The Practice of Music Improvisation to Promote Mental Health and Well-Being: A Multidisciplinary Grounded Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this thesis, I employed a constructivist grounded theory methodology to investigate current practices and perspectives among performing musicians, community musicians, and music therapists in order to develop a multidisciplinary understanding of how these practitioners use music improvisation to promote the mental health and well-being of their audiences, community members, and clients, respectively. \n \nTen participants, recruited through purposeful, snowball, and theoretical sampling, engaged in intensive semi-structured interviews. Of these, seven participants submitted an audio recording of themselves engaging in the practice under study. The musical data were used to guide the interviews for relevant participants. Interview data were analyzed with the support of NVivo software. This involved multidisciplinary, case-specific, cross-case, and theoretical analyses. \n \nThe main contribution of this thesis is the development of a substantive grounded theory of music improvisation to promote mental health and well-being as practiced by performing musicians, community musicians, and music therapists. Five grounded theory categories were devised based upon the data. Engaging in the Musical Interpersonal Relationship was identified as the Core Category. The remaining four categories were: (a) Bringing an Understanding of Mental Health and Well-Being; (b) Conceptualizing Links Between Music Improvisation and Mental Health and Well-Being; (c) Applying Intention; and (d) Acting in the Improvisatory Moment. The grounded theory explains that how a practitioner engages in the interpersonal musical relationship with those they are improvising with or for configures their practice of music improvisation to promote mental health and well-being. Furthermore, the theory identifies Affordances of the Relationship Type According to Discipline as a contingency within the Core Category that distinguishes the practice of music improvisation to promote mental health and well-being among disciplinary lines. \n \nThe findings of this research establish music improvisation to promote mental health and well-being as both a cross-disciplinary and discipline-specific practice. This may open new directions for relevant multidisciplinary collaboration based upon a mutual understanding of each discipline’s respective potential contributions. Recommendations for future research include inquiry that: (a) incorporates additional related disciplines; and (b) investigates further perspectives (e.g., of audience members, community music participants, and music therapy clients).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".