Digital technologies and the mediation of undergraduate students’ collaborative music compositional practices

Abstract

Music education is supported by an increasing range of digital technologies that afford a remarkable divergence of opportunities for learning within the classroom. Musical creativities are not, however, limited to classroom situations; all musicians are engaged in work that traverses multiple social and physical settings. Guided by sociocultural theory of human action, this paper presents a case-study analysis of two computer-based composers creating one soundtrack together. Analysing how collaborative work was undertaken in all of the naturally occurring settings, this paper shows how the students' interrelationships with technology constituted their understandings, creative output and their ecology of practice. The research contributes new knowledge about how digitally resourced creating is shaped by remote, remembered, hypothetical and imagined digital technologies. It also shows how technology-mediated co-creating is a complex interactional accomplishment, implicating the value of long-term multisetting digital co-creating to higher mental development through discourse within music education.

Keywords:

• music
• computer-mediated music
• sociocultural theory
• interthinking
• creative process

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Professor Dorothy Miell and Dr Rosie Flewitt for their support, contributions to discussions and feedback throughout its development of this work. The comments of two anonymous reviewers are also much appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Dobson studied composition and music for media at Bangor University before retraining in social psychology of education and collaborative creativity with Open University. She is senior lecturer in computer music composition at the University of Huddersfield where she is developing her work on collaborative creating within and beyond the music technology curriculum. Through her research she has founded the CollabHub, which is a social enterprise fostering multidisciplinary collaboration.

Karen Littleton has research expertise in the psychology of education and collaborative creativity. She has held chairs at The Open University, UK, and the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She has worked as a visiting professor at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Coventry University, UK. She has also been a visiting scholar at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico, and the University of Cambridge, UK. Karen is a former Director of the Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology, the second largest educational research unit in the UK.

Notes

1. This paper presents research that talks about creativity, though it acknowledges a pluralist view of musical creativities as presented by Burnard (2012) since this signals a spectrum of inter-connected practices.

2. Here ‘a’ format refers to stereo audio while ‘b’ format refers to the ambisonic (multi-channel) format.

3. ‘Ambisonics is a powerful technique for sound spatialisation. It can allow recording, manipulation and composition with naturally and artificially constructed three-dimensional sound fields.’ (Malham and Myatt 1995)

4. is a powerful ambisonic sounds for quadraphonic performance, while ‘smaller’ indicates mono or stereo sounds that need to be integrated into a mix.