Exploration of Emotions and Artistic Identity

Abstract

This practice-based research aims to explore my artistic identity and how musical improvisation affects us emotionally based on our episodic musical memory. The description given to episodic memory during this research is as follows:“All those songs that we have listened to throughout our lives and have an importance for us at a cultural, social, family, individual, cult or national level.” (Luis, 2022)Each musical moment resonates uniquely with individuals, acknowledging the distinct emotional spectrums we each inhabit. Through writing and painting, participants reflect on the universality of music and the ever-evolving nature of our tastes and perceptions.The research on emotions inspires the exploration of my artistic identity. It shapes, evolves, and deconstructs during my exploratory journey.The methods used to analyse participants' emotions include Video Recall Stimulated Interviews (Meissner & Timmers, 2020), combined with the Draw-Write method (Hartel J. et al., 2019). Participants' musical personalities are also analysed using the Spotify Web API.The outcome of this research is the vision of different emotional universes among participants. These universes can serve to create connections in how we experience music, bypassing categorisations by musical genres. Additionally, the exploration of my artistic identity has generated different sounds and techniques that have been used to build various atmospheres in the pilot concerts and the final concert.