Journal of Music, Technology & Education - Volume 14, Issue 2-3, 2021

This quantitative study examined the self-efficacy of music teachers in each of the technological, pedagogical and technological knowledge domains with a particular focus on their technological self-efficacy. Bauer’s (2013) M-TPACK questionnaire was used as its measurement tool and was sent to members of the National Association for Music Education in the United States. Overall, 475 respondents reported high levels of self-efficacy when implementing technology in their instruction. This study also revealed that music educators were discovering technology and learning to use it mostly on their own time and outside school hours. Results further validated the factor structure of Bauer’s M-TPACK survey as it pertains to music teachers for the questions measuring individual TPACK domains.

This article explores the use of a technological tool, the Makey Makey, in the music classroom, to support student engagement and motivation. An experimental, descriptive and correlational quantitative design was designed and done over a sample of 104 students at high school level. Pre- and post- measures of engagement and motivation indicators were collected and compared to a control group to explore and compare the impact of the use of the Makey Makey over these indicators. The research findings indicate a significant difference between the experimental and control group in relation to their levels of engagement and motivation, suggesting that the use of technological tools in the music classroom can have potential benefits over these indicators. The results also show that are the affective and emotional dimensions that have more incidence over the student engagement, suggesting that educational interventions aimed at improving student engagement and motivation should focus on nurturing their emotional engagement. However, the results from this study cannot be generalized due to the study’s limitations, which make evident the need for more experimental studies and further exploration of the impact of technology in student engagement and motivation indicators.

In this article, we investigate whether and how a purposely built digital tabletop musical instrument (DTMI) can help groups of novices and casual users to explore music composition. Working together in small groups around the DTMI, our participants explored how the musical concepts of melodic similarity and contrast can convey narrative through musical structure. We build on our previous work that investigated a one-to-one learner–tutor scenario and expanded it to groups of peers. Similarly to our previous study, we adopted an exploratory and primarily qualitative approach, involving 24 participants divided into eight groups of three each, sampled from the general population via flyers and word of mouth. We structured the sessions as a series of open-ended discussions of the notions of similarity and contrast, starting from a general point of view, leading up to the task of inventing a short story and composing a melody to describe it. Although the two studies may appear superficially similar, the group element represents a fundamental difference, as we found. The combination of technology and group setting was instrumental in helping less experienced participants discuss music with more experienced participants by using a simplified yet expressive representation of music that could be used to discuss complex aspects of melody and composition.

This article presents educational strategies for critical listening in sound engineering. Derived from listening within the context of language learning as an arguably more mature discipline that uses similar modes of communication, it aims to provide pedagogical methods transferable to a range of teaching and learning situations. Framed within embodied cognition as theoretical perspective, the strategies’ effectiveness is qualitatively assessed using learning journals and focus group interviews of 51 audio engineering students. This evaluation cements the validity of two educational strategies mapped from language learning to sound engineering. First, a communicative approach to critical listening education joins the identification of sound causality with its embodied interpretation to create more meaningful learning experiences. Second, a metacognitive approach to attention regulation and vigilance promotes autonomy in critical listening, enabling learners to continue developing their skills beyond the classroom.

‘Personæ’ is an interactive large-scale space sound installation designed by the students of the music technology classes of the ‘V. Gambara’ music high school in Brescia (Italy). The activities that led to the conception and realization of the installation were part of ‘The Discovery of Interactive Spaces’ project, a set of extracurricular workshops organized by the authors of this article between spring 2019 and winter 2020 with the support of the Italian National Operation Program (PON). At the end of January 2020, the installation was presented during a public event and an evaluation questionnaire was administered to 79 visitors. The purpose of this research is to assess how the public, students, parents, teachers and classmates received the ‘Personæ’ installation, and the technology integration within regular study curricula. While the majority of visitors have well received the artistic and communicative value of the installation, the questionnaire reveals that there is not a similar uniformity of agreement on some aspects of technology integration in school curricula.