Topic: Music perception and creativity
This is a special one – Dr Andrea Schiavio will be visiting with us from the University of York, to talk about Andrea and Nikki’s recent paper!
“When we listen to music, as well as to other patterns of sound…” Dowling, 2012.
“The study of music perception encompasses a broad range of phenomena, including the perception of basic attributes of sound such as pitch, duration, and loudness, the principles by which lower-level features are extracted so as to produce higher-level features, the perception of large-scale musical structures, cultural influences on music perception, developmental issues, aberrations of music perception; and so on.” Deutch, 2017.
A huge amount is known about musical perception thanks to scientific research into psychoacoustics, the science of audition. However, sound is only one dimension of musical experience.
Listening can appear, outwardly, as a passive activity. The situation and conventions of European classical music performance heighten this illusion. Yet we know that this perspective is not sufficient to explain either the processes or the products of artistically-motivated, human behaviours. So, how else should we look at things? Scientific research into ‘music’ is vast. But dominant narratives about musical meaning, function and value do tend to shape the way that evidence is both generated and interpreted. Perhaps existing evidence already explains the fundamentally expressive and creative character of musical participation?
Reading: Schiavio, Moran, Antović & van der Schyff. (2022). ‘Grounding Creativity in Music Perception? A Multidisciplinary Conceptual Analysis.’ Music & Science, 5.
