Music Technology in Ethnomusicology

Ethnomusicology has often had an ambivalent relationship with technology: we owe our discipline to mid-twentieth-century developments in recording technology. Nevertheless there is a strong counter-modern streak that characterizes ethnomusicologists as a group. This essay investigates the reasons for ethnomusciologists’ mistrust of certain kinds of music technology and interprets ambivalence as a mode of critical engagement. It surveys turning points in the field from comparative musicology to the critical turn and from the critical turn to the new digital humanities. I conclude that digital humanities needs ethnomusicological ambivalence in the form of critical engagement. Good data analytics needs a skeptical view from the vantage point of music scholars and contextual knowledge-bearers in the cultures of study.

Technology in Music Education in England and across Europe

In this chapter, adopting an autobiographical perspective, I reflect upon the use of music technology within English school classrooms during the last 50 years. The chapter illustrates that this has become so important—particularly for creative work—that formal music technology examination syllabi for older students now exist alongside courses that focus on “traditional” music skills. The chapter also discusses the less positive position of information communications technology within the music curricula for primary school children and secondary students aged 11–14, and offers thoughts on the future of music technology within the English education system. As a backdrop to the discussion the chapter presents a short reflection on music technological developments in society during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The chapter also includes the perspectives of music educators from a wide range of European countries, during the period 2008–2011, on the position of music technology within their own educational contexts.

Mobile Learning in Music Education

To follow up the trends from an Asian perspective in globalization and technology provided by the Core Perspective, this section further discusses the recent development of mobile learning in music education and ICT in music education in Hong Kong. A detailed study of 120 teachers, including 60 in-service and 60 preservice music teachers’ concerns and expectations regarding mobile learning in the music curriculum, was conducted in 2014 and 2015, respectively, in Hong Kong. The top three concerns among teachers were equipment setup, technical support, and financial burden. The top three expectations are e-learning resources, interactive functions, and self-directed learning. This chapter proposes an ecology of ICT in music education as an “outside in-inside out” relationship, where cultural practices involving mobile learning can be brought into the school, enhanced at school, and then fed back into the digital world at large.

Equity and Access in Out-of-School Music Making

This chapter focuses on the importance of community to both music education and the ways that youth shape their ideas, interests, and identities in music. Musical learning is rarely, if ever, about a learner operating a new musical technology-based tool in isolation. Music is inherently social, and these influences have a great impact upon the development of musical identities. This chapter explores the ways that out-of-school spaces like those in the Computer Clubhouse Network, YOUmedia, and Musical Futures support social music learning by providing private recording studios that allow youth to assume increasingly public roles as musicians, performers, and producers. The chapter also describes how mixing formal, nonformal, and informal learning spaces helps to develop a youth’s musical maturity through what is known as the “progression pathways model.”

Power and Choice in the Teaching and Learning of Music

This chapter opens a critical dialogue about the relationship between technology and the teaching and learning of music, with key emphasis on notions of power and choice. The chapter’s discussions revolve around technology as provision for (1) access to the musical world as sound through digital forms and formats, (2) greater opportunities for the most basic beginner in music to explore and experiment with sound, (3) wide/r choice and variety in listening, performing, and creating for both the “trained” and “untrained” musician, (4) compressed time and space in musical experiences and environments, and (5) questioning what constitutes musicality, a musician, and skill acquisition. Music educators need to draw closer links between the widening gap of school music with learners’ daily musical-technological experiences and become more cognizant of the multimedia and multidisciplinary space that the digital native learner is engulfed in, so as to further notions of creative work within the music classroom that might include these experiences.

The Impact of Technologies on Society, Schools, and Music Learning

This chapter examines how music education can benefit from the use of new electronic tools and materials for music making that allow learners to combine their interests and prior understandings toward deepening their engagement in music. By exploring how rhythmic video games like Rock Band bridge the large chasm that exists between youths’ music culture and traditional music education; how inexpensive recording hardware and software such as Audacity and GarageBand have provided youth with opportunities to compose and perform as only professional musicians could in the past; and how software like Impromptu successfully engages youth in music composition and analysis by enabling users to create and remix tunes using virtual blocks that contain portions of melodies and rhythmic patterns, this chapter argues that twenty-first-century music education, with the help of new technology, has the potential for engaging greater numbers of young learners in authentic music making and performance.

Exploring Intersections of Technology, Play, Informality, and Innovation

The idea that “humans are the ones making the music” (Pignato, this volume) is the starting point for reflection upon the factors beyond new technologies that encourage musical innovation. In their core perspectives, Pignato, Peppler, and Kigozi offer illustrations of practices that demonstrate the inseparability of context, informality, and innovation. Context is critical, as different settings afford access to different technologies and produce diverse sociocultural structures. Informality—as a learning style, an approach to engagement, and settings beyond the formal music education institutions—is important for its accommodation of playfulness, open-ended exploration, and improvisation around imposed constraints. I argue that these factors, and the innovative responses that emerge when technologies and creative people converge, are interrelated and multidirectional. Regardless of how advanced our technological capabilities become, innovation and new musical expressions remain products of humans interacting and exploring technological possibilities within a specific time, space, and social environment.

The Promise and Pitfalls of the Digital Studio

Whether or not we make the best use of technology in the music classroom, young people will continue to find unexpected uses for it elsewhere. There is no historical precedent for the informal learning possibilities afforded by inexpensive and ubiquitous computers. Are young music learners best left to their own devices, literally and figuratively? Or can we structure a classroom around these devices, combining independent play with guided group activity? Will formal educational settings always compromise or even negate young people’s autonomy and independence? Perhaps if we think of the music room as a maker space rather than a classroom, we can admit some of the imaginative play and authentic expressiveness that students find outside school. Music education will happen wherever people gather together, using whatever materials are at hand. A school is necessarily an ad hoc society; ideally, it can be a genuine artistic community as well.

Learner Engagement and Technology Integration

If music educators use technology to do old things in new ways, they are still doing old things. Music is constantly evolving with technological advancements. Technology can be used in many different ways in music classes. Technology best serves music educators when they reimagine musicianship and design opportunities to explore nontraditional ways of being a musician. This should begin with the teacher’s preservice experiences. Music educators need a rich understanding of their content area so that technology becomes a support for authentic musical processes, as opposed to being an add-on. The integration of music technology must be contextualized within methods courses in order for music educators to feel comfortable enough with the technology itself that it becomes transparent to the musical experiences. Technology will never replace a great educator, but a great educator who understands the possibilities of supporting learning with technology will replace a great educator who does not.

Using Mobile Technologies and Problem-Seeking Pedagogies to Bridge Universities and Workplaces

The task of providing future music teachers with the capacity to respond effectively in changing teaching environments and the related issues of retention and job satisfaction of early-career teachers present an ongoing challenge to teacher educators. Engagement in a process of systematic problem-solving arguably builds the kind of complex understanding of the real-world workplace that inoculates against praxis shock. This chapter addresses the problem by demonstrating how the utilization of simple technologies as learning tools can enhance the quality of the teacher education process. The Mobile Technologies Project encapsulates a two-way process of having future teachers become comfortable with new technologies, thereby increasing the likelihood that they will use them effectively in their classrooms. The aim of this pedagogical trial was to increase the relevance of tertiary study to the “real world,” linking the reality of teaching with university training.