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 engage in work that traverses multiple social and physical settings (Burnard 2014). Guided by sociocultural theory of human action, this paper presents a case-study analysis of two computer-based composers creating one soundtrack together. Analyzing how collaborative work was undertaken in all of the naturally occurring settings, this paper shows how the students' inter-relationships 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 multi-setting digital co-creating to higher mental development through discourse within music education.

Creative Collaboration and Collaborative Creativity: A Systematic Literature Review

“…For example, learning and teaching in creative composition, occurring within one-to-one dyads have been explored (Barrett, 2006 ; Barrett and Gromko, 2007 ) using in-depth interviews and video observation to explore the collaborative processes between student-composer and composer-teacher. One-to-one peer learning in composition was the context for a subsequent study carried out by Dobson and Littleton ( 2016 ). In this study, video and audio recordings of the students' collaborative work was analyzed, looking at micro-moments where “collaborative conceptual creative themes” (p. 337) were articulated.…”

“…Across all of the settings, the methods used were primarily qualitative, with the exception of one self-report rating scale questionnaire (Morgan et al, 2015 ), statistical analyses of features of expressivity extracted from multimodal recordings (Marchini et al, 2014 ) and quantitative analysis of computer code (Freeman and Van Troyer, 2011 ). Among the qualitative studies, approaches to analysis included thematic analysis (e.g., Barrett, 2006 ; Barrett and Gromko, 2007 ), discourse analysis (MacDonald and Wilson, 2006 ; Wilson and MacDonald, 2012 ; Dobson and Littleton, 2016 ), content analysis (Freeman and Van Troyer, 2011 ; Virkkula, 2016 ; de Bruin et al, 2019 ), interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA: Wilson and MacDonald, 2017 ) and finally, the constant comparative method (Blom, 2012 ; Biasutti, 2015 , 2018 ; Hill et al, 2018 ).…”

“…Eight papers were primarily concerned with collaborative creative learning. Of those concerned with collaborative creative learning , six studies were carried out in higher education (Barrett, 2006 ; Barrett and Gromko, 2007 ; Blom, 2012 ; Dobson and Littleton, 2016 ; Virkkula, 2016 ; de Bruin et al, 2019 ) and two in the context of professional development (de Bruin, 2016 ; Brinck, 2017 ). Where the phenomenon of interest was conceptualized as creative collaboration , one study was carried out in the context of higher education (van Nort, 2018 ), four studies were located in professional practice contexts (Khodyakov, 2007 ; Hill and Fitzgerald, 2012 ; Morgan et al, 2015 ; Hill et al, 2018 ), and one was undertaken in a community context (Tan et al, 2020 ).…”

Talk for collaborative learning in computer-based music production

“…Kate had talk about the collaborative practice of Cunningham and Cage, so he suggests that the dancers know about Cage and Cunningham, offering this aleatoric approach as a solution for their practice. These episodes revealed the complex interactional accomplishment of collaborative computer music production (Dobson and Littleton, 2015), but specifically how their 'cumulative conversation' draws on all various social settings, and also private 'thinking spaces' (Perret-Clermont, 2003) over time. Students do witness interthinking and thinking aloud episodes, and these insights can feed back into the emerging group knowledge across different meetings.…”

“…Throughout this collaboration the students imagined practices and hypothetical conversations in order to solve the problems that they could not have anticipated (Dobson and Littleton, 2015). They were particularly resourceful in their meaningmaking practices.…”