In the present study, we combined first-, second-, and third-person levels of analysis to explore the feeling of being and acting together in the context of collaborative artistic performance. Following participation in an international competition held in Czech Republic in 2018, a team of ten artistic swimmers took part in the study. First, a self-assessment instrument was administered to rate the different aspects of togetherness emerging from their collective activity; second, interviews based on video recordings of their performance were conducted individually with all team members; and third, the performance was evaluated by external artistic swimming experts. By combining these levels of analysis in different ways, we explore how changes in togetherness and lived experience in individual behavior may shape, disrupt, and (re-)stabilize joint performance. Our findings suggest that the experience of being and acting together is transient and changing, often alternating phases of decrease and increase in felt togetherness that can be consistently recognized by swimmers and external raters.

In a previous study, it was found that novice musicians learning to play short musical pieces in different modalities were equally accurate in both solo and duo settings. Intrigued by these findings, we conducted a new experiment to explore whether differences between solo and duo musical learning might be differentially appreciated from a perceiver’s standpoint. We therefore asked a cohort of expert musicians to listen to and evaluate all the melodies played by the learners of the previous study in light of five specific questions. We asked whether the melodies were learned alone or with a partner, how well these were learned, and how their expressiveness, articulation/phrasing, and coherence could be assessed. We found that our raters were generally sensitive to the learning condition (synchrony, turn-taking, and imitation) and pairing (solo and duo) in which the melodies were learned. However, this result was not salient enough to let us observe significant clusters of responses. Future work might approach this investigation by adopting a longitudinal design where differences between individual and group musical learning can be explored over time.

Disciplinary background A. Statement of background in Psychology of Creativity: Organizational psychology has demonstrated the importance of social dynamics for group creativity (Hennessey et al., 2020). Prosocial attitudes, e.g., feeling close to each other, can affect joint creativity in different ways (Oztop et al., 2018). It remains unclear whether such findings can be applied to other domains, such as music. Disciplinary background B.Statement of background in Musical Improvisation: Musical improvisation research includes descriptive analyses, as well as investigations based on quantitative methodologies. And although musical improvisation is often participatory, the social dynamics at the heart of such an activity have rarely been addressed from an interdisciplinary perspective that brings together both approaches.