Exploring overlapping cognition in music making (Dr Neta Spiro, Royal College of Music)

To what extent and in what ways do participants who just made music together understand what they were doing in the same way? In this talk, I’ll explore this question drawing on case studies in a range of music making contexts: improvisation on a jazz standard, free improvisation, and a classical duo. In these case studies, we developed methods of data collection and visualisation that prioritise individual participants’ characterisations of what happened during music making sessions and their ratings of agreement with each other’s characterisations. So far, our case studies suggest that performers’ interpretations are not always privileged relative to an outsider’s. In three different musical settings, with different constraints – such as being able to see each other or not – we find that the levels of agreement among people among who were making music together are lower than with their audience. In a further recent case study, we have extended the work into the domain of musical care – an online group songwriting intervention – where we find that levels of agreement among participants correlate with feelings of connectedness.

Biography

Neta Spiro is Reader in Performance Science at the Royal College of Music and an honorary Research Fellow at Imperial College London. Neta’s background is in music, cognitive science, and music psychology. She was previously Head of Research at Nordoff Robbins, London, and Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London and at the New School for Social Research, New York. Two questions underlie her research: What is the potential role of music in peoples’ health and wellbeing, and what is communicated when we make music together? Neta’s current research includes a British Academy/Leverhulme funded project which explores the equitable upscale of musical care in the UK. She is also exploring the possible levels of shared understanding across a variety of forms of music making. Neta co-leads the Musical Care International Research Network.