Towards a Psychology of Coordination: Exploring Feeling and Focus in theIndividual and Group in Music-making.

Coordination;Attention;Aesthetic;Choral Performance;Ethnography;Music-making;Psychology;Social Sciences;Psychology

Stephens, John PaulMaitlis, Sally ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Coordination;    Attention;    Aesthetic;    Choral Performance;    Ethnography;    Music-making;    Psychology;    Social Sciences;    Psychology;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/75864/jpsteph_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Organizing involves unifying the work of many into the work of a whole group ororganization. This occurs through the continuously adaptive performance of coordinationby individuals within a group. Although how individuals act on behalf of the group isshaped by what is perceived by their minds and senses, we know little about what groupmembers focus on and feel while coordinating. Two studies examined individualattention and feeling in groups coordinating their efforts to make music. I chose groupmusic-making as a setting to explore these issues because it exhibits attention and feelingin uniquely observable ways. In Study 1, I used a four-group experimental design tostudy how a focus on attention to self, to other and to the self-in-relation-to-other affectedthe quality of coordination for individuals performing a group song-composition task. InStudy 2, I used the ethnographic methods of participant-observation and qualitativeinterviewing to examine the primacy of feelings or aesthetics in how individualscoordinate sounds as they sing as a choir.Both studies revealed that individuals coordinate with others based on theirperceptions of either ;;parts” or ;;wholes” through attention and feeling. Experimentalgroups in which members displayed more attention to others in relation to attention to theself were more responsive than groups in which members displayed more attention to theself. Groups with more responsive members were judged to have higher coordinationquality, and reported more feelings of the group working as a substantive whole. The experiences of singing as a choir revealed that performers use the aesthetic or feeling ofbeauty, as well as attention, to coordinate. Performers know whether to maintain or adjusttheir efforts based on experiencing the desirable, beautiful cohesive whole of a fineperformance (high quality coordination), or the discomforting, poor-qualityfragmentation of a poor performance (low quality coordination). The choir’s conductoralso shaped both performers’ attentional focus and use of beauty as a standard forcoordination. Together, the studies reveal how the work of individuals is at once the workof the group, and how both cognitive and aesthetic knowledge shape coordination.