On affordance-based, autoethnographic music research

Recent years has seen increasing interest in the concept of affordances in music performance research. Hereby, the agency of musical instruments is understood as defined by the perceived opportunities for action emerging through the sensorimotor relationship (i.e. the continuous interaction between musician and instrument). As such, it is an analytical perspective that highlights material and embodied dynamics of musical practice. Since affordances are perceptual properties, methods for data collection and analysis from a first-person perspective have become a central approach. Researchers have applied different procedures, sometimes building on combinations of qualitative and quantitative data. Although much of this research is rigorously conducted and reported, one underdeveloped aspect is how to gain access to the subjective experience of the musician-researcher.Consequently, the point of departure is the following question: How can affordance-based research on musical instruments fruitfully adopt an autoethnographic approach?A critical point is that affordances by definition (partly) are intuitive and subconscious – they are perceived and acted upon through entrainment and habitual patterns of attention. Consequently, part of the experience of musical performance is not immediately accessible through reflection. This presentation aims at targeting this and other challenges by drawing on research in order to discuss methodological possibilities and epistemological dimensions of such practice-based explorations. The chosen studies are first-person accounts of interactions with musical instruments within different genres, published during the last three years. We present a comparative analysis of projects in which different methodological approaches have been developed to provide access to the subjective experience of performance. These comprise analytical autoethnography and constrain-led designs as well as phenomenological approaches and the use of video-stimulated recall. The outcome of such studies holds a potential for conceptual development with regards to the embodied dimension of musical practice and learning.