The Routledge Companion to Music, Technology, and Education

Andrew King, Evangelos Himonides, S. Alex Ruthmann, Andrew King, Evangelos Himonides, S. Alex Ruthmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317415121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

The Routledge Companion to Music, Technology, and Education is a comprehensive resource that draws together burgeoning research on the use of technology in music education around the world. Rather than following a procedural how-to approach, this companion considers technology, musicianship, and pedagogy from a philosophical, theoretical, and empirically-driven perspective, offering an essential overview of current scholarship while providing support for future research. The 37 chapters in this volume consider the major aspects of the use of technology in music education:

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• Part I. Contexts. Examines the historical and philosophical contexts of technology in music. This section addresses themes such as special education, cognition, experimentation, audience engagement, gender, and information and communication technologies.
• Part II. Real Worlds. Discusses real world scenarios that relate to music, technology, and education. Topics such as computers, composition, performance, and the curriculum are covered here.
• Part III. Virtual Worlds. Explores the virtual world of learning through our understanding of media, video games, and online collaboration.
• Part IV. Developing and Supporting Musicianship. Highlights the framework for providing support and development for teachers, using technology to understand and develop musical understanding.

The Routledge Companion to Music, Technology, and Education will appeal to undergraduate and post-graduate students, music educators, teacher training specialists, and music education researchers. It serves as an ideal introduction to the issues surrounding technology in music education.

Part I
Contexts

This companion begins with a philosophical view of technology, culture and the arts in education. It is important to pause and consider not only the impact of digital technology upon music but also the arts and education more generally. Andrew Burn provides a fascinating perspective of this phenomenon and insightful views on how deeply rooted technological change is within culture. Several consequences are drawn out of this discussion that highlight the neophilism of some work in this area, the new opportunities that digital technology can present, the need to avoid a division between material technologies and conceptual learning, and the elevation of technology beyond the instrumental through the craft, tools, knowledge and aesthetic shaping that also locates technology from a social and cultural perspective. This chapter serves to not only begin this section but also to provide a foundation for the entire volume.

The second chapter examines in more depth what we consider to be instrument technology. Tae Hong Park provides a historical context and brief overview of instrument technologies, highlighting philosophies, aesthetics and trends. Attention is drawn to how instrument-building technology has found a place within educational institutions, as well as insightful comments concerning the potential future development of instrument technology in education. It would seem that just as the democratisation of technology has afforded opportunities for music making beyond an enclosed industry, this can also be profoundly felt within the design of new instruments and open up new possibilities of collaboration beyond the learners’ immediate environment. Leman and Nijs offer a view of cognition and technology for instrumental music learning and an architecture to enable this. This work is particularly concerned with interactive and assistive forms of technology within educational technologies and instrument learning, highlighting the need to design music instruments that consider the time-critical and fine-motoric schemes from a human interaction viewpoint. Attention is also drawn to the need for further empirical evaluation in this area.

New instrument technologies emerge and ways of creating music through the use of technology. Whilst earlier electronic technologies created unique instruments such as the theremin, other forms of digital synthesisers merely attempted to emulate existing instruments, although many had the ability to create unique sounds. Live coding is an emergent field of artistic endeavour and this is discussed in chapter 15 of Part II by Ge Wang, one of the leading innovators of the laptop orchestra. Chapter 4 provides a foundation for that work in that it gives a perspective of learning from live coding. Within these pages Burnard et al. highlight the current position in teacher education, the lack of confidence for teachers in this area, and how educators could be empowered to take risks and provide opportunities between coding and musical practice with digital technology. Part of the basis for this discussion is provided by the revolutionary Sonic Pi project that the authors developed and evaluated.

The next chapter, ‘The Sounds of Music’ follows on from live coding by also highlighting the need within the general music curriculum for more experimental forms of music making. Leigh Landy discusses the highly successful EARS 2 project, which is a powerful enabler for learners to compose music with sounds with a focus away from the notational aspects of music. The chapter discusses the importance of aural awareness and making music education by making engagement possible from a relatively low threshold of prerequisite skills and musical knowledge. Landy also acknowledges the importance of ‘the music of notes’ within culture but typically is a flag bearer for new forms of musical expression. Teresa Dillon likewise makes the case for sound exploration through sound art practice and why it should be included within a music curriculum. This is approached from a unique viewpoint by drawing upon the work of two contemporary sound artists. It builds upon the previous chapter by Landy, who discusses a pedagogical platform for learners engaging with sound art; Dillon gives an urban dimension to practitioners working in the field.

The next chapter provides a sobering reminder to educators that the enthusiasm with which technology is met in some classrooms can have repercussions from a gendered perspective. Victoria Armstrong is author of the acclaimed Technology and the Gendering of Music Education, and through this chapter she discusses how the uptake of post-16 level courses in music technology is largely by males, and provides a focus for the gendered aspects of digitally mediated music education approaches. Armstrong draws upon feminist science and technological studies as well as gender-technology relationships, and argues from a gender perspective that through technology a more exclusive curriculum is created, and from an engagement perspective this has consequences educators need to carefully consider. We then continue to a theoretical framework for musical development in early years provided by the well-established collaborative project Sounds of Intent. What is also of great importance here is the original ethos of the approach that was aimed towards special educational needs (SEN) and the opportunities that can be discovered. This chapter views this project from a technological perspective and the fostering of critical thinking and placing it as the centre of the focus rather than a tool.

The final chapter in this part provides a nexus to Part II on real-world scenarios. Bauer and Mito provide an overview of information and communication technologies (ICT) in Music Education in the United States and Japan. The authors describe a variety of ways that technology is being used to facilitate music learning and musical participation in general, examining the ICT knowledge and skills needed by music teachers to effectively integrate technology into diverse student learning experiences. It provides a useful context for what follows in Part II, which explores particular aspects of technology in music education that follow on from the theoretical framework provided by this opening part.

1
Digital Aletheia

Technology, Culture and the Arts in Education

Andrew Burn

Oh I am a handweaver to my trade

And I fell in love with a Factory maid

And if I could but her favour win

I’d sit beside her and weave by steam.

The Handweaver and the Factory Maid (Trad.)

This piece of history may seem a long way from the digital revolution and the classroom. It may reveal, however, some telling questions about the relation between technology and society which, with a little teasing out, we can apply to the question of how education shapes and is shaped by technology, and what this means for educators in the arts in particular.

The song tells of the disastrous effects of mass mechanical weaving on the cottage industry of handloom weavers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It split communities, drove country-dwellers into towns and stripped out much of the craft of weaving. It deprived workers of ownership of the means of production and exemplified the dire consequences of mass industry for working people and their landscape, a chapter in a narrative elaborated by critics of the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution, from Blake to Dickens. This narrative persists into the media age, as we know. In Adorno’s version, the mass industry of popular music is used to blunt the sensibilities of the people (Adorno, 1941). In Benjamin’s influential essay, the mechanization of art proves profoundly ambiguous, apparently destroying the aura of the individual artwork, yet oddly democratising it (Benjamin, 1938). It adroitly constructs the ambiguity of technology and art in the post-industrial world, and this ambiguity characterises debates, research and practice in education today.

The narrative in the digital age has shifted. Critiques of inexorable corporate power over the lives of individuals have given way to an unstable mix of pessimisms and optimisms: postmodernist pessimism about the empty and depthless simulacra seen to constitute contemporary cultural forms; optimistic celebration of the apparent shift of power from media producers to those who used to be thought of as an undifferentiated audience. The latter view can cite in support instances such as the work of video editors who—for the first time able to buy affordable tools such as Final Cut Pro in the early 21st century—could leave their production companies and set up as freelancers working from home. In short, some sectors of the economy gave way again to cottage industries, and the digital descendant of the handloom weaver set up shop. These developments represent a curious mix of small-scale agency and the big corporations’ exercise of a hegemonic power, controlling large-scale publishing and distribution (in the games industry, for example), and catering to our creative and communicative needs in return for our content, our submission to advertising and our compromises over privacy.

In the case of education, the celebratory rhetoric is tempting and ever-present. Digital making in school can be seen as another kind of cottage industry, except that it encounters a double disenfranchisement: not only that of working people disenfranchised by mass industry, but also of young people whose creative endeavours were typically disregarded by the adult world as inadequate by adult standards, trapped in an eternal mode of apprenticeship. The celebratory mode can be tempered, then, with due recognition of the limits on what is possible, as I’ll suggest later in this chapter. In particular, we have been warned by others of the dangers in simplistic views of the transformative powers of technology in education: the dangers of technological determinism (Selwyn, 2008), critiques of Prensky’s (2001) ‘digital natives’ trope (Jenkins, 2007) and challenges to popular assumptions and academic arguments about gamification (Buckingham, 2007). As my argument unfolds, then, I will look for the kinds of balance which researchers and practitioners might strike.

However, the handweaver and the factory maid prompt other questions pertinent to the question of technology in education. What exactly is the value of the craft the handweaver was so skilled in? And by extension, what kinds of craft, skill and artistry do educators in the arts attempt to develop in their students, and what part might digital technologies play here? Some might believe that they threaten the pre-digital skills of hand, eye and ear; some believe they extend, complement and augment them.

Another question is prompted by the history of the song excerpt in the epigraph. Like all folksongs, it exemplifies a mode of oral transmission we might consider to have died out. It became popular in the British folk revival and was performed and recorded by a range of contemporary folk singers and bands, including Martin Carthy with the band Brass Monkey. The sleeve notes say:

the present song has not yet been found in printed sources. It was collected from a William Oliver of Widnes and partially refurbished by A. L. Lloyd from the “chambermaid original.” Martin [Carthy] learned it from the actor Roger Allam.

This narrative raises a number of interesting questions for debates about the arts: the nature of authorship, the transformation over time of cultural texts and the nature of creativity involved at the various stages of composition, revision, collation, collection, transcription and performance.

But, equally significant for this chapter, this cultural object is now digital in a variety of ways. Although I own the Brass Monkey album, the preceding quotation is copied and pasted from a web page. The album itself is now on my iPhone, and my car plays it automatically via Bluetooth. However, these types of text remain editable, fluid, auditory and mobile across different social and cultural contexts. They are examples of the retention of oral sensibilities in the digital age which Walter Ong described as “secondary orality” (Ong, 1982).

All of this reminds us, then, that the relation between the digital arts and education is not only a question of innovation, newness and the future; it is also a question of history, another chapter in the metamorphosis of cultural resources over time, across generations and over successive tools of composition, performance and distribution.

These are some of the questions this chapter will explore, then: What kinds of creative making do the digital arts in education make possible? What are their histories? What constraints and opportunities do they offer? What human endeavours lie behind the gleaming surfaces of new media? How can we relate the material properties of hardware and software to social and cultural purposes, and to the processes of teaching and learning?

I will aim to separate out ‘real-world’ technologies of the digital arts from ‘ed-tech’; consider technology’s relation to culture; emphasise the role of technology in practices of creative production and processes of learning; and consider the implications of virtual worlds and bodies for the arts in education.

Real-World Technologies and Ed-tech

‘Educational technologies’ have their own domain of practice, policy, commerce and research; their own conferences, journals, marketing practices and forms of deployment in classrooms. They are not the focus of this chapter. It is true that there are many areas of overlap between technologies specifically designed for education and those used in the wider society, yet the distinction is important. It can be simply summarised by the difference between learning through a technology and learning with or about a technology, a distinction made by David Buckingham to which I will return.

On the one hand, using an interactive whiteboard in combination with a modern foreign language software package is clearly an instance of ‘learning through.’ On the other, using Cubase or Adobe Premiere for making music or film is clearly learning with and about. These softwares have not primarily been designed as learning tools: they are for making, just as a chisel, lathe or paintbrush are technologies for making in the pre-digital age—and, significantly, remain with us. To be sure, the use of Cubase, Premiere, chisel, lathe or paintbrush all enable learning: the tools complement the pedagogies of school, home or apprenticeship. But the point is that they are authentic instruments in the wider world, used by creative communities in common.

By contrast, interactive whiteboards, drill-and-skill softwares, virtual learning environments and classroom presentation tools lack cultural authenticity. Despite their novel appeal and digital affordances, they are the descendants of overhead projectors and blackboards. I do not mean to demonise such instruments; they have their place, have always been with us, and require deft use as part of the pedagogic toolkit. We may see them, perhaps, in terms of what Heidegger, in his influential essay on the question of technology, referred to as “the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology” (Heidegger, 1954/1977, p. 287). Heidegger’s move beyond this is to amplify the Greek conception of techne, relating the sense of craft and skill to society, knowledge and truth, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Part I Contexts
• Part II Real Worlds
• Part III Virtual Worlds
• Part IV Developing and Supporting Musicianship
• Index