In 2017 we began exploring learning designs in which participants create simple music using the immersive environment of Minecraft. Minecraft was chosen as a music creation tool and environment because it represented a way to explore the nature of the social collaboration associated with group-based music-making from the perspective of embodied cognition. That is to say, instead of presenting participants with facsimiles of virtual instruments (say, in a manner similar to the popular music creation app Garageband from Apple), a three-dimensional environment was designed and built within Minecraft in which participants – through their avatars – would be able to explore and interact with elements within the landscape concurrently and collaboratively. In turn, their interactions would result in tones being generated, and participants would be given opportunities to influence the resulting music through the editing (or ‘modding’) of the in-world elements. Such interactions are possible because one of the phenomena engineered in to the Minecraft environment is analogous to the presence of electrical current flow.

As stated in a preceding paragraph, from the perspective of the learning sciences, the study leverages principles of embodied cognition. It also draws on the work of Gee (2007) with respect to his work on the notion of projective identity. From the perspective of musicology, the study was designed as a response to Baker’s and Harvey’s (2004) work on ‘music as social behavior’, in which they considered a range of ways in which the social psychology of music might be empirically investigated. They concluded their chapter by drawing attention to a wide range of social psychological research questions that remain ripe for exploration, and encouraged researchers to “use imaginative” methods in approaching them.

Understood thusly, our approach does not focus as much on the nature of the actual music collaboratively ‘composed’, but more on the social processes through which participants sought to create (what might be eventually be construed as tuneful) music in the first place. As such, Laurillard’s (2001) work on conversational frameworks was used to analyse the transcripts of conversations among the participants as they sought to make music. Specifically, the focus is on how any participants might have taken initiative to ‘step up’ to guide their fellow participants in aspects of the interaction in which they may have been more proficient (such as music background in determining the cadence of the notes).

This study was awarded Gold at the Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Research Programme, and was published in Vol 13 Nos 2/3 of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. It is of potential interest because it represents one possible way in which music creation in a digital environment might be carried out in a manner which does not seek to be a literal facsimile of real-world instruments. This latter point is in alignment with our work on Disciplinary Intuitions, in which he explores the phenomenological roots of the conceptions and misconceptions which novices bring to learning environments. Finally, the affordance of a three-dimensional immersive environment for collaborative activity for participants who are not necessarily co-located in the ‘real-world’ might also allow insights to be gleaned on similar collaborative learning spaces.