Nicola's Projects

Ensembles working towards performance: Emerging coordination and interactions in self-organised groups

Music ensembles are often regarded as models of group coordination, as they work together to produce artistic performances. However, as well as musical skills and knowledge, the group dynamics involved can have a big impact on performance. This project aimed to understand ways that individual contributions form part of an interacting, dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and in which many small decisions and changes contribute to the final result. Like other work groups, musical ensembles face time pressures and complex demands. Preparing for performance is achieved through rehearsals, shared goals, social, technical and musical elements. This project adopted a range of methods to explore this. A survey of ensemble rehearsal practices and interviews with members of newly formed groups were combined with time pattern analysis to track interaction patterns. Time pattern analysis enabled tcoded behaviours to be expressed as hierarchical time patterns. These emergent patterns of verbal interactions provided a means to investigate implicit coordination over the course of a series of rehearsals and revealed the presence of tacit or ‘hidden’ patterns of communication in rehearsal. The main findings from the research suggest that these patterns were structured as a series of episodic transitions, which emerged over time during rehearsals, suggesting complex patterns of interaction.

Nicola’s PhD research was funded by the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH), and formed part of the Expressive Nonverbal Communication in Ensemble Performance research network, between Sheffield, York and Leeds Universities.

Find out more:

https://sheffield.academia.edu/NicolaPennill

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicola-pennill-6397455/

http://wrocahensemble.sites.sheffield.ac.uk