Andrea Schiavio

University of York

The present study investigated the role of motor and audiovisual learning in the memorization of four tonally ambiguous melodies for piano. A total of one hundred and twenty participants divided into three groups — pianists, other musicians (i.e., not pianists), and nonmusicians — learned the melodies through either playing them on a keyboard (play...

Despite evolutionary musicology's interdisciplinary nature, and the diverse methods it employs, the field has nevertheless tended to divide into two main positions. Some argue that music should be understood as a naturally selected adaptation, while others claim that music is a product of culture with little or no relevance for the survival of the...

In this article we explore the role of pre-reflective, embodied, and interactive intentionality in joint musical performance. Putting together insights from phenomenology and current theories in cognitive science, we present a case study based on qualitative interviews with the Danish String Quartet (DSQ). A total of 12 hours of interviews was reco...

The subject of musical emotions has emerged only recently as a major area of research. While much work in this area offers fascinating insights to musicological research, assumptions about the nature of emotional experience seem to remain committed to appraisal, representations, and a rule-based or information-processing model of cognition. Over th...

Recent embodied approaches in cognitive sciences emphasize the constitutive roles of bodies and environment in driving cognitive processes. Cognition is thus seen as a distributed system based on the continuous interaction of bodies, brains, and environment. These categories, moreover, do not relate only causally, through a sequential input–output...

It has been demonstrated that moving together in synchrony to music makes us feel connected. Yet, little is known about the individual differences that shape the relationship between interpersonal synchronization to music and social bonding. The present research tests the hypothesis that this association is influenced by differences in empathy and...

There is limited empirical research devoted to exploring children's subjective responses to music, despite extensive examination in the literature of their ability to recognize emotions said to be expressed by music. To address this gap, we recruited 26 participants aged between 5 and 11 years with the aim of learning more about their capacity to r...

Shared flow can be conceptualised as a collective state of flow that emerges within a group. It has been recently suggested that shared flow involves a spectrum of self-other overlap, joint attention, and social interaction, further facilitated by context and experience. To empirically test this, four gamelan groups - a musical ensemble originating...

Research in the field of crossmodal correspondences has documented the widespread existence of consistent crossmodal associations between simple auditory and visual stimuli or dimensions (e.g., pitch-lightness) [see 1, for a review]. Far fewer studies have investigated the association between complex auditory stimuli and visually presented concepts...

Psychology of Music is a flourishing area of research in the Western Balkans. However, much of its findings and insights have remained relatively unknown outside the region. Psychological Perspectives on Musical Experiences and Skills features recent research from the Western Balkans, foregrounding its specific topics, methods, and influences, and...

Psychology of Music is a flourishing area of research in the Western Balkans. However, much of its findings and insights have remained relatively unknown outside the region. Psychological Perspectives on Musical Experiences and Skills features recent research from the Western Balkans, foregrounding its specific topics, methods, and influences, and...

It has been demonstrated that moving together in synchrony to music makes us feel connected. Yet, little is known about the individual differences that shape the relationship between interpersonal synchronization to music and social bonding. The present research tests the hypothesis that this association is influenced by differences in empathy and...

To what extent does playing a musical instrument contribute to an individual’s construction of knowledge? This paper aims to address this question by examining music performance from an embodied perspective and offering a narrative-style review of the main literature on the topic. Drawing from both older theoretical frameworks on motor learning and...

Although various social factors can significantly impact creative performance, it is still unclear how social cohesion (i.e., how close we feel to others) influences creativity. We therefore conducted two studies exploring the association between social cohesion and creativity within the domain of musical improvisation, a prime example of creative...

We introduce a new inventory labeled the Processes and Relationships in Composers Scale (PRCS). This is a novel inventory developed to self-assess creative and social factors inherent in music composition. The PRCS consists of two separate scales of 12 items each, namely the Composing Processes Scale (CPS) and the Social Relationship Scale (SRS). A...

The present study proposes a new approach to musical referentiality and its alleged tendency to relate to bodily experience and movement. To address this, we collected a corpus of 38,587 words (2,265 verbal descriptions of ‘associations’ or ‘imagery’ sparked by short musical excerpts by 554 participants from 32 countries). We tested the hypotheses...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused major changes to many areas at the very heart of our lives, triggering interventions that affected people’s everyday activities, both socially and individually. The use of e-learning and online platforms to support music education and performance created a drastic shift in how music was taught, made, and enjoyed. This q...

Over recent decades, studies investigating cross-modal correspondences have documented the existence of a wide range of consistent cross-modal associations between simple auditory and visual stimuli or dimensions (e.g., pitch-lightness). Far fewer studies have investigated the association between complex and realistic auditory stimuli and visually...

In this paper we suggest that basic forms of musical entrainment may be considered as intrinsically creative, enabling further creative behaviors which may flourish at different levels and timescales. Rooted in an agent's capacity to form meaningful couplings with their sonic, social, and cultural environment, musical entrainment favors processes o...

In a previous study, we found that musical learning of novices was equally accurate (in terms of playing the correct rhythms and pitches) when learning in a solo or duo setting. Intrigued by these findings, we conducted a follow-up experiment investigating whether the learning outcomes differed in subjective terms as perceived by listeners judging...

Synaesthesia has been conceptualised as a joining of sensory experiences. Taking a holistic, embodied perspective, we investigate in this paper the role of action and emotion, testing hypotheses related to (1) changes to action-related qualities of a musical stimulus affect the resulting synaesthetic experience; (2) a comparable relationship exists...

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 cr...

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...

Les approches de la cognition incarnée conçoivent la vie mentale comme émergeant de la relation permanente entre les ressources neurales et extra-neurales. Ces dernières comprennent, tout d’abord, le corps dans sa totalité mais aussi les schèmes d’activité mis en œuvre dans un milieu donné, les normes culturelles, les facteurs sociaux, ainsi que le...

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 int...

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 be...

Minds offers an innovative account of human musicality that draws on recent developments in embodied cognitive science and many other fields of research. 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 hu...

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...

In a previous study, it was found that novice musicians learning to play short musical pieces in different modalities were equally accurate in both solo and duo settings. Intrigued by these findings, we conducted a new experiment to explore whether differences between solo and duo musical learning might be differentially appreciated from a perceive...

The present article provides an in-depth look at the strategies and practices developed by a cohort of primary school music teachers in Italy to deliver online music lessons during the COVID-19 lockdown. We used a qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews to bring out our participants’ voices and reflections in a very personal man...

Meet4Music (M4M) is a low-threshold community music program based at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria, offering free participatory sessions to people from all social and cultural backgrounds, including students. The program allows attendees to experience an emerging field of music pedagogy and approach current challenges of...

In a newly designed collaborative online music course, four musical novices unknown to each other learned to play the clarinet starting from zero. Over the course of 12 lessons, a special emphasis was placed on creativity, mutual interaction, and bodily movement. Although addressing these dimensions might be particularly challenging in distance lea...

In the present study, we combined first-, second-, and third-person levels of analysis to explore the feeling of being and acting together in the context of collaborative artistic performance. Following participation in an international competition held in Czech Republic in 2018, a team of ten artistic swimmers took part in the study. First, a self...

Creativity research has generated an impressive body of literature that spans a range of disciplines. Despite this diversity, however, creativity studies have traditionally tended to focus on the evaluation of products generated by creative people, which are categorized in various ways according to their reception and impact on society. This orient...

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 e...

In this paper, we advance the thesis that music-making can be advantageously understood as an exploratory phenomenon. While music-making is certainly about aesthetic expression, from a phenomenological, cognitive, and even evolutionary perspective, it more importantly concerns structured explorations of the world around us, our minds, and our bodie...

The perspectives of music teachers and students on the main benefits of collaborative musical learning are explored in this chapter. Qualitative data from two recently conducted studies are discussed through the main conceptual resources of the “embodied approach” to mind. In these studies, an open-ended questionnaire was administered to expert mus...

The capacity of expert musicians to coordinate with each other when playing in ensembles or rehearsing has been widely investigated. However, little is known about the ability of novices to achieve satisfactory coordinated behaviour when making music together. We tested whether performance accuracy differs when novices play a newly learned drumming...

What do musical creativity and musical skill acquisition have in common? In what sense is creativity implicated in the development of novel musical abilities, and how does the process of building a repertoire of musical skills affect creative cognition? In trying to answer to these questions, the present chapter adopts conceptual resources from res...

The recent COVID-19 health emergency has forced many music teachers to adopt remote teaching methods. The present paper investigates the practices and strategies used by conservatory-level music teachers to give lessons online in different European countries and the USA. Data from an exploratory qualitative study were collected using semi-structure...

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 resea...

The present paper reports data from an original qualitative study that investigates how music students reacted to novel remote teaching strategies that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. A population of twenty learners enrolled at an Italian conservatory responded to an open-ended survey, verbalising their recent learning experiences concerning...

Current literature on creative cognition has developed rich conceptual landscapes dedicated to the analysis of both individual and collective forms of creativity. This work has favored the emergence of unifying theories on domain-general creative abilities in which the main experiential, behavioral, computational, and neural aspects involved in eve...

Creativity studies have traditionally tended to focus on the evaluation of products generated by creative people, which are categorized in various ways according to their reception and impact on society. This orientation has been advanced in various ways by including factors such as process, personality, and cultural pressures. While these approach...

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting imposition of physical distancing rules had consequences in the domains of music and sport. The present study sought to analyze how the COVID-19 lockdown period affected interpersonal relationships between music teachers and students and sports coaches and athletes. As part of a semi-structured interview...

In the current study, we investigate the implementation of a musical workshop in an early childhood education setting. The workshop is based on a shared space for musical creativity (the Active Musical Room) comprising six different musically relevant objects, which toddlers were free to explore and play with. Inspired by Delalande’s Pedagogie musi...

THIS IS THE PRE-COPYEDITED VERSION OF A PAPER THAT HAS BEEN RECENTLY ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION IN THE JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN MUSIC EDUCATION, PUBLICATION DUE IN 2021. PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR CITE THIS VERSION

In a qualitative study, we explored the range of reflections and experiences involved in the composition of score-based music by administering a 15-item, open-ended, questionnaire to seven professional composers from Europe and North America. Adopting a grounded theory approach, we organized six different codes emerging from our data into two highe...

In an experimental study, we investigated how well novices can learn from each other in situations of technology-aided musical skill acquisition, comparing joint and solo learning, and learning through imitation, synchronization, and turn-taking. Fifty-four participants became familiar, either solo or in pairs, with three short musical melodies and...

In this article, we report data from two survey studies administered to expert music teachers. Both questionnaires aimed to explore teachers’ pedagogical and performative practice and included open questions elucidating musical skills emerging in groups. The first study focuses on collective teaching settings offered to amateurs, jazz musicians, an...

The next special issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies will be centered on the theme "Embodiment in Music", a topic which allows our contributors to elaborate on their work and submit it to a peer-reviewed, open access journal (without paying any fee).

Embodied approaches to cognition conceive of mental life as emerging from the ongoing relationship between neural and extra-neural resources. The latter include, first and foremost, our entire body, but also the activity patterns enacted within a contingent milieu, cultural norms, social factors, and the features of the environment that can be used...

The conceptual resources of '4E' music cognition-i.e. the embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive paradigms have offered a rich set of tools to explore the nature of musical experience. Among these four approaches , the extended mind perspective has heretofore received less overall attention. In this paper we focus on further developing the musi...

In this paper, we present a qualitative study comparing individual and collective music pedagogies from the point of view of the learner. In doing so, we discuss how the theoretical tools of embodied cognitive science (ECS) can provide adequate resources to capture the main properties of both contexts. We begin by outlining the core principles of E...

In the current study, 11 expert music teachers were asked to reflect on their own practice and compare their experience of individual and collective teaching settings. Adopting an approach based on grounded theory, two interrelated themes were identified in the raw data: teaching issues and professional development. In both categories, the notion o...

The phenomenon of creativity has received a growing amount of attention from scholars working across a range of disciplines. While this research has produced many important insights, it has also traditionally tended to explore creativity in terms of the reception of products or outcomes, conceiving of it as a cognitive process that is limited to th...

Recent approaches in the cognitive and psychological sciences conceive of mind as an Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and Enactive (or 4E) phenomenon. While this has stimulated important discussions and debates across a vast array of disciplines, its principles, applications, and explanatory power have not yet been properly addressed in the domain of...

In this paper, we report on a qualitative study based on the "Meet4Music" (M4M) project recently developed at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria. M4M is a low-threshold community-based program where participatory sessions dedicated to different artistic activities are freely offered to people from different social and cultura...

In this paper, we report on a qualitative study based on the "Meet4Music" (M4M) project recently developed at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria. M4M is a low-threshold community-based program where participatory sessions dedicated to different artistic activities are freely offered to people from different social and cultura...

In this paper we explore early musical behaviors through the lenses of the recently emerged “4E” approach to mind, which sees cognitive processes as Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, and Extended. In doing so, we draw from a range of interdisciplinary research, engaging in critical and constructive discussions with both new findings and existing positio...

While Basic Emotion Theory (BET) has only just begun to be developed in musical contexts, its basic tenets align closely with many long-standing assumptions in music psychology. Indeed, musical emotions have traditionally been understood in terms of (ad hoc) emotion categories that are thought to correspond with specific neural mechanisms that supp...

Drawing from recent embodied and enactive frameworks in the cognitive sciences, in this chapter we explore musical interactivity as a form of 'participatory sense-making'. In providing conceptual grounding, we adopt the notion of 'mutual incorporation' inspired by the phenomenological tradition, and argue that joint musical practice is best underst...

In this chapter I explore a possible alternative to traditional " paper-and-pencil " assessment practices in music classes. I argue that an approach based on phenomenological philosophy, and inspired by recent developments in cognitive science, may shed new light on learning, and help reconsider grading systems accordingly. After individuating the...

In this paper, we take a critical look at the notion of musical qualia. Although different conceptions of qualia are often used by theorists to describe musical experience, there is little consensus as to just what this entails. Broadly speaking, some argue that qualia are best understood as pregiven attributes of the musical environment, whereas o...

An enactive approach to music education is explored through the lens of critical ontology. Assumptions central to the Western academic music culture are critically discussed; and the conception of ‘ontological education’ is introduced as an alternative framework. It is argued that this orientation embraces more primordial ways of knowing and being,...

The present study investigated the role of motor and audiovisual learning in the memorization of four tonally ambiguous melodies for piano. A total of one hundred and twenty participants divided into three groups - pianists, other musicians (non-pianists), and non-musicians - learned the melodies through either playing them on a keyboard (‘playing...

The embodied approach to cognition associated with the interdisciplinary research program known as ‘enactivism’ is posing a growing challenge to traditional dualistic conceptions based in standard ‘information-processing’ or ‘mind-as-computer' models. The enactive approach sees bodily, affective and cognitive development as ontologically continuous...

In the current study, we examined the role of active experience on sensitivity to multisensory synchrony in six-month-old infants in a musical context. In the first of two experiments, we trained infants to produce a novel multimodal effect (i.e., a drum beat) and assessed the effects of this training, relative to no training, on their later percep...

An inter(en)active approach to musical agency and learning'. Source: Abstract Traditional accounts of music pedagogy tend to take forms that fit with cognitivist and functionalist approaches to cognition, leading to disembodied and ungrounded teaching modalities: one-to-one lessons, stimulus-response learning methodologies, and mental training. All...

The embodied paradigm recently applied to music cognition advocates the crucial role of the agents’ body for musical understanding. This standpoint holds that a basic form of musical meaning’s ascription is action-based, radically entwined with the level of motor knowledge of the listener or performer. Traditional music psychology often employs com...

The International Summer School on Musical Understanding (ISSMU) was held for three and half days, July 8 to 11, 2013, at the Department of Music of the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. Twenty-five postgraduate students from academic or research institutions from 15 countries participated in ISSMU. The authors (doctoral-level students...

Leman and Maes offer a comprehensive review of the main theoretical and empirical themes covered by the research on music and embodied cognition. Their article provides an insight into the work being carried at the Institute for Psychoacoustic and Electronic Music (IPEM) of Ghent University, Belgium, in which they work, and presents a theory of the...

During the past few decades, one of the core issues in the debate on human musicality has become explaining how we understand, or make sense of the musical material. Embodied music cognition and mediation technology 1 was written by Marc Leman with the aim to clarify this sense-giving process focusing on the cognitive relationship, in the broadest...

Context • The past few years have presented us with a growing amount of theoretical research (yet that is often based on neuroscientific developments) in the field of enactive music cognition. > Problem • Current cognitivist and embodied approaches to music cognition suffer, in our opinion, from a too firm commitment to the explanatory role of ment...

The notion of affordance has been introduced by Gibson (1977, 1979) as the feature of an object or the environment that allows the observer to perform an action, a set of "environmental supports for an organism's intentional activities" (Reybrouck 2005). Studied under very different perspectives, this concept has become a crucial issue not only for...

Despite an apparent common agreement on the impossibility to define correctly the complex phenomenon of music, some authors continue to look explicitly for a strict definition, while other contributors assume implicitly a predefined notion of mu-sic, often based on a modular conception of the mind/brain. While musical analysis and standard musicolo...

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