Music Education Special Interest Group
Research Seminar Announcement
'Flow' in the musical activities of novice and advanced musicians
Marcos Araújo (PhD student at the Department of Communication and Art of University of Aveiro, Portugal)
Monday 18th May
16.00 – 17.00
Room: 834
Further details from Lucy Green, l.green@ioe.ac.uk
All are welcome
Abstract
In this seminar Marcos will present studies on flow in the context of music practice. In the first part he will briefly review studies that show how the idea and promotion of flow can be beneficial to music learning processes. In the second part he presents two aspects of his current research. The first concerns a cross-sectional survey to investigate the dispositions to flow in practising alone, and to what extent some efficient practice behaviours adopted by advanced musicians are related to their flow dispositions. The second involved a short intervention with nine novice classical guitar students from a Portuguese conservatoire. It consisted of i) an informal lecture about informal learning approaches (e.g. learning by ear, experimentation, improvisation, use of figures, tablature, etc.); ii) group learning activities, with the main purpose being the application of classical techniques in other musical genres; and iii) a 'musical moment', where the students presented their own shared musical outcomes. The participants filled in a questionnaire at the end of the activity, assessing flow and motivation for learning guitar in the future. An interview was also conducted with the teacher two months after the activity. The findings shed light on how daily practice can heighten positive affective responses (flow) in musicians vulnerable to the requirements and difficulties of deliberate practice. It leads to questions about the optimization and sustaining of flow in daily practice, offering future directions in the study of effective engagement with deliberate music practice.
Marcos Araújo is a former Erasmus student at the UCL IoE, and a member of the Music Education Special Interest Group. His PhD is in the music doctoral program at the Department of Communication and Art of University of Aveiro, Portugal. Member of INET/MD – Instituto de Etnomusicologia – Centro de Estudos de Música e Dança and the European Flow-Researchers Network (EFRN). He has presented his research in some of the main conferences on musical performance such as PERFORMA-2013 (Porto Alegre, Brazil), International Symposium on Performance Science 2013 (Vienna, Austria), and Performance Studies Network 3rd International Conference (Cambridge, UK), and published in peer-reviewed journals and publishers such as Psychology of Music and Springer. His research interests include flow and the cognitive and affective processes underlying music practices. As a musician, Marcos has been giving concerts both as a solo and chamber classical guitarist in Brazil, Portugal and UK.
