandings of creative practice in professional sport training(PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2023-02-22)We conducted a qualitative study involving twelve expert sports coaches to explore and compare the range of creative practices they adopted during their professional activities. Their written responses to open-ended questions highlighted different interrelated dimensions of creative engagement in coaching sport, suggesting that efforts to instil creativity may initially focus on an individual athlete; they may often span a range of behaviours dedicated to efficiency; they may involve significant degrees of freedom and trust; and they cannot be captured by a single defining feature. We contextualise these findings in the light of recent literature in sports studies, performance science and creativity research, providing concrete examples based on the written statements provided by our participants. We conclude by offering insights for future research and coaching practice that may be relevant in broader domains.
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ItemMusic teachers’ self-reported views of creativity in the context of their work(SAGE Publications, 2022)What are the main views and perceptions of creativity of a music teacher? By administering an open-ended questionnaire to 11 music teachers, we sought to elicit responses to clarify what are their self-reported understandings of creativity; how they think musical creativity can be facilitated in a teaching setting; and how they can differentiate between individual and collective forms of musical creativity in the classroom. A thematic analysis gave rise to five categories, each addressing one or more of these dimensions from different angles. Findings indicate that our respondents tended to associate the development of a creative musicianship with generally positive concepts, attributing to it several interrelated meanings. In particular, the music teachers who took part in the study mentioned how fostering creative attitude in their students may involve stimulating their curiosity, changing their perspectives, and helping them navigate both personal and social domains; finally, our participants indicated that both individual and collective forms of teaching may display important constraints when creativity is placed at the heart of the lesson.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableMusical Bodies, Musical Minds Enactive Cognitive Science and the Meaning of Human Musicality(MIT Press, 2022-08-30)Musical Bodies, Musical Minds offers an innovative account of human musicality that draws on recent developments in embodied cognitive science. The authors explore musical cognition as a form of sense-making that unfolds across the embodied, environmentally embedded, and sociomaterially extended dimensions that compose the enactment of human worlds of meaning. This perspective enables new ways of understanding musical experience, the development of musicality in infancy and childhood, music's emergence in human evolution, and the nature of musical emotions, empathy, and creativity. Developing their account, the authors link a diverse array of ideas from fields including neuroscience, theoretical biology, psychology, developmental studies, social cognition, and education. Drawing on these insights, they show how dynamic processes of adaptive body-brain-environment interactivity drive musical cognition across a range of contexts, extending it beyond the personal (inner) domain of musical agents and out into the material and social worlds they inhabit and influence. An enactive approach to musicality, they argue, can reveal important aspects of human being and knowing that are often lost or obscured in the modern technologically driven world.
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ItemGrounding Creativity in Music Perception? A Multidisciplinary Conceptual Analysis(SAGE Publications, 2022-01-01)To what extent can we understand and account for music perception as a creative process? In this paper we draw on recent work in music, creativity, and the cognitive humanities to suggest that the fundamentally creative aspect of music perception is not yet satisfactorily examined in existing research. We briefly review the state of scholarship into both creativity and music perception, and identify key points of convergence, which are prominent in work that investigates the mutuality of action and perception, and the exploratory bases of the latter, among others. Inspired by a growing number of contributions in 4E music cognition research, we argue that listening to music can involve mechanisms of active bodily engagement, along with the imaginative exploration of novel possibilities for thought and action. We put forward the view that this approach is important because of the way in which it can bring to the analytical centre stage a creative dimension that may not otherwise be apparent. The contribution of this paper involves this presentation of a multidisciplinary framework for the study of music perception, highlighting the integration of perception and action, and foregrounding this conception of creative cognition as a central aspect of music perception.