Our project has tracked the challenges, opportunities, and solutions that students and teachers currently face in exploring the computer as an instrument. Some parts of the project lasted only an hour, a lesson, while others spanned weeks - and as a whole, the project has continued for two years. Students and teachers, in collaboration with researchers, have ultimately arrived at a number of perspectives and examples of what the computer as an instrument can mean in Aesthetic Art Program, at Upper Secondary School. Above all, the project has captured a wealth of stories, reflecting the voices that collectively provide an incredibly rich description of what it means to be in constant change within today's Upper Secondary School environment.
In the fall of 2020, the project "The Digital Student - Challenges and Opportunities with the Computer as an Instrument in Music Education" began. The project aimed to explore teaching with and about the computer as an instrument to develop the abilities, skills, and knowledge of teachers and students who use the computer as an instrument in the Upper Secondary School's Aesthetic Arts Program. The goal was to deepen the understanding of what it means to use the computer as an instrument and thereby further develop the teaching methods. The project team included teachers, pupils, teacher students, and researchers from Malmö Academy of Music (Lund University), Rytmus Malmö (Academedia AB) and Ystad Gymnasium (Ystad Municipality).
The project initially involved surveys, interviews, and focus group interviews with pupils, teachers, teacher students, and principals. The team then designed several interventions tested in the courses "Instrument or Voice" (Individual Instrumental Teaching) and "Ensemble with Choir". Here, teachers and students experimented by performing tasks recorded using GoPro's and Screenflows.
Based on the rich data collection, the team developed these guidelines to support creative processes in conjunction with emerging technologies. The goal of the examples of educational resources and methods in the guidelines is to continue to building a creative knowledge base within our community as a whole, i.e., together with you.
Several of the educational resources and methods have been developed alongside the experiences in the project and can be used as standalone resources.
A Definitive Definition?
The project aimed to generate a scientific understanding of what the computer as an instrument means for the participants involved in the two Upper Secondary Schools and the subject teacher training included in the various sub-studies. We, therefore, rely on the participants' experiences and descriptions of what the computer as an instrument means to them, without seeking a definitive definition.
One of the Upper Secondary Schools has been pioneering and leading the implementation of the computer as an instrument in Swedish Upper Secondary Schools. In this context, the computer as an instrument is described as a composite system based on three components: 1) computer 2) user-configured software 3) digital controllers that together function as a single instrument with a broad spectrum of musical possibilities and expressions. At Berklee College of Music, a similar description is used under the term electronic digital instrument (EDI), which has led to EDI becoming a collective name for the computer as an instrument (both within and outside the project) and a collective name for digital tools in the broadest sense (outside the project). In the three organization included in the study, different conditions, prior knowledge, and abilities that provide different perspectives and examples of how the computer as an instrument is perceived, experienced, and understood. Thus, the computer as an instrument is redefined by all who use it.
Therefore, the project did not aim to define the computer as an instrument but rather to be receptive and open to the participants' lived experience of an instrument in constant change.