Journal of Music, Technology & Education - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2014

This study investigated the utilization of an original sing-a-long DVD and activity package titled ‘Sing-A-Long of the 1930s’ to engage older adults’ participation in singing and therapeutic recreation activities. Participants (n=693) included a combination of persons residing and/or working at 25 long-term care facilities, retirement homes and adult day care centres across Canada engaging in a DVD sing-a-long and activity programme for five weeks. Following this experience, participants were individually interviewed or took part in one of 25 focus groups. The results focused on participant, caregiver and DVD facilitator’s perceived benefits and indicate the DVD was successful in engaging older adults with cognitive impairment in singing, social interaction and discussion, participation in meaningful activity, reminiscence, sensory stimulation, and quality of life in aging.

This article is about composition learning of two students in a music programme in upper secondary school with a special regard to how they develop conceptual structures within the musical form of expression and understanding. Semiotics, spectromorphology and cultural historical theory are engaged to discuss the empirical findings that are collected through observation and interview. The compositional task in the study regarded sound-based composition within the field of electroacoustic music, more specifically applying additive synthesis to make raw material for composition, preparatory exercises and finally compositions. Musical meaning-making and compositional creativity were triggered by the encounter of newly learned concepts with internalized and familiar musical thinking. The learning process could be understood in terms of a concept development process (CDP) in language-based learning.

In the field of education the use of some of the ever-multiplying videos on the Web 2.0, such as those found on YouTube or video podcasts, is a relatively recent phenomenon, which is nevertheless starting to spread rapidly. Vodcasting – Web 2.0 video technology used in this research – is becoming a flexible and powerful tool for the delivery of educational content. Although it is certain that educational experiences using video podcasts are beginning to proliferate in higher education, very few are carried out in secondary schools, and examples in the area of musical education are scarce. The objective of the article is to show – through an action-research methodology – the effectiveness of podcasting/vodcasting in the instrumental performance of secondary school music students, who have used video podcasts for their instrumental training. The data obtained over the course of three academic years, based on video recordings carried out before and after having used video podcasts, highlight the progress in performance results amongst the students who used this tool.

In this article, it is suggested that academic programmes in higher education can benefit from focusing on procedural (or practical and phenomenal) and propositional (or theoretical and abstract) knowledge. The preparation of professional musicians is particularly relevant to this issue because musicians’ focus is often on procedural knowledge gained through making music. Accordingly, two approaches to preparing professional musicians are contrasted – face-to-face and distance education – and these illustrate how the transmission and acquisition of procedural knowledge works. The first, face-to-face teaching and learning, is thought about figuratively in terms of an artist who apprentices pupils or disciples and leads them to become exponents of particular musical practices. The second, distance teaching and learning in music as practiced worldwide, is informed particularly by metaphors of the web, factory and boutique that invoke, respectively, notions of connectivity, production and consumption in music education. The role of technology in mediating the process of teacher and student interaction in distance education is explored. Implications of the analysis for distance teaching and learning in higher education are sketched, with particular reference to the practical case of a hypothetical music school.

This study is an empirical investigation of what activities evolve when children interact with and around a new music technology (an Interactive Reflexive Musical System (IRMS), a kind of computationally augmented instrument), with and without an adult actively participating. What the nature of the participations’ communication is, what structuring resources they are introduced to and use, and whether or not the participants establish temporarily sufficient intersubjectivity are analysed. The empirical data consist of video observations from an after-school centre of, first, the children themselves interacting with each other and the music technology, and second, with a teacher participating in the activity. The result shows that the activities developed into different types of play-based participations: make-believe and/or musical play. Although the adult provides some structuring resources (counting, using metaphors and gestures) to engage the children in a ‘musical dialogue’ with the system, the participants do not establish temporarily sufficient intersubjectivity for engaging in a joint activity of this kind. The finding that the children (and adult) engage in many different kinds of activities illustrates the creative and open-ended nature of participating in social practices.

Classes where students have opportunities to interact with experts allow students to apply what they have learned and begin to contextualize the content learned in class. The instructor in this face-to-face choir ensemble class used web conferencing to set up a virtual interview with an expert, Dr David Dickau, to allow his students to have the opportunity to have direct contact with a living composer whose music has had a profound influence in the choir ensemble field. The interactive web conference included an interview with the composer, followed by a critique of the choir’s performance of his composition, ‘If Music Be the Food of Love’. Students completed a survey following the web conference session. This study examines the effect of the composer’s virtual visit on students’ understanding and performance of his song. It also looks at students’ recommendations to continue such virtual activities as well as the effect on Social Presence. Results of this case study show that Dr Dickau’s virtual visit had an overwhelmingly positive effect on all of these areas and students strongly recommended the continuation.

Social media has led to new opportunities for learning music. In less formalized settings, a whole new arena for learning music has developed. The aim of this article is to investigate student teachers’ experiences of learning to play an instrument with the Internet as a teacher. The investigation was done as an action research study where twelve beginning teacher-training students were given the task to use the Internet to learn how to play an instrument. The students were organized in peer groups to help each other. Documentation of the progress happened through logbooks. The project lasted for half a year in 2011 and had a triple intention: to provide the students with experience about learning how to play by help of the Internet, for the students to learn to play a second instrument, and to investigate if and how learning practices for learning an instrument aided by the Internet could be useful in music teacher training.

The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, David Neumeyer (ed.) (2014) New York: Oxford University Press, 683 pp., ISBN: 9780195328493, h/bk, £100

The Art of Music Production: The Theory and Practice, Richard James Burgess (2013) Oxford University Press, 329 pp., ISBN: 9780199921744, p/bk, £19.99