Abstract In higher music education, assessment regimes and norms of “correctness” can narrow what counts as artistic knowledge, marginalising individual artistic and cultural sense-making. This artistic research develops and tests a reproducible practice format—Self-Determined Mental Creative Space Through Improvisation—in which structured improvisation supports participants’ “inner worlds” as resources for artistic agency and cooperative invention under uncertainty.

The workshop transposes this format into an experiential artistic-research session for musicians and non-musicians alike, adaptable across art forms. Participants engage a sequence of short, constraint-based scores that operationalise four interlinked methods: guided imagination; translating imagery into sound, movement, or other material; reframing “error” as divergence between imagined intention and outcome; and shifting core values via multisensory attention. Constraints function as compositional scaffolds that reduce decision overload, temper dominance/withdrawal, and enable a workable shared “common language” through real-time negotiation.

Reflection links the shared practice to the project’s questions: how structured improvisation reshapes capacities to initiate, refrain, and respond (“alone together”); how reframing error redistributes authority and supports collective adaptation; and how often-marginalised expressive vocabularies (timbre, gesture, texture, silence) can operate as epistemic resources for equitable participation and early-stage transcultural exchange without flattening difference.

The underlying research is based on two iterative three-day courses with mixed-instrument, multilingual cohorts at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre; data (field notes, open questionnaires, follow-up interviews) are analysed abductively in ATLAS.ti. The contribution is a transferable artistic-research framework and score-based method for cultivating safe creative space in collective practice.