Creative Tensions: Leveraging Interactive Systems to Support Listening, Value Negotiation and Wellbeing in Community Music for Immigrants and Refugees

This project aims to design a community choral initiative for immigrants and members of the host community in Canada. The goal is to study how social computing technology and communication practices can be combined to identify and resolve points of tension, as well as the effects these tensions can have on the creative process, sense of belonging, and mutual understanding.

The social computing technology consists of two core components:

1. A concert program planning tool that allows choir members and the director to add, remove, and reorder songs to conceptualize a concert around a predefined idea or theme;
2. A visualizations that display tensions (e.g., differences in values, opinions, and attitudes) in an aggregated manner.

1. How well do participants feel heard and included in discussions during times of tension that may arise among members of the community choral singing initiative, including select audience members, during the creation process? A sub-question of this aspect is how effective the social computing tool is in supporting the facilitator during these tense dialogues and how its functionalities can be improved;
2. To what extent the perceived positive benefits (such as emotional and physical well-being) of singing together as a group outweigh any unsettling effects that may emerge from tensions related to their collective creation process?
3. What can we learn from the community choral process as a phase within a larger socio-cultural integration process that transforms both immigrants and the host society?

On the computer science side, methodologies involve iterative user-centered design, observations, semi-structured interviews, and field studies. On the community music side, we will employ a qualitative approach to gather and analyze information about participants’ perceptions of tensions, felt experience, and how the process contributes to their well-being.

Over a 4-month field study, choir members and directors will use the social computing platform between rehearsals, and at the beginning of each rehearsal to discuss any tensions. Researchers will observe and take notes of these interactions. This will be followed by two live concerts of the repertoire collectively chosen by the group. We conclude with group-based interviews to better understand participants experiences of this technology-facilitated co-creation process.

•  The Listening Choir / Coro a la Escucha (external link) 
• The Newcomer App Project (external link) 

The project is in progress, currently in the initial planning phase. 

Expected completion: April 2027

Community music; Social computing; Listening research; Migration studies