Find Your Shine : Connecting Spirituality, Improvisation, and Audience Participation in Music Creation and Performance

Abstract

This reflective report explores how to create music events where participants experience the activation of alpha, theta, or gamma brainwave activity, elevated emotions, and perhaps even a transcendental experience. Artistic research incorporated the relaxation of the nervous system, the effects of meditation on the brain, and sound healing.An audience is divided into two groups, one the “spiritual practitioners” and the other the people who are not familiar with, and perhaps not even interested in, spiritual practices or events. Research on these topics resulted in three related music projects: The Warm-up, the Sonic Voyage and the Affirmation Songs. The event for the “Professional Integration Project” (PIP) included all these components, with the goal of creating an event, inspired by “spirituality” but not intended to be a “spiritual event”. How can this approach be inclusive for both types of groups? How might it be possible to take this “spiritual practice” into an artistic space?Artistic research led to the conclusion that it might be helpful to include a short introduction to the methods being used to enter a meditative state and experience elevated emotions in a music event. It might be important to reach a wide variety of people at these events: The “spiritual group” might benefit from learning why the methods work physiologically, while the “non-spiritual group” might benefit from the methods, to which they may only be introduced because it is being presented in an artistic space.However, finding inspiration in composers who successfully incorporated their spiritual ideas into their creative work led to the conclusion that it might be necessary to create a particular “world” of rules, within which it is possible to put forward creative ideas in an inclusive way.