Engaging children's participation in and around a new music technology through playful framing

Abstract

This article concerns children's engagement and participation in a musical dialogue, with the adult taking the role of the more-experienced participant and frames the activity as a musical play activity (in both senses of the word ‘play’). It presents an analysis of empirical data from a session with two six-year-old children interacting with and around a new music technology in a Swedish preschool setting and explores what participating in these practices implies for the children's learning. The results indicate that the communicatively established framing made it possible for the children (i.e. provided scaffolding for them) to participate actively in a joint playful music-making activity. The communicative framing provided by the adult who took the role of a more-experienced participant played a vital part in providing musical experiences, not only in guiding the children to explore the system but also in introducing mediating tools as a way of discerning musical aspects.

Keywords:

• communicative framing
• guided participation
• music technology
• preschool

Acknowledgements

The work reported here is a part of a large-scale international research project on children's technology-transformed music learning, entitled Musical Interaction Relying on Reflection (MIROR), financed by the European Union FP7-ICT [Grant 258338]. The transnational project group is coordinated by Anna Rita Addessi (University of Bologna, Italy). The other partners and their national and technological project leaders are: Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris (Francois Pachet); University of Gothenburg, Sweden (Bengt Olsson); University of Exeter, UK (Susan Young); University of Genoa, Italy (Gualtiero Volpe); and University of Athens, Greece (Christina Anagnostopoilou).