Practice-Based Methodological Design for Performance-Composition and Interdisciplinary Music Research

Abstract

Practice-based research has gained increasing prominence in the field of creative arts enquiry. Its engagement has fueled disruptive discourse on its nature, methodology and application in music research. Textbooks and journal publications on practice in arts-based research and a host of eminent practitioner-scholars have contributed to this nascent field of study. Several of these publications focus on the creative arts industry with fewer discourse on practice-based research approaches in the subdomains of music. This article deliberates on the multi-facets of practice-based approaches in performance, composition, and interdisciplinary music research. It shares the process of crafting methodological designs that encapsulate research in and of practice. Keywords that frame practice-based techniques include terms such as praxis, divergent and multi-methodological processes, design thinking, and research about/through/for practice as represented by performative-compositional artefacts and their accompanying discourse. Two exemplars are discussed. It argues that practice-oriented research transcends discipline borders encompassing interdisciplinary domains within multidisciplinary co-creational practice. In the author’s music-health studies, she views the interdisciplinarity of science-arts research as interpolated dimensions of collaborative scientific knowledge within an embodied cultural space that yields transformative creativities of translational research to reach its targeted community of users. Practice-centred research in music therefore embraces spheres of investigations with research-informed practice as its focus and its artefacts and discourse as inputs of and outputs from that research, incorporating the overarching paradigms of practice-led research, practice-based research, and creative research in the performing arts.