In this presentation, a drummer reports on a “practical musicology” project (Zagorski-Thomas, 2022), completed in summer 2026 for publication in book form in 2027. The researcher adopted an autoethnographic approach (Denzin, 2014; Smith, 2022), also including semi-structured interviews with co-participants. Along with professional audio examples, the presenter describes his own and other collaborators’ motivations for recording an album of improvised and composed duets between 2019 and 2024 (released that year), and describes the processes of making 19 tracks with 14 musicians who contributed through rap, spoken word, tin whistle, piano, violin, hand percussion, singing, electronics, saxophone, iPad, and bass. The album was recorded in person, virtually, synchronously, and asynchronously, with the initial goal of discovering the presenter's voice as lead collaborator on a project (instead of, as usual in his drumming, providing the beat for someone else's).

Zagorski-Thomas (2022) notes that practical musicology projects are teleologically oriented toward doing music better, somehow, and that “better” is, along with the research questions, often discovered through the research process itself. Better music making herein is framed with Rosa’s (2016) sociological theory of “resonance,” whereby Rosa construes humans’ means of connecting meaningfully with themselves, with one another, and with the world as “axes of resonance” (105). For Rosa, resonance is “a major driving force behind the production” of art (286), and he observes, “through music, our relationship to the world as a whole becomes more tangible” (94), as this study found. The question guiding this study was: “In what ways and to what extent did collaborators contributing to the musical duets album [removed for anonymous review] seek or experience resonance?” Collaborations covered the gamut of resonant experience, with several musicians (including the presenter) experiencing profound personal transformation.