Creative arts engagement has been shown to be related to maintaining wellbeing in older adulthood (Tymoszuk et al., 2019). For people living with dementia, music can be engaging and rewarding (Baird & Thompson, 2018), and is often presented as a therapeutic activity. It is theorised that music’s capacity to effect change is due to its engaging, emotional, physical, personal, social and persuasive qualities (Brancatisano et al., 2020). However, music itself is a complex intervention (Loui, 2020) and the ‘creative’ in music activities in the small number of studies with people living with dementia is rarely described or critiqued (Creech et al., 2020). Music is often described as passive (receptive)/active to reflect different listening or playing activities. Only a few studies detail opportunities for people living with dementia to exercise creativity (e.g. Zeilig et al., 2019).Technology to assist these musical interactions in dementia falls under distinct categories of listening to music, or playing music, with very little afforded in the way of agency, choice or control (MacRitchie et al., 2023). A few possible explanations could be: i) the musical activity is valued in terms of pre/post cognitive or social changes (Kontos & Grigorovich, 2018) i.e., the activity itself is not particularly critiqued, ii) creativity is assumed to be embedded in the activity and does not need to be enhanced or supported, iii) the locus of creativity is in cognitive processes occurring in the brain, so people living with dementia are often ascribed a passive role in creative musical interactions (Zeilig et al., 2019). We propose a new way of thinking about musical interactions for people living with dementia, building from the enactive, embodied experience of music (Schiavio et al., 2022), and considering a more relational view. Leaving aside the framing where the person with dementia is limited in what creativity they can offer, we propose instead a framework of design where subtle acts of agency and (mini-C) creativity are afforded, supporting a myriad of musical interactions that sit between listening and performing.
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The dissertation Pathways of Musical Creativity shows that students’ musical creativity can develop in an intervention with Video Feedback Coaching for teachers, mediated by their support of students’ creative autonomy during classroom interactions in music lessons. Autonomy support entails fostering students' self-determined learning by providing space for their own choices and interests. The intervention introduced teachers to music-pedagogical strategies for enhancing classroom interaction in order to transition from a teacher- and method-centered style to a student-centered and autonomy-supportive interaction approach. This PhD research also took the nonverbal components of teachers' autonomy support into account because classroom interaction in music lessons is also nonverbal and musical in nature.Teachers changed their interaction style during the intervention to one that supported more autonomy, and they were less likely to return to mainly instruction and modelling. Although for verbal autonomy support a beneficial effect was observed, teachers found it more difficult to provide higher levels of non-verbal autonomy support in music teaching. In turn, students showed more originality and variation in their creative thinking and acting in music. Although over half of the classes engaged in playing more complex rhythmical patterns over the course of the intervention, at group-level no effect for this aspect was found in comparison to a control group. These findings suggest that in both primary education and teacher education, more focus should be placed on enhancing classroom interaction and supporting students’ creative autonomy support in music lessons.
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In primary music education a key question is what teachers can do to stimulate students’ musical creativity. For the answer, delving into teacher-student interaction during the creative processes in the naturalistic setting of primary music lessons is required. Twenty-six music lessons from thirteen teachers and their classes of seven Dutch schools were recorded to explore the relation between teachers’ autonomy support and students’ divergent and convergent thought & action. Quantitative sequential analysis and thematic analysis were combined to examine this relation, using a framework offered by Complex Dynamic Systems theory and Enaction theory. In contrast to classical correla-tional analysis, sequential analysis focuses on the dynamics, and thus on the temporal relation in classroom interaction. The results show that mostly lower-level autonomy support was offered. Es-pecially in creative lessons, higher-level autonomy support is more likely to lead to higher-level student divergent thought and action. For convergent thought and action, the results were less con-clusive. An implication of the findings is that (research into) music education could benefit from interventions aimed at enhancing autonomy support in primary school music.
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Created by founder Josep Garces, LiveLoop introduces a professional looping software for live music performance, designed to expand the possibilities of the looping technique. Musicians compose and play multi-layered performances build on multiple musical-phrase-recordings played back in real time. With LiveLoop, artists can compose and perform in real time as a one-man band. LiveLoop offers a unique product for professional and beginner musicians, through an intuitive and easy-to-use software which eliminates the need for equipment and is available at an affordable price. The software provides versatility and comprehensive features, empowering the users to compose with maximum creativity.
