Investigating emergent coordination in small music groups

It is people that make group music work. For researchers, this provides many interesting and diverse opportunities for study. This chapter focuses on ways in which musicians establish coordination in musical contexts with particular consideration of methods of investigation. It takes a high-level view of coordination relating to the alignment of ideas, intentions, and actions in creative collaboration processes. It outlines observational methods for real-life contexts, coding schemes for group behaviors, and the increased employment of mixed-methods that observe and measure interaction in lab and ecological settings. The chapter closes with a consideration of the relevance of longitudinal studies of ensembles that showcase emergent coordination, and an example is offered of an investigation of the development of behavioral interactions over time in two vocal quintets.

Digital Civic Participation and Misinformation during the 2020 Taiwanese Presidential Election

From fact-checking chatbots to community-maintained misinformation databases, Taiwan has emerged as a critical case-study for citizen participation in politics online. Due to Taiwan’s geopolitical history with China, the recent 2020 Taiwanese Presidential Election brought fierce levels of online engagement led by citizens from both sides of the strait. In this article, we study misinformation and digital participation on three platforms, namely Line, Twitter, and Taiwan’s Professional Technology Temple (PTT, Taiwan’s equivalent of Reddit). Each of these platforms presents a different facet of the elections. Results reveal that the greatest level of disagreement occurs in discussion about incumbent president Tsai. Chinese users demonstrate emergent coordination and selective discussion around topics like China, Hong Kong, and President Tsai, whereas topics like Covid-19 are avoided. We discover an imbalance of the political presence of Tsai on Twitter, which suggests partisan practices in disinformation regulation. The cases of Taiwan and China point toward a growing trend where regular citizens, enabled by new media, can both exacerbate and hinder the flow of misinformation. The study highlights an overlooked aspect of misinformation studies, beyond the veracity of information itself, that is the clash of ideologies, practices, and cultural history that matter to democratic ideals.

Coordinating Free Improvisation: An Integrative Framework for the Study of Collective Improvisation

Understanding how musicians can coordinate their musical actions when they improvise together remains an important theoretical and empirical challenge. In this article, we suggest a broad theoretical framework, compatible with up-to-date research on joint action, which can account for coordination in collective improvisation, especially in the hard case of so-called collective free improvisation. This framework addresses the limits of an account of coordination in collective improvisation that relies only on low-level, emergent coordination mechanisms, and shows how these mechanisms can be combined with planned coordination mechanisms to explain how improvisers deal with some of the main coordination problems that typically arise in collectively improvised performances. As such, our framework allows for the formulation of new hypotheses that pave the way for further empirical investigations on collective improvisation and sheds light on collectively improvised behavior at large.

Emergent coordination with a brain–machine interface: implications for the neural basis of motor learning

How patterns of covariance in motor output and neural activity emerge over the course of learning is a topic of ongoing investigation. Vaidya et al. (Vaidya M, Balasubramanian K, Southerland J, Badreldin I, Eleryan A, Shattuck K, Gururangan S, Slutzky M, Osborne L, Fagg A, Oweiss K, Hatsopoulos NG. J Neurophysiol 119: 1291–1304, 2018) investigate the emergence of patterns of covariance in the motor output and neural activity in chronically amputated macaques learning reach-to-grasp movements with a brain–machine interface. The authors’ findings have implications for uncovering general principles of how neural coordination unfolds while learning a different motor behavior.