### What Counts as Research?
- When does making music become research?
- What is **your research**?
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- If a composer writes a piece simply to create something interesting, expressive, or enjoyable, **is that research?**
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- Not every act of making music is necessarily research.
- So, what makes artistic practice **research**?
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### Artistic Research
Artistic practice can become research when making is a way of:
- **asking questions**
- **exploring possibilities**
- **generating knowledge**
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### Artistic Research Can Also Investigate People
Artistic research can investigate **human experience, behavior, and interaction**.
For example:
- How do listeners perceive a particular sound?
- How do performers interact with a new instrument?
- How does an audience experience spatial audio?
- How do musicians use AI in their creative process?
- How does a new interface change musical behavior?
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### Can We Conduct Artistic Research Using **Traditional Academic Research Methods**?
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### Traditional Academic Researchers Might:
1. formulate a question;
2. collect evidence;
3. analyze evidence;
4. develop an argument;
5. communicate conclusions.
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### Artistic Researchers Might:
1. encounter a problem and formulate a provisional question;
2. make, build, and experiment;
3. encounter unexpected results;
4. modify the work and reflect on what happened;
5. contextualize the findings and formulate new questions.
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### When People Are Part of the Investigation
We can learn through:
- **interviews**
- **surveys**
- **observation**
- **user testing**
- **performance studies**
- **listening experiments**
- **focus groups**
The people involved can become an important source of **research evidence**.
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### We Often Struggle to Distinguish Between **Artistic Creation** and **Thesis Research**.
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### Artistic Research Is Not Simply “Being Creative.”
It involves:
- identifying questions or problems;
- investigating through **artistic practice**;
- reflecting on what emerges;
- articulating and documenting the findings;
- **contextualizing** and communicating the knowledge produced.
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### What Is Contextualizing?
Contextualizing means placing your artistic work within a broader **artistic, historical, theoretical, cultural, or social context**.
It helps the reader or audience understand:
- **What already exists?** (where the work comes from)
↓
- **How does my work relate to it?** (what it responds to)
↓
- **What does my work add, challenge, or change?** (why it matters)
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For example, if you create a piece using **granular synthesis**:
- **Without context:**
> “I created a piece using granular synthesis.”
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- **With context:**
> “My piece explores granular synthesis as a way of disrupting our perception of continuity. This builds on the work of Curtis Roads and earlier experimental approaches to sound fragmentation.”
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- What are you doing? → Using granular synthesis
- What are you investigating? → **Perception of continuity**
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- **Who/what came before?** → Curtis Roads and earlier experimental practices
- **What is the relationship?** → Your work **builds on** those practices
- **Where does your work sit historically/artistically?** → Within a tradition of experimenting with sound fragmentation
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### Example Cases: **Music-Making Can Be Artistic Research**
When someone is:
- composing to **investigate** a particular musical idea or problem;
- designing a musical interface and **examining** how it changes musical interaction;
- experimenting with an unconventional tuning system to **explore** its musical possibilities;
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- building an interactive performance system to **investigate** relationships between performer, technology, and audience;
- studying a synthesizer's history to **understand** how its design shaped musical practice;
- investigating how machine learning **influences or transforms** compositional decisions.
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### The Central Question Is Not Simply What We Make, but What We Learn Through Making.
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### Another Example: Interactive Instrument
**Artistic Research**
- How does interface latency affect a performer's sense of musical agency?
You might:
- build an instrument;
- experiment with different latency conditions;
- perform with it;
- reflect on your own experience.
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### Adding Human Research
You might also ask:
- **How do performers experience different amounts of latency?**
You could:
- have several performers use the instrument;
- observe their interactions;
- interview them afterward;
- compare their experiences.
Now, the performers' experiences become **evidence**.
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### Different Kinds of Evidence (Quantitative and Qualitative Evidence)
Research does not always produce numbers.
You might collect:
**Quantitative evidence**
- response times
- ratings
- frequency of behaviors
- survey responses
- performance data
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**Qualitative evidence**
- interviews
- observations
- descriptions of experiences
- performer reflections
- audience responses
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### Research With Human Participants
If your research involves people as research participants, consider:
- informed consent;
- privacy and confidentiality;
- potential risks;
- how data will be collected and stored;
- whether your institution requires **research-ethics review or IRB approval**.
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### Now, Do You Have a Better Idea of What Kind of Research You Are Going to Conduct?
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### Music Technology Is Not Neutral
If you are having trouble finding a research topic, let's consider the following inquiry:
- How do our technologies **shape** the way we make music?
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### The DAW Is Not Just a Tool
A DAW may appear to be simply a tool for recording and producing music, but it also embodies assumptions:
- music can be represented as **tracks**;
- time can be represented **visually**;
- musical events can be **quantized**;
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- pitch can be represented through particular **tuning systems**;
- sound can be represented as **editable objects**;
- musical structure can be organized through **timelines**;
- production can be organized around particular **workflows**.
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### Technology Can Shape Musical Practice
Technology does not simply enable musical practices—it can also **shape them**.
Technological design can influence:
- how musicians think;
- how they work;
- what they consider possible;
- what kinds of music they create.
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### Interesting Idea vs. Research Question
You may already have something you want to make, but an interesting idea is not yet a research question.
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### Start With an Interest
For example:
- granular synthesis;
- AI and composition;
- custom controllers;
- spatial audio;
- improvisation;
- electronic performance;
- machine listening;
- unusual tuning systems.
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### Then Ask: Why?
**What interests you about it?**
For example:
- “I am interested in granular synthesis.”
↓
- “I am interested in how granular synthesis can disrupt the perception of continuity.”
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### Then Ask: What Is the Problem?
A research problem identifies something that is:
- **unclear**
- **unexplored**
- **unresolved**
- or worth **reconsidering**
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For example:
- “Granular synthesis is often used to create fragmented or transformed sounds.”
↓
- But how does this fragmentation affect the listener's perception of continuity?
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### Summary: From Topic to Question
**Topic:**
- Granular synthesis
↓
**Interest:**
- Perception of continuity
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**Problem:**
- How fragmented sound affects the perception of continuous musical events
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**Research Question:**
- How can granular synthesis be used to investigate the perception of continuity in musical time?
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### A Good Research Question Should Be:
- **specific enough** to investigate;
- **open-ended** rather than answerable with yes/no;
- connected to a **problem or tension**;
- possible to investigate through your available methods;
- meaningful beyond the production of a single artwork.
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### Avoid the “How Do I...?” Question
A common starting point is:
- “How do I make **__**?”
This is usually a **design or production question**, not yet a research question.
For example:
- “How do I make an interactive musical instrument?”
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Instead, ask:
- **What can I learn by making an interactive musical instrument?**
or:
- **How does the design of an interactive instrument affect the performer's musical decision-making?**
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### Summary: From Making to Investigating
Think about three levels:
### 1. What Will I Make?
- An interactive musical instrument.
### 2. What Will I Investigate Through Making It?
- The relationship between interface design and musical decision-making.
### 3. What Might I Learn?
- How different interface designs shape performers' choices and behaviors.
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### The Research Question Can Evolve as the Research Develops.
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### The Research Question Can Change
Your initial question does **not** need to be perfect.
Artistic research is often **iterative**.
You may begin with:
- “How does latency affect musical performance?”
↓
- **Experiment**
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- **Unexpected result**
↓
- New question:
“How does unpredictable latency affect a performer's perception of agency?”
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### Classroom Activity: What Is Your Research Problem?
Try completing these sentences:
- **I am interested in...**
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- **I notice that...**
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- **But I don't yet understand...**
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- **I want to investigate...**
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- **I will investigate this through...**
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- **I might learn...**
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### Your Thesis in One Sentence
Try to complete:
- **I will investigate [QUESTION] through [ARTISTIC PRACTICE] in order to understand [KNOWLEDGE/INSIGHT].**
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For example:
- **I will investigate how interface latency affects a performer's sense of musical agency through the design and performance of an interactive instrument in order to understand how technological constraints shape musical decision-making.**
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### By Next Week (ASAP!)
You should have a sense of:
- **What interests you?**
- **What problem or curiosity does it raise?**
- **What do you want to investigate?**
- **What might your research question be?**
**Next week:**
What will you make, and how will you investigate it?