Nikki Moran

• University of Edinburgh

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...

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 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...

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).

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...

Human interaction involves the exchange of temporally coordinated, multimodal cues. Our work focused on interaction in the visual domain, using music performance as a case for analysis due to its temporally diverse and hierarchical structures. We made use of two improvising duo datasets—(i) performances of a jazz standard with a regular pulse and (...

Successful duetting requires that musicians coordinate their performance with their partners. In the case of turn-taking in improvised performance they need to be able to predict their partner's turn-end in order to accurately time their own entries. Here we investigate the cues used for accurate turn-end prediction in musical improvisations, focus...

Conductors use body movements to communicate their interpretations of musical works though performance directions regarding selected musical features. The aim of this study was to examine how the kinematic features of conducting movements relate to compositional elements such as rhythmic patterns, melodic peaks, dynamic changes, and also how they r...

Previous research has shown that literacy influences some dimensions of the visual (or graphic) representation of temporal events, and that concepts of time vary across cultures. The present exploratory study extends the scope of this research by examining representations of brief rhythmic sequences by individuals living in literate and nonliterate...

In witnessing face-to-face conversation, observers perceive authentic communication according to the social contingency of nonverbal feedback cues ('back-channeling') by non-speaking interactors. The current study investigated the generality of this function by focusing on nonverbal communication in musical improvisation. A perceptual experiment wa...

Imagery has long been considered an important part of music practice, yet its use in professional musicians’ practice and teaching has not yet received a great amount of research attention. A participant observation study of a 5-day masterclass for 11 expert pianists, given by the pianist and Alexander technique teacher Nelly Ben-Or (NBO), examined...

The agenda in music research that is broadly recognized as embodied music cognition has arrived hand-in-hand with a social interpretation of music, focusing on the real-world basis of its performance, and fostering an empirical approach to musician movement regarding the communicative function and potential of those movements. However, embodied cog...

In cross-cultural research involving performers from distinct cultural backgrounds (U.K., Japan, Papua New Guinea), we examined 75 musicians’ associations between musical sound and shape, and saw pronounced differences between groups. Participants heard short stimuli varying in pitch contour and were asked to represent these visually on paper, with...

This article sets out the methodology and results of part of an ethnographic study of North Indian music performance where qualitative interviews were analyzed with grounded theory to explore how musicians conceive of musical communication. The findings highlight the importance of socially-responsive movement cues that musicians use to co-ordinate...

This article examines the usefulness of Knowledge Exchange (KE) funding streams for higher education community music research projects, with a case study of one particular project that took place between February and April 2010. The project was funded via a KE stream, linking University researchers with a well-established community music charity ba...

This paper reports on a knowledge exchange project, funded by the Scottish Funding Council and undertaken by a group of researchers from three higher education institutions in Scotland and the project partner, Sistema Scotland. This newly established charity is attempting to implement a major programme of social change, developed in Venezuela, with...

The study focuses on the communication processes in improvised music performance by duos, exploring the relationship of musical communication to movement in spontaneous, everyday human social interaction. The study presented here examined improvising instrumentalist musicians' looking behaviours (their ostensive direction of attention as presented...