1. Research and the Arts: the Challenge
Research and the Arts: the Challenge
Elizabeth Hudson, Dean of the College of Arts, Media, and Design, Northeastern University
November 2, 2017

2. Defining Research: England’s REF (research excellence framework)
Quality of output (e.g., publications, performances, and exhibitions) rated in terms of their “originality, significance, and rigour”, their impact beyond academia (on the economy, society, and/or culture), and the environment that supports research.” 1. For the purposes of the REF, research is defined as a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared.

3. REF, continued
2. It includes work of direct relevance to the needs of commerce, industry, and to the public and voluntary sectors; scholarship; the invention and generation of ideas, images, performances, artefacts including design, where these lead to new or substantially improved insights; and the use of existing knowledge in experimental development to produce new or substantially improved materials, devices, products and processes, including design and construction 3. It includes research that is published, disseminated or made publicly available in the form of assessable research outputs, and confidential “

4. Australia’s ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia), run by the Australian Research Council (ARC).
Research quality: “considered based on citation analysis, or ERA peer review, and other supporting quality indicators”; Research activity: “based on research outputs, research income and other research items” ERA defines research as the creation of new knowledge and/or the use of existing knowledge in a new and creative way to generate new concepts, methodologies, inventions and understandings. This could include the synthesis and analysis of previous research to the extent that it is new and creative.

5. New Zealand: Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF)
For the purposes of the PBRF, research is original, independent investigation undertaken to contribute to knowledge and understanding and, in the case of some disciplines, cultural innovation or aesthetic refinement.
Research typically involves inquiry of an experimental or critical nature driven by hypotheses or intellectual positions capable of rigorous assessment by experts in a given discipline. In some disciplines, research may be embodied in the form of artistic works, performances or designs that lead to new or substantially improved insights. Research may include:  
contributions to the intellectual underpinning of subjects and disciplines (for example, dictionaries and scholarly editions);
the use of existing knowledge in experimental development to produce new or substantially improved, materials, devices, products, communications or processes
 the synthesis and analysis of previous research to the extent that it is new and creative.
Research findings must be open to scrutiny or formal evaluation by experts within the field. This may be achieved through various forms of dissemination including, but not limited to, publication, manufacture, construction, public presentation, or provision of confidential reports.

6. International/OECD: Frascati Manual 2015
Research and experimental development (R&D) comprise creative and systematic work undertaken in order to increase the stock of knowledge – including knowledge of humankind, culture and society – and to devise new applications of available knowledge. The activity must be: novel, creative, uncertain, systematic, transferable and/or reproducible.

7. R. Keith Sawyer: “The Western cultural model has led us to neglect performance creativity, even though it, of all forms of creativity, provides us with the best window onto the collaboration and improvisation of the creative process…. We now know that creativity is fundamentally social and collaborative; that it involves preparation, training and hard work; and that the process is more important than the product or the personality. By explaining performance, we can ultimately better explain all creativity.” Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation, 2nd edition (Oxford, 2012)

8. “whereas many cognitive tasks, such as vision or language, have fairly well-localized centres of brain activation, music does not. To put is crudely, when we listen to music, all the lights are apt to come on at once. Pretty much the whole brain may become active: motor centres that govern movement, the ‘primal’ emotion centres, the language modules that seem to process syntax and semantics, the auditory highways. Unlike language, say, music has no dedication mental circuitry localized in one or a few particular areas: it is a ‘whole brain’ phenomenon. On the one hand this makes it immensely challenging to understand what is going on. On the other hand, it shows why music is so fundamentally important: no other stimulus comparably engages all aspects of our mental apparatus, and compels them to speak with one another: left to right hemisphere, logic to emotion [....] It is quite simply a gymnasium for the mind.” Philip Ball, The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)