Learning and Creating Music in the Digital Age: Degrees of Formality in the Music Classroom

Abstract

Digital technologies have transformed music consumption, production, and learning in many musical cultures, making way for highly individualised and global engagement with music and music learning outside the formal classroom context. While technology provides anyone with the technical tools to make music, it does not necessarily provide musical skills and knowledges. Access to digital tools within and outside of the classroom necessitates a reconsideration of the relationship between the role of the classroom music teacher, the application of technology, and existing approaches to pedagogical design.

This grounded theory study explored experiences of students and teachers using digital tools through observations, interviews, and focus groups with participants in two secondary school communities in Sydney with three differing degrees of formality: teacher-led, student-centred, and independent. Two key factors impacting learning and creation were observed; pedagogical design, and students’ assemblages (after Deleuze, 1995). Overall, inclusion of these tools and musics resulted in increased engagement and motivation by most students across all contexts. Greater engagement and deeper, enactive learning occurred in contexts informed by authentic learning practices, characterised by self-guided experimentation, relevant and student-selected musical material, real-world goals, teacher as more experienced learner, opportunities for social learning, and music theory as parenthetical. In these contexts, students created and learned about music through experimentation, tinkering, active listening (e.g. using reference tracks), solitary, and peripheral learning, mirroring real-world practices. Students’ musical assemblages, their musical and cultural knowledges gained through experiences in various musical genres, and the classed relationship of these genres to the formal music classroom, informed students' musical decisions and impacted their identity, values, and motivation.