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Interdisciplinary musicologist Dr Nikki Moran is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the Edinburgh College of Art and is a member of the Creativity, AI, and the Human research cluster at Edinburgh Futures Institute. As the recipient of a Royal Society of Edinburgh Personal Research Fellowship, Dr Moran’s current work explores how musical accompaniment connects art to everyday relationships.
Beyond individual performance
While exceptional musicians are often judged on individual performance, Dr Moran is keen to showcase the invisible and unmapped art of musical accompaniment. Musical accompaniment, according to Dr Moran, involves sophisticated interpersonal skills and is highly creative in itself.
Musical accompaniment that is done well is invisible – it takes great skill and effort to complement and highlight the lead musician in a performance. Dr Moran explains:
“Accompaniment is about making and holding a space where another voice can take shape and be heard.”
Musical accompaniment skills as life skills
Learning to respond to another person playing music demonstrates a form of creative human response and interaction. But Dr Moran goes further, and argues that the art of musical accompaniment translates to life skills that are beneficial for any student.
For instance, the skills of facilitation, which include responding to others’ needs and enabling others to perform well, are undervalued skills which people do not often aspire to. However, the ability to enable creativity in others and to co-construct expressive performance are fundamental for human connection, good communication and healthy relationships.
Musical learners are often rewarded for and examined on technical skills based on an idea that the goal should be exemplary solo performance. But for Dr Moran, “learning how to anticipate and respond to the things that other people do” is one of the most distinctive and valuable aspects of music education.
Backing track technologies are so widely available that they have become a standard tool to support group music making. It is normal for students to learn to play and sing with musical accompaniment in the form of backing track technologies, alongside or sometimes instead rather than with other people. Dr Moran points out that these technologies can only simulate the expressive responsiveness that characterises musical participation, potentially compromising students’ capacity to be creative, interactive players.
Reimagining musical accompaniment
Dr Moran’s current research aims to reimagine musical accompaniment, pushing for its importance to human creativity and working towards a vocabulary to better understand it.
The first stage of this research involves ethnographic work with elite accompanists to find out how they learned their skills in terms of both musical skills and human interaction. Dr Moran says:
“I’m looking to discover how and where these skills are learned and honed not only from professional performance experience but where else they use and develop those accompaniment skills.”
Dr Moran’s research also addresses the current lack of concepts and vocabulary that can access the interpersonal qualities of musical accompaniment. Language borrowed from health and counselling research is important, as it focuses on the dynamics of relationships. Dr Moran argues that the interaction involved in musical accompaniment is not limited to therapy – it is also about developing healthy human relationships more broadly, and understanding the role that the expressive arts play in normal, everyday communication.
Dr Moran wants to map out the skills involved in musical accompaniment, to begin to examine and articulate these so that they can also be better valued. She explains:
“We have the vocabulary to talk about artistry in a solo sense, but not in collaboration. It’s not just about doing things at the same time as each other: it’s how we co-construct [musical] spaces that can enable other people’s imagination and expression.”
Music and human connection
Throughout her academic career, Dr Moran’s teaching and research have always focused on the interaction between music and human connection. Dr Moran explains that her current research project on musical accompaniment benefits from dialogue with students and experiences in the classroom since she began teaching at the University in 2007. She has always used a comprehensive approach in her classes, introducing arts methods such as grounding exercises and listening practices for music students alongside more formal teaching methods.
Dr Moran is looking forward to connecting more with other researchers as a member of the ‘Creativity, AI, and the Human’ cluster at Edinburgh Futures Institute. She says that being involved in the cluster is a great way to encourage conversations about how innovative technologies and AI can truly support and enhance human creativity and ask questions about whether human interaction can or cannot be replaced by the recent developments in music technology. She would also like to work with music education developers to influence how resources are sourced and created, including the creation of quality backing tracks and how to best make use of new cutting-edge music technologies.
