TOPUP: Transform Outcome and Process Utilities and Programs - Upgrading music performance and intervention research equipment for creative processes

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Being human means to be creative, to relate to others, to be part of a culture that is developed in places where people produce it as a creative expression of their social identity. Music is one of the cultural assets of regions in which they create a particular expression of their identity that relates to places and ways in which humans interact and create music. In front of the LIPA in Liverpool a sculpture displays suit-, drum-, and guitar cases and from there you have a view on the Mersey river floating towards the ocean, a few doors down you can enter the Jacaranda Club etc.; these places were instrumental for developing creativity that allowed four young men to travel the world and the creative industries to grow into world-leading figures. At the core of this is the creative process at a certain time and place and the 'chemistry' of humans relating to each other in a creative process that can bring about change in practice and outcomes. The 'right music at the right time' has an impact on the listener, the expressions of emotions and thoughts in a song can represent and symbolise a common denominator of what many may feel and think at a particular time. Music as the language of emotions allows expressing the momentary multimodal complexity of how things relate to each other and can help to discover ourselves in what we feel and think about the societal challenges and how we join-in, to bring people and organisations together to support happier and healthier lives. The Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research (CIMTR) is dedicated to study the creative process to bring about change in people's lives, to initiate processes to do things differently and to overcome the burden experienced when living with disease. CIMTR researches ways in how we can rethink the medical idea of outcomes and treatment processes as we are dealing with interactive creative processes and performances during musical interventions and although performed with a body, the expression of being human is not necessarily identical with the materialistic description of dysfunctions of body parts or physiological processes. To be incorporated in a body is different from its physical functions as we live in our body and being and feeling healthy and creative can also be expressed in an excessive pushing of the body's boundaries for artistic purposes. In short, CIMTR's research adds a humanistic, narrative perspective of the multimodal human experience to the datasets recorded during creative processes and how change can be described integrating the creative and physiological processes at a certain time and place. This can be a therapy room in the intimacy of a healing contract between a person seeking help and a professional devoting his/her creative sensitivity to the healing process and not to the artistic outcome, it can be a stage and how the performers are is inspired from each other or from the audience, it can be the creation of an audio mix in the studio where shared listening may create a sound that is signified from the people involved, it may be the calibration of audiovisual settings for immersive processes, it may show how a drama therapist mirrors and extends the body language of a person locked in a narrowed regulation of emotion, or how an actors improvising roles of a play to transform the given narratives. With this bid we aim to expand our methodological repertoire of technological solutions to focus on how the body performs in different settings and how this performance looks like with different lenses of brain research, how people look at things happening around them during creative processes and track their gaze and objects focused upon, how their bodies move through spaces in which they are involved in creative processes and to utilise the language of current technological measures describing what we can observe, track and evoke with paradigms that are adequate to represent the creative process of being human.