Mutefest: Investigating Musicians’ First-person Experiences

Symposium with showings, presentations and open discussions

Outcomes of Artistic Research and Methodology research processes carried out by visiting Professor Jin Hyun Kim with the research group at the Music Technology department of the Sibelius Academy in collaboration with Professor Stefan Östersjö, Luleå University of Technology, Piteå School of Music.

About the symposium

Motivated by the question about what and how the intangible and ineffable processes at the core of music making experience are, we explore, learn about, and expand two established interview methods, Stimulated Recall and Open Coding, and Micro-Phenomenological Interview technique with the objective to better understand the potential of an approach that takes the second-person perspective on first-person experience. 

The artistic practices of the musicians in the research group of the Music Technology department largely centre around technically mediated music making to be investigated to expose some of the underlying processes of musical shaping, mostly in performance. In parallel to learning about these methods, each practitioner must develop a specific frame in one of their pieces and through iterative research actions identify and articulate their focal questions and topics. 

Within the plurality of Artistic Research approaches, hybridization with qualitative methods of empirical research provides one possible avenue towards generating deeper understating. Commonly used methods such as (auto-)ethnographical and other grounded theory approaches take on a wide variety of forms in Artistic Research, which are not always very systematic and structured and thus remain bound to a specific artist. They are also mostly used to identify and describe artistic shaping processes through their material elements, processes and actions, only occasionally uncovering sensations, affects, and emotions. 

Stimulated Recall makes it possible to “relive an original situation with vividness and accuracy [when] presented with a large number of cues or stimuli [from] the original situation.” (Bloom 1953, p. 161) Current implementations of this approach often use an audio or video document, which can be repeatedly accessed and used as a basis for Open Coding. This “detailed word-by-word and line-by-line analysis is conducted by researchers asking what is going on” and thus “discover, name, define, and develop as many ideas and concepts as possible without concern for how they will ultimately be used.” (Benaquisto, 2008, p 2)  

With this iterative process categories can be developed from the bottom up. While well suited for exploring initially wide and poorly circumscribed aspects of artistic practice, the mediated (media-based) access and successive exposure of this method poses considerable challenges. One is a creeping loss of memory details and increasing difficulty to relive the original situation due to repeated watching and listening. Another is that conventional Stimulated Recall and Open Coding methods are not able to provide access to some of the fine-grained structures of first-person experience. We address this by guiding the process from a second person perspective.  

Studying musicians’ experiences underlying their artistic shaping processes requires developing a methodological approach appropriate for understanding the microgenesis of those experiences – related to the emergence and transition of experience in the course of its unfolding during a timespan – in as fine-grained a manner as possible. Additionally, this approach should do justice to perceptual concepts involved in these experiences, which are often challenging to articulate verbally, yet relevant to understanding artistic shaping processes.   

The Micro-Phenomenological Interview technique, developed within the scope of neurophenomenology, allows researchers to collect verbal descriptions that involve non-theoretical propositional concepts related to felt sense, revealing the diachronic and synchronic structures of lived experience. A key premise of the Micro-Phenomenological Interview technique is that first-person descriptions can be gathered most effectively from the second-person perspective, through a trained interviewer who guides the interviewee’s attention towards their experiences and the ways they undergo those experiences on a moment-to-moment basis, rather than focusing on the content of the experience.  

While originally designed as a primarily verbal technique, the research group of the department of Music Technology attempts to extend the Micro-Phenomenological Interview method into a non-verbal approach, exploring whether and to what extent it is possible to direct artists’ attention towards the first-person experience underlying their artistic shaping processes without relying on verbalization techniques. Using a combination of verbal and nonverbal micro-phenomenological approaches developed by Jin Hyun Kim, the participants’ studies identify relevant categories within each artist’s first-person experience. These categories are then utilized in further research processes used by the artists, such as Stimulated Recall or micro-phenomenologically inspired experience-scores. These subsequently come to serve continuing artistic shaping processes. 

Collectively, the studies and artistic projects carried out by the group demonstrate the potential of a methodological approach based on a second-person perspective as a foundation for mixed methods focused on experience further developed in Artistic Research. 

This symposium presents the group’s studies with some of their outcomes and attempts to summarize methodological findings arising from the juxtaposition of using the established interview methods and the development of a novel non-verbal approach to first-person experience. In this public event with showings, presentations and open discussions, the research group seeks to engage in a wider dialogue with fellow artist-researchers and an interested audience. 

Schedule

• 09:00 – 09:45 Framework introduction by Profs. Jin Hyun Kim & Jan Schacher 
• 09:45 – 10:25 Study presentation by Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski: “Studying the Lived Experience of a Creative act: Decision Making in my Practice of Field Recording in Motion” 
• 10:25 – 10:40 Coffee break 
• 10:40 – 11:20 Study presentation by Robert Ek: “Feeling Flow: The Embodied Nature of Flow in Music Performance and its Connection to Opacity” 
• 11:20 – 12:00 Study presentation by Paola Livorsi: “An imaginative and intersubjective exploration at the threshold of verbal and nonverbal experience” 
• 12:00 – 13:00 lunch break 
• 13:00 – 13:40 Study presentation by Alejandro Olarte “Listening with the Knee: Contemplative Performance in Electroacoustic Music”  
• 13:40 – 14:30 Panel discussion with the presenters and Profs. Stefan Östersjö and Jin Hyun Kim, moderation by Prof. Jan Schacher. 

Study presentations

Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski: “Studying the Lived Experience of a Creative Act: Decision Making in my Practice of Field Recording in Motion” 

In field recording in motion I perceive my recordist path as a musical creation act enabling awareness of my relation to the sonic whole. My research urged me to understand better the structures of my experience at the moments of decision-making initiating movements within this practice. My study performance is a tentative re-enactment of a Cameroonian forest situation I experienced earlier. The resulting multicamera view video synchronised to the field recording I made during the indoor experiment is used for a Stimulated Recall analysis in HyperResearch. 

While being microphenomenologically interviewed by professor Jin Hyun Kim allowed to identify a pivotal moment in which to zoom-in for detailed dimensions and structures of the experience, I conducted Stimulated Recall on the full length of the experiment. The microphenomenological interviews revealed the main categories I could work with for the analysis. Stimulated Recall allowed to find more values within these categories and verify how they articulate themselves within the overall experience. 

The combination of the methods allowed to determinate that my decision making is driven by ’empathetic feeling’ and not for example only by ethical reasoning, which was dominantly present in my first verbal account of the Cameroonian forest situation. 

Robert Ek: “Feeling Flow: the Embodied Nature of Flow in Music Performance and its Connection to Opacity” 

Initially, this study sought to explore the relationship between different levels of opacity in a DMI and how such relations could be connected to perceived expressivity. The assumption was that the lower opacity an interface has, the higher expressivity is expected. However, results from this study reveals that the lowest level of opacity and, with that, the highest level of control does not necessarily  constitute the basis for expressivity. This observation led to adding to the inquiry the perspective of flow, and the added question, what the relation might be between opacity and expressivity. 

Flow is an optimal state where a person becomes fully immersed and highly focused on a task. According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is marked by a sense of control and enjoyment, emerging from a perceived balance between challenges and skills. While scholars widely accept that music is an embodied phenomenon, research into the embodied aspects of flow is still in its early stages. Nonetheless, studies indicate that sensorimotor coupling lies at the heart of flow and its connection with music. 

Using a combination of stimulated recall and micro-phenomenology I have eventually, in this study, explored the embodied nature of flow and how its connected to expressiveness in musical performance.4 

Paola Livorsi: “An imaginative and intersubjective exploration at the threshold of verbal and nonverbal experience”  

This presentation will disclose the background and present state of the ongoing research project Exercises in Imagination, ideated together with Professor Jin Hyun Kim in June 2024. Through philosophical and literary texts, among which Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch and Natalia Ginzburg’s collection of essays Non possiamo saperlo [We cannot know it], the project aims to address questions of identity and diversity, building on the concept of stimming. The research is conducted through a series of stimming vocal improvisations, with traits of ‘comprovisation’. At the moment we are working on ‘morphological shaping’, that is a way to imaginatively extend the semantic boundaries of a text through musical behaviour.  

The musical exploration process is accompanied through tactual co-shaping, based on Kim’s non-verbal micro-phenomenological approach to Artistic Research, aiming to allow the performer to have access to her first-person experience, specifically her decision-making process in the context of this project, during a performance. For this occasion, we will present a first version of an imaginative exploration of a fragment from Arendt’s Men in Dark Times.   

I will also briefly mention the work done together with Kim in autumn 2023, during her course “Methods for investigating subjective experience within the scope of artistic research,” which constituted for me a meaningful first experience in micro-phenomenology, applied to a performance situation.  

Alejandro Olarte: “Listening with the Knee: Contemplative Performance in Electroacoustic Music” 

This project delves into the concept of “contemplative performance” within the realm of electroacoustic music—an artistic and introspective practice where the performer’s body and consciousness intertwine with the sound and musical environments through deliberate, mindful, meditative engagement and performative gestures. Throughout this project, I developed and worked with a series of sound compositions and scores, employing methods drawn from contemporary music composition, synthesizer performance, meditation practices, micro-phenomenology, and self-confrontation techniques. These scores progress from performative, verbal instruction sets to ultimately culminating in prescriptive experience-scores designed to guide the performer’s embodied awareness and musical performance.

This presentation will outline the artistic process, highlighting key phases of the research and examining the theoretical and inspirational influences behind the work. Through this inquiry, I aim to expand the scope of electroacoustic performance practices, positioning contemplative performance as a pathway to deeper experiential and phenomenological engagement in music.

Further information: Jan Schacher, jan.schacher@uniarts.fi