Brazilian Research on Creativity Development in Musical Interaction

Rosane Cardoso de Araújo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000392463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Brazilian Research on Creativity Development in Musical Interaction focuses on creativity that involves interactive musical activities, with different groups, such as professional musicians, students, and student teachers. It seeks to present research with a theoretical foundation on musical creativity and interaction, within psychology and music pedagogy. A collection of ten contributed essays present studies that promote understanding of the possibilities of creative development from the interactive process. All are undertaken within the context of teaching and learning, whether one-on-one or group lessons, ranging from elementary school music class, instrument study, choral singing, composition and teaching an autistic student.

1 Reflexive Interaction and Musical Creativity

A Study with Drums Students

Jean Felipe Pscheidt, Rosane Cardoso de Araújo
and Anna Rita Addessi

1 Introduction

In the musical education context creativity has been explored from different perspectives, such as the development of collaborative activities between teachers and students through improvisation and shared musicality (Burnard & Murphy, 2013; Cross et al. 2012; Seddon, 2012; Tafuri, 2006). This is a reflection of a research perspective that explores methods that go beyond technical development during music lessons, promoting teaching based on creative music making (Elliott & Silverman, 2015; Schafer, 2011). According to Schiavio et al. (2019). This type of view has practical consequences that lead to a more open learning approach, bringing more possibilities for exploration, improvisation and musical creation.

For creativity to occur, Burnard (2011, p. 11) emphasizes the need to promote an environment where “the students can take risks, engage in imaginative activity, and do things differently”. As Beghetto and Kaufman (2011) explain, teachers need to balance, during their classes, the development of content while fostering creativity, and not fearing “curricular chaos”. Sawyer (2011) offers a perspective of “disciplined improvisation” that, in a general way, presents the concept that it is needed to elaborate a defined structured teaching by establishing the necessary content while providing space for ideas to flow.

Given the many intrinsic challenges of teaching that focus on developing musical creativity, the goal of this chapter is to present some perspectives for the development of musical creativity of drums students in an interactive-reflexive context. The reflexive interaction can be comprehended as a mechanism of musical interaction that occurs through musical improvisation based on imitation with variations (Addessi, 2014; Addessi et al., 2017).

This type of interaction is explored in this research in two distinct contexts: human/machine reflexive interaction, and human/human reflexive interaction. The human/machine reflexive interaction has been studied using the MIROR project, an European project coordinated by professor Anna Rita Addessi, from the University of Bologna, Italy, which focuses on the elaboration of the MIROR Platform, that is, a technological platform that explores possibilities of involving children in composition, improvisation and body movement activities to manipulate a software known as interactive-reflexive systems (Addessi, 2014; Addessi & Pachet, 2006; Addessi et al., 2017). From among the interactive-reflexive systems that make up the MIROR platform, this research used the MIROR-Impro. This software works by connecting an electronic drums, allowing the student to freely play the instrument and, when the student stops playing, receive an immediate response from the software that imitates the phrase previously played by the student, with variations.

In the context of human/human interaction, some research has been developed investigating the vocal interaction between parents and babies, as well as the musical experience of the newborn child, reinforcing the importance of the mother acting as a sound mirror for the child, strengthening his/her musical ‘self’ (Addessi, 2012; Stern, 2004; Imberty, 2005). In this chapter human/human reflexive interaction is investigated in instrument teaching, with the teacher performing a reflexive function (Addessi et al., 2017). The teacher acts similarly to the interactive-reflexive MIROR-Impro system, that is, answering the phrases executed by the student and, at the same time, inserting small variations. In that way, the modeling, conducting and mirroring strategies, suggested by Addessi (2015), were used so that the teacher could reinforce the student’s musical style.

The reflexive interaction has been investigated as a tool capable of stimulating a creative musical dialogue (Addessi, 2015). Therefore, this type of interaction emerges as a possible way of thinking about pedagogical practices that stimulate musical creativity in the context of instrument teaching. For that, we discuss how the theoretical support of creativity and the interactive-reflexive paradigm can contribute to explaining the creative experience in the interactive-reflexive context. In this chapter we present a study developed in an interactive-reflexive context with drum students, which explored, through human/human and human/machine interaction, the creative processes inside the referred context.

2 Musical Creativity

As reinforced by Burnard (2012), the meaning of what is creative is related to each studied context. Odena (2012) suggests that some approaches in the field of music education relate, in a practical way, creativity with composition, emotion, pedagogical situations, cognition and musical improvisation, as well as music therapy and wellbeing. Considering the diverse fields of discussion about creativity, it can be noted that the literature has presented approaches that reflect the discussion about the creative person (Guilford, 1950; Torrance, 1974; Webster, 2002), the creative process (Amabile, 1993; Sternberg, 2010) and the creative product (Csikzsentmihalyi, 1996; Elliott & Silverman, 2015). In this chapter we review these perspectives, initially maintaining our focus on: the individual, through studies of divergent/convergent thinking and imagination; on the process, from the perspective of creative accomplishment; and finally, on the product, through the study of creativity as something new and useful.

2.1 Looking at the Individual: Divergent and Convergent Thinking and Imagination

According to Webster (2002), creative thinking occurs based on the dynamics between two types of thinking, the divergent and convergent. Divergent production can be understood as the ability to generate different responses to certain tasks (Lubart, 2007). This type of thinking was studied mainly in the psychometric approach, where J. P. Guilford (1950) and E. Paul Torrance (1974, 1993) were the pioneers in the field of creativity research utilizing it. According to Sternberg (2010), this approach uses the application of tests, such as the Torrance Creative Thinking Test (Torrance, 1974), that measure the diversity, number and appropriateness of responses to questions that stimulate the thinking of possibilities. Divergent thinking opens space for more than one idea about certain content. That is, divergent thinking results in a musical practice willing to find more than one possibility when planning and handling sound material.

For Sternberg (2010), thinking divergently is important; after all, the possibility of an action where several ideas are generated stimulates a process through which an innovative idea can arise. Thus, it is healthy to think of several ideas before settling on only one (Lubart, 2007). Several authors have researched divergent thinking and assure the correlation between this type of thinking and the creative performance (Lubart, 2007; Runco & Albert, 1985; Torrance, 1983). Webster (2002) uses the term musical flexibility to indicate when the student is capable of generating different ideas, which is directly related to the functioning of divergent thinking.

If in the divergent thought the action is related to the ability of generating diverse ideas, in the convergent thought the person develops the ability to evaluate ideas and to determine the one that is more likely to be used. Thus, divergent thinking will allow the student to choose possibilities of musical application, while convergent thinking will be responsible for determining which musical idea is the most appropriate (Lubart, 2007).

Imagination is something a person needs for expressive and creative musical accomplishment. Developing the student’s imaginative potential is one of the functions of the teacher during music lessons (Kokotsaki & Newton, 2015). Elliott and Silverman (2015) present some ways of thinking about imagination in order to foster a creative instrumental practice. In this case, three layers are demonstrated with the purpose of employing imagination in a way that the child thinks of possibilities of sound and how to perform them.

The first is called imagination from experiences already experienced and occurs, for example, when the child can imagine the sound of the bass drum (low pitch) and design their sound characteristics to the point of establishing rational sense before playing. The second stage predicts the use of imagination to propose sound possibilities from an already known sound. So, the child thinks of sound possibilities; for example, what would the sound of the snare with a sheet of paper on the drumhead be? How can the sound of a helicopter be produced using the floor tom? What would the sound of an approaching storm be like using cymbals? In the third stage, the imagination is used to think about new possibilities of sound that extrapolate the ordinary. During all the three stages, imagination supports the actions employed by the child. So, when facing a problem that must be solved, the imagination acts as the fuel for divergent thinking, leaving the obvious on ‘standby’ in the face of other possibilities, usually without regarding a traditional or common practice. At some point, this thinking is ceased in favor of ‘convergent’ filtering for the purpose of choosing/creating a final solution (Webster, 2014).

As Robinson (2011) reinforces, imagination acts as the fuel for creativity. However, it is necessary to comprehend that imagination and creativity are different from each other. While imagination involves the process of thinking through possibilities, creativity relates to the perspective of putting ideas into practice.

Imagination happens through the ability of thinking about all the possibilities in front of something, while creativity is a step further, because it involves doing something. A creative person is someone who has, at one time or another, produced something and, in that sense, we cannot call someone creative when he/she has just imagined possibilities.

2.2 Looking at the Process: Knowledge and Creative Achievement

According to Elliott and Silverman (2015), it is not necessary to know technical standards such as tension, relaxation, cadences, rhythmic patterns, etc. for an individual to enjoy and get involved with music. That is, in the context of drums, students can perfectly play the instrument without necessarily thinking about metrics, rhythmic cells, turns and independence. Therefore, knowing the technical elements is not determinative for making music.

In some cases, learning can occur by immersion in a context, naturally and without the individual being aware of this process, which, for some authors, means learning by enculturation (Green, 2008; Sloboda, 2008). This experience by immersion generates an intuitive thought that is the result of the contact with several references, be it in videos, the extrinsic stimulus of the parents, the motivation to play and sing what they like and others.

However, when the child is questioned about what he/she is playing, on many occasions he/she may not be able to explain how they achieved such a performance. Therefore, the first question that arises is: how can we make the child perceive his/her musical ideas to the point of comprehending them and, from then on, propose variations?

For Elliott and Silverman (2015), one of the alternatives is through listening to music, letting the student know how to listen. Kratus (2017) reinforces the importance of rethinking how musical listening has been worked on in the field of music education. Delalande (2017), in turn, advocates a listening experience based on sound exploration. This perspective illustrates the association that can be made between listening and motivation because, for Delalande (2017), the best way to motivate listening is to base it on an experience of sound production that has meaning for the individual. In that way, moments ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Series Pages
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Reflexive Interaction and Musical Creativity: A Study with Drums Students
• 2 Teaching with a Social Constructivist Vision of Learning: A Case Study of Beginning Guitar Class
• 3 Critical Pedagogy in Action: A Study on Interaction and Dialogue in Musical Composition
• 4 Creative Strategies for Learning Brazilian Popular Piano
• 5 Creative Practice and Reflexive Musical Interaction with an Adolescent with Autism
• 6 Music, Movement and Creativity
• 7 Interaction and Development of Musical Creativity in Elementary School: An Ethnography in a School Context
• 8 Collaborative Musical Composition at School: Theoretical and Methodological Interfaces in the Field of Creative Learning
• 9 Creative Teaching in Music Education: A Study in a Choir Singing Context
• 10 Accounts of Music Knowledge Mobilization: Creativity as a Tool for Self-Regulating Learning
• Conclusion
• Index