Eudaimonia And Social Good Through Technologically Mediated, Collaborative Music-Making

Moir, Zack; Smith, Gareth Dylan

Abstract

Humans often tend towards working in groups of various kinds. Following childhood and the family unit we seek those groups in mutual interest groups and activities. One of the fundamental ways that people make profound meaning is through creating music with one another. For some people making music is key to their identity realization (Smith 2013) or self-actu-alization (Maslow 1954). Pursuing the deep, core existential needs of one’s self or ‘daimon’ has been identified as ‘eudaimonia’ (Smith 2016; Waterman 1992), recognized by Norton (1979) as a virtuous and essential means for people to flourish. Collective music-making therefore creates a particular kind of social good for those for whom engaging in music-making is a vital part of their personhood, being whom they really are. Music-making is thus also an inherently societal good, bringing arts, creativity and joy to the world.

Internet and music recording technologies are able to expand the potential for creating this social good across and beyond local and national boundaries in multi-located, de-territorialized modes of distributed creativity and creation (Pignato and Begany 2015). In this presentation, two musician-researchers talk about and demonstrate through music performance how Avid ProTools and LoLa technologies have enabled them to work collaboratively online and individually in physical spaces to engage to produce a professional, broadcast-quality sounds recording. A saxophonist from the UK and a drummer based in eastern Pennsylvania provide a detailed description of the process, opportunities, challenges and limitations of collaborating to create recordings of three original pieces. They then demonstrate one of the possible outcomes of their collaborative creative process by recreating their music in live performance using LoLa tech-nology. Following precedent set during previous improvisations and performances using LoLa (Moir, Ferguson & Smith 2019), the drummer will be on campus at Stony Brook, with the saxophonist on campus at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland.

The presenters emphasize that the salient point is not whether this music is ‘objectively’ any good, but rather how it is good and what/whom it is good for. With people valued increasingly for their (contributions to corporations’) economic output, to the point that any social or artistic contribution is frequently devalued and ignored, network technologies offer means of salvation from lives potentially devoid of eudaimonic meaning and fulfillment, enabling artists to make music and to connect with a shared artistic purpose. Flourishing through creative, collectively meaningful musical activity is core to the notion of artistic citizenship (Elliott, Silverman and Bowman 2016). Artistic citizens make music as part of compassionate, democratic and personally fulfilling lives. A society in which people are valued by one another and are able to engage in deeply meaningful action as part of their jobs, ‘devotee work’ or as ‘serious leisure’ activity is one that has the potential to be more just, more socially good.

Citation

Moir, Z., & Smith, G. D. (2019, November). Eudaimonia And Social Good Through Technologically Mediated, Collaborative Music-Making. Paper presented at NowNet Arts, New York

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: NowNet Arts
• Start Date: Nov 7, 2019
• End Date: Nov 10, 2019
• Deposit Date: Dec 2, 2019
• Keywords: Music, Social Good, Technologically Mediated Musicking
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2354592
• Related Public URLs: https://nownetarts.org/conference-2019