To better understand the co-creation process of a song: reflexivity in service of a research-creation project
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62410/n0bt1b66Keywords:
co-création, processus créatif, écriture de chansons, recherche-création, réflexivitéAbstract
How are ideas intertwined during a co-creation process? What kind of relationship develops between the co-creators and their work? Why is co-creation sometimes so difficult, even in an atmosphere of trust and respect? While collaborative creation has been the subject of much research in education and psychology, it remains relatively unstudied in its own right, as a specific mode of creation. This article reports on a musicology project adopting a research-creation approach. The research component aims to better understand the co-creation process of a song through active participant observation (APO), while the creation component aims to produce a song that is meaningful to its co-creators.
Through a hermeneutic and reflective approach, I demonstrate that considering my own journey within this project allowed me to better understand the complexity of the creative, collaborative, and interactional components of the co-creation process. My analyses, based on transcripts, a logbook, individual interviews, and cross-self-confrontation, also enabled me to reflect on the role of a person in a position of authority within a co-creation group: how can they intervene to "facilitate" the creative process while minimizing their influence on it? Indeed, I chose to collaborate with young people aged 15 to 17 with no prior songwriting experience, thus testing Vygotsky's (1981) concept of the zone of proximal development. In summary, my results show that resorting to a more traditional epistemological stance would not have allowed us to reveal certain intersubjective subtleties of the co-creation process, such as the surprising ambiguity of the link that unites the co-creators to their song.
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