New Podcast Episode: Dr Scott McLaughlin on Making Creative Practice Research Explicit

How can research generated through creative practice be communicated without reducing or flattening the practice itself?

In this episode of Creative Practice Research Insights, I speak with Dr Scott McLaughlin, Associate Professor in Composition and Music Technology at the University of Leeds.

Scott is a composer and practice researcher whose work explores materiality, agency, indeterminacy and emergent musical structures. He is also closely involved in the development of practice research infrastructure through SPARKLE and the AHRC-funded ENACT Practice Research Data Service.

Our conversation grew out of a series of exchanges about how creative practitioners identify, articulate and share the research taking place through their work. In particular, we explore the distinction between what I have called research articulation and what the Journal for Artistic Research describes as research exposition.

Research articulation seeks to make the questions, methods, insights and contribution of a practice explicit. It creates a structured bridge between the practitioner’s experience and the wider academic community, helping the research become legible, reviewable and assessable.

Research exposition takes a different approach. Rather than explaining the research from the outside, it attempts to bring others into an encounter with it through media, form, navigation, juxtaposition and experience. The research is not simply described: it is enacted through the way it is presented.

Scott develops this discussion through a distinction between methods for doing research and methods for articulating or sharing research. Methods for doing are often highly specific to the individual practice. They may slow down the movement towards a finished work, allowing emerging insights to be noticed, tested and developed. Methods for sharing translate those insights from the local experience of the practitioner into forms that can circulate within a wider research field.

We also consider whether structured articulation might function as an intermediate stage rather than simply as a final reporting mechanism. A practitioner might first use articulation to clarify what the research is, before returning that understanding to a more material, aesthetic or practice-specific exposition.

At the centre of the conversation is a deceptively simple question: should practice research primarily make its knowledge explicit, or should it create the conditions through which that knowledge can be encountered?

Listen on Podbean:
https://creativemediapractice.podbean.com/e/dr-scott-mclaughlin-on-making-research-explicit-articulation-exposition-and-creative-practice/

Watch on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/1hF9TOa4IH8

Creative Practice Research Insights explores the methods, challenges and possibilities of research conducted through creative practice.