Naturalistic artistic decision-making and metacognition in the music studio

Abstract

Professional artistic contexts, such as studio-based music production, are rarely investigated in naturalistic decision-making (NDM) research, though creative work is characterised by uncertainty, risk, a lack of clearly definable goals, and in the case of music production, a complex socio-technical working environment that brings together a diverse group of specialized collaborators. This study investigates NDM in the music production studio. In music production, there is a professional role explicitly tasked with taking decisions—the (record) producer. The producer, as a creative collaborator, is differentiated as a problem-solver, solution creator and goal setter. This investigation looks at the producer’s metacognitive abilities for reflecting on the nature of problems and decisions. An important challenge for this study is to develop methods for observing decision-making without unrealistically reducing the amount of uncertainty around outcomes or creative intention within a studio production. In the face of that, a method is proposed that combines socio-cultural musicology and cognitive approaches and uses ethnographic data. Preliminary findings shed light on how the producer in this study self-manages his decisions and his interactions with, and in response to, the production environment; how decisions and actions sustain collaboration; how experience is utilized to identify scenarios and choose actions; and the kinds of strategies employed and their expected outcomes. Findings provide evidence that exercising producing skills and performing production tasks involve metacognitive reflection.