The assessment of musicianship in selection for UK Music Therapy training: Performing 'Music Therapy Musicianship'

This thesis is a study of musicianship in the professional training of UK music therapists. I focus on musical aspects of training and specifically on the selection process for one UK training, the MA Music Therapy at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. I show that musicianship is diverse and contextual and take a critical discourse approach to understanding how musicianship is formed and performed in selection for music therapy training. A Preliminary Study of UK music therapy training institutions and trainers shows discourses around musicianship as having both gatekeeping and fence-making functions. These discourses establish music therapy as a skilled practice while also differentiating it from other musical roles. I show this differentiation extends backwards to selection of candidates for training and the role of a musical audition. The Main Study focuses on one such selection process and shows how institution, selectors and candidates invoke and transform the musical audition to both form and evaluate actual or potential capacity for ‘music therapy musicianship’ (MTM). I present a network model of musicianship with MTM as one node of this. MTM articulates a neglected discourse within music therapy about the kinds of musical skills involved. I characterise MTM as involving interactive rather than solo music-making, treating performance competence as a resource rather than an achievement, and as requiring (inter)personal emotional capacity. I explore its implications for music therapy training and selection and reconfigure auditions for music therapy training as a ‘musical interview’ that articulates and evaluates the musical skills trainees need. The study invites questions about the impact of candidates’ previous training and experience on their capacity for MTM, and the impact of musical selection processes on diversity of candidates. The study proposes a model of musicianship relevant to music therapy pedagogy, and potentially to disciplines such as community music and music and health. It also contributes a new perspective on musicianship to the sociology of music education

The intersection between Descriptivism and Meliorism in reasoning research: further proposals in support of 'soft normativism'

The rationality paradox centres on the observation that people are highly intelligent, yet show evidence of errors and biases in their thinking when measured against normative standards. Elqayam and Evans (e.g., 2011) reject normative standards in the psychological study of thinking, reasoning and deciding in favour of a ‘value-free’ descriptive approach to studying high-level cognition. In reviewing Elqayam and Evans’ position, we defend an alternative to descriptivism in the form of ‘soft normativism’, which allows for normative evaluations alongside the pursuit of descriptive research goals. We propose that normative theories have considerable value provided that researchers: (1) are alert to the philosophical quagmire of strong relativism; (2) are mindful of the biases that can arise from utilising normative benchmarks; and (3) engage in a focused analysis of the processing approach adopted by individual reasoners. We address the controversial ‘is–ought’ inference in this context and appeal to a ‘bridging solution’ to this contested inference that is based on the concept of ‘informal reflective equilibrium’. Furthermore, we draw on Elqayam and Evans’ recognition of a role for normative benchmarks in research programmes that are devised to enhance reasoning performance and we argue that such Meliorist research programmes have a valuable reciprocal relationship with descriptivist accounts of reasoning. In sum, we believe that descriptions of reasoning processes are fundamentally enriched by evaluations of reasoning quality, and argue that if such standards are discarded altogether then our explanations and descriptions of reasoning processes are severely undermined

The Search for Invariance: Repeated Positive Testing Serves the Goals of Causal Learning

Positive testing is characteristic of exploratory behavior, yet it seems to be at odds with the aim of information seeking. After all, repeated demonstrations of one’s current hypothesis often produce the same evidence and fail to distinguish it from potential alternatives. Research on the development of scientific reasoning and adult rule learning have both documented and attempted to explain this behavior. The current chapter reviews this prior work and introduces a novel theoretical account—the Search for Invariance (SI) hypothesis—which suggests that producing multiple positive examples serves the goals of causal learning. This hypothesis draws on the interventionist framework of causal reasoning, which suggests that causal learners are concerned with the invariance of candidate hypotheses. In a probabilistic and interdependent causal world, our primary goal is to determine whether, and in what contexts, our causal hypotheses provide accurate foundations for inference and intervention—not to disconfirm their alternatives. By recognizing the central role of invariance in causal learning, the phenomenon of positive testing may be reinterpreted as a rational information-seeking strategy

Boundaries of Semantic Distraction: Dominance and Lexicality Act at Retrieval

Three experiments investigated memory for semantic information with the goal of determining boundary conditions for the manifestation of semantic auditory distraction. Irrelevant speech disrupted the free recall of semantic category-exemplars to an equal degree regardless of whether the speech coincided with presentation or test phases of the task (Experiment 1) and occurred regardless of whether it comprised random words or coherent sentences (Experiment 2). The effects of background speech were greater when the irrelevant speech was semantically related to the to-be-remembered material, but only when the irrelevant words were high in output dominance (Experiment 3). The implications of these findings in relation to the processing of task material and the processing of background speech is discussed

Serial reconstruction of order and serial recall in verbal short-term memory

A series of experiments was carried out on verbal short-term memory for lists of words. In the first experiment, participants were tested via immediate serial recall and word frequency and list set size were manipulated. With closed lists the same set of items was repeatedly sampled, with open lists no item was presented more than once. In serial recall, effects of word frequency and set size were found. When a serial reconstruction of order task was used, in a second experiment, robust effects of word frequency emerged but set size failed to show an effect. The effect of word frequency in order reconstruction were further examined in two final experiments. The data from these experiments revealed that the effects of word frequency are robust and are apparently not exclusively indicative of output processes. A multiple mechanisms account is adopted in which word frequency can influence both retrieval and pre-retrieval processes