It is common to learn to play an orchestral musical instrument through regular one-to-one lessons with an experienced musician as a tutor. Students may work with the same tutor for many years, meeting regularly to receive real-time, iterative feedback on their performance. However, musicians travel regularly to audition, teach and perform and this can sometimes make it difficult to maintain regular contact. In addition, an experienced tutor for a specific instrument or musical style may not be available locally. General instrumental tuition may not be available at all in geographically distributed communities. One solution is to use technology such as videoconference to facilitate a remote lesson; however, this fundamentally changes the teaching interaction. For example, as a result of the change in communication medium, the availability of non-verbal cues and perception of relative spatiality is reduced. We describe a study using video-ethnography, qualitative video analysis and conversation analysis to make a fine-grained examination of student–tutor interaction during five co-present and one video-mediated woodwind lesson. Our findings are used to propose an alternative technological solution – an interactive digital score. Rather than the face-to-face configuration enforced by videoconference, interacting through a shared digital score, augmented by visual representation of the social cues found to be commonly used in co-present lessons, will better support naturalistic student–tutor interaction during the remote lesson experience. Our findings may also be applicable to other fields where knowledge and practice of a physical skill sometimes need to be taught remotely, such as surgery or dentistry.

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An increasing body of work provides evidence of the importance of bodily experience for cognition and the learning of mathematics. Sensor-based technologies have potential for guiding sensori-motor engagement with challenging mathematical ideas in new ways. Yet, designing environments that promote an appropriate sensori-motoric interaction that effectively supports salient foundations of mathematical concepts is challenging and requires understanding of opportunities and challenges that bodily interaction offers. This study aimed to better understand how young children can, and do, use their bodies to explore geometrical concepts of angle and shape, and what contribution the different sensori-motor experiences make to the comprehension of mathematical ideas. Twenty-nine students aged 6-10 years participated in an exploratory study, with paired and group activities designed to elicit intuitive bodily enactment of angles and shape. Our analysis, focusing on moment-by-moment bodily interactions, attended to gesture, action, facial expression, body posture and talk, illustrated the 'realms of possibilities' of bodily interaction, and highlighted challenges around 'felt' experience and egocentric vs. allocentric perception of the body during collaborative bodily enactment. These findings inform digital designs for sensory interaction to foreground salient geometric features and effectively support relevant forms of enactment to enhance the learning experience, supporting challenging aspects of interaction and exploiting the opportunities of the body.

There are many ways that people come together for the purpose of making music, each offering different opportunities for interaction and exhibiting different communicative characteristics.Through the study of one-to-one instrumental music lessons featuring the clarinet, we find that student and tutor musical contributions are organized using aspects of conversational turn-taking. Short fragments of music, which are characteristic of lesson activity, can also function as turns in themselves as student-tutor dialogue unfolds. When the medium for communication is changed and we analyse video mediated music lessons, these mechanisms are less effective, revealing the importance of this organization to lesson flow, and to musical interaction more generally.