Simon Zagorski-Thomas says:

I’m going to get a little ‘meta’ in my peer review but I’ll end with a couple of questions. First though – this was really interesting, both in terms of the documentation of your practice (Results/Sources) perspective and the Analysis in the last 20 minutes of discussion. There were several points made in both parts about using the unfamiliar as a spur to creativity and prompting freedom or divergence from your normal ways of working and thinking. That, I think, was a theme across all five videos: from the micro level of how tuning breaks the habitual connection between your finger movements and the sounds that emerge, to the ways that having to engage with someone else’s practice revealed ways of thinking and doing differently in your own practice. That’s really the basic idea behind the Research Challenges as a concept. You also both mentioned – or at least hinted at – the idea that you were used to working alone. I presume that means as lone composers as I’m pretty sure both of you do a lot of musical collaborating. That got me thinking about how the research challenge format – along with the whole Open Research Project collaborative approach of the C21MP Research Centre – is or isn’t achieving its research goals of bringing that collaborative aspect of research more to the forefront. Practice Research has tended to be about either individual creativity or, when collaborative, about a group working with defined roles towards an end. The C21MP idea is to get multiple people to engage with the same research problem from multiple directions and then to explore what they can learn from each other.
The professional structures of both research and music making are built around us being able to identify and demarcate our contribution – our individuality and thence our reputation. That’s reflected in the ways that career paths and the professional practice that we engage in to traverse those pathways are assessed based on how we can identify our individual contribution. You’ve both played in bands / ensembles and you know that the way you interact with the rest of the group is just as much of a skill and makes just as much of a contribution as your individual actions. The same is true of research. The (often informal and un-documented) interactions at conferences and workshops have often led to important and seismic shifts in knowledge – the jump in the Research-Creation world that came from Natalie Loveless’ Knowings & Knots event at the University of Alberta, the conference panels and discussions that led to both the Social Construction of Technology and Actor-Network Theory, and my own experiences with the Art of Record Production community. This Research Centre’s methods are an attempt to make those types of communication and collaboration into something more concrete and, most importantly, open to a whole community rather than only those who were invited to be in the room, go to the bar afterwards or sit at the ‘right’ dinner table. And it seeks to extend them from presentation and discussion into experiments and demonstrations that provoke responses and new ideas.
You two did something that I don’t think anyone else did in the challenge, which was to end with a description of ‘next steps’ – of where and how you might explore these tuning ideas further. The couple of questions that I said I’d end with are:
1. Did this process teach you anything about your research activity (hopefully as well about using guitar tuning) and, if so, what and how do you think it will be useful?
2. In relation to the ‘next steps’, what should or could the research centre do to explore and utilise this process of collaborative research? That question’s more about methods and methodology than about the specifics of guitars and creativity.