This research uses a practice-based methodology to answer the research question. During the period February 2024-January 2025, I organised eight workshops to conduct my research. Through these workshops, together with two fellow musicians, I investigated how we explored improvisation, sounds and graphic notation together with children using verbal communication, listening, music making and drawing. The workshops are not intended to have a pedagogical approach where the goal is to teach children about experimental music. The aim is to take a closer look at how we as musicians can act more as guides to provide children with a space in which they can shape the creative process, and we can invent music together on their terms.
In this study, I will use documentation from seven workshops conducted in Norway in the period February 2024 to January 2025, and one workshop in The Netherlands from November 2024.
Good documentation of the workshops is necessary, as they will be the source of knowledge. The workshops are documented either with video, pictures or audio. This varies from workshop to workshop due to the issue of consent.
To make it easier to get consent from the parents to document the workshops, I decided that only myself, my musicians and the research supervisor would see the original videos. In this research exposition, the children's faces will be blurred so that you cannot see the identity of each individual child. This was necessary in order to get permission from all the parents. Consent forms with this information were sent out in advance or given in the workshop itself. From workshop #5 there is no video documentation, but pictures.
In addition to the workshops, I have also documented a conversation with the other musicians after each workshop. For some of the conversations, I have used a guiding questionnaire with questions that I think are important for the development of the workshops. The questionare can be seen on the right of this section.
In order to get feedback from the children, I have chosen not to have any documentation other than the drawings they made during the workshops, due to the scope of the study. Since I will mostly have video documentation of the workshops, analysing these videos will also function as feedback from the children, in the sense that I will document the children's reactions in addition to the drawings they make. This choice will of course affect the results and the angle of the research, since I will largely base my findings on the analysis of the videos and the conversations with the fellow musicians.
