Naturalistic artistic decision-making and metacognition in the music studio

Abstract

Professional artistic contexts, such as studio-based music production, are rarely investigated in naturalistic decision-making (NDM) research, though creative work is characterised by uncertainty, risk, a lack of clearly definable goals, and in the case of music production, a complex socio-technical working environment that brings together a diverse group of specialized collaborators. This study investigates NDM in the music production studio. In music production, there is a professional role explicitly tasked with taking decisions-the (record) producer. The producer, as a creative collaborator, is differentiated as a problem-solver, solution creator and goal setter. This investigation looks at the producer's metacognitive abilities for reflecting on the nature of problems and decisions. An important challenge for this study is to develop methods for observing decision-making without unrealistically reducing the amount of uncertainty around outcomes or creative intention within a studio production. In the face of that, a method is proposed that combines socio-cultural musicology and cognitive approaches and uses ethnographic data. Preliminary findings shed light on how the producer in this study self-manages his decisions and his interactions with, and in response to, the production environment; how decisions and actions sustain collaboration; how experience is utilized to identify scenarios and choose actions; and the kinds of strategies employed and their expected outcomes. Findings provide evidence that exercising producing skills and performing production tasks involve metacognitive reflection.

Metacognición y Música: Una Revisión del Ámbito de Aplicación

“…No obstante, durante el proceso de elegibilidad se descartaron 9 trabajos: uno en francés (Peral & Dubé, 2012), un artículo de opinión (Jabusch, 2016), tres revisiones (Concina, 2019;Oliveira et al, 2021;Varela et al, 2016), otros dos artículos conceptuales (Benton, 2013;Kruse-Weber & Marín, 2016) y otro artículo publicado en una revista sin el suficiente índice de impacto (Hakan, 2016). Asimismo, en otros dos artículos, el planteamiento de la intervención no se basaba en estrategias metacognitivas (Burwell & Shipton, 2013) y en el otro caso, la intervención no estaba realizada exactamente en contextos educativos (Lefford & Thompson, 2018). Los 13 artículos incluidos en esta revisión fueron publicados entre 2012 y 2022, en varios países, en revistas científicas de impacto especializadas en diferentes ámbitos de la psicología o de la pedagogía musical.…”

Creative metacognition in design thinking: exploring theories, educational practices, and their implications for measurement

“…A concern expressed in creativity research at large is the need for more naturalistic observations to increase ecological validity ( Rafner et al, 2022 ; Jaschek et al, 2023 ). Some studies already move in this direction, such as Lefford and Thompson (2018) . We want to emphasize the possibility of combining naturalistic observations with controlled competency tests and quantifications.…”

Towards an understanding of creativity in independent music production

“…Pras and Guastavino (2011, 77) further classify the role of the producer and audio engineer across three domains: 'mission, skills, and interaction' . o ver the past fifteen years, scholarly writings on studio recording practice have focused on the systems model of creativity (McIntyre 2008(McIntyre , 2012), sites of cultural production (Bates 2012;Bennett and Bates 2018;Watson 2014), decision-making and roles (Lefford and Thompson 2018), and interdisciplinary theories of creativity (Slater and Martin 2012;Thompson 2019;Zagorski-Thomas 2014). o ther scholars move away from the idealized notion of the recording studio as a specialized place where hits are made.…”