Music Making through Music and Making (MMMM)

This project will run workshops exploring instrument construction with students, and a staff workshop discussing the barriers and opportunities involved in teaching music with technology.

Organised by: Nicolas Gold, Ross Purves, Evangelos Himonides

About the project

This project aims to give school students an opportunity to experiment with making and playing musical instruments. It builds on our previous work and draws particularly on teacher feedback from earlier fieldwork about the nature of the resources we used, exploring this for better design in future. We will adopt similar methods to those developed for previous fieldwork (Gold, Purves, Himonides, 2022) but with an increased and more rigorous focus on the role and nature of instructional resources. We have identified two research questions that we aim to address through a single set of activities:

Research Questions

Q1: Do formal properties of instructions (information theory) correlate with their usability/effectiveness from professional and student perspectives?

Q2: Does the approach developed in Gold, Purves, and Himonides (2022) remain effective when computer programming is introduced to instrument development?

Whilst these emphasise different aspects of our work, they will be answered through a single stream of activity. This activity will take the form of three workshops aimed at local schools, two for pupils, the other for teaching staff.

For pupils, we will run workshops at UCL in which they explore the potential for physical and digital instrument construction using LEGO®, Raspberry Pi computers and simple programming. They will follow bespoke instructions with specific design properties to support them (to explore the relationship between those properties and the utility of the instructions). We will use group performance to motivate engagement with the work as we have before.

For teaching staff, we will facilitate a CPD-style workshop to discuss contemporary barriers to, and opportunities for, the teaching of music with technology. This will provide opportunities for professional knowledge exchange and exploration of the learning resources used for the pupil-focused workshops. The aim is to learn about the range of instruction types (and the principles that underpin them) that would be useful in future, drawing on professional perspectives and observational evidence of use, and relating that evidence to fundamental properties of instructions and the way they are created.

We hope to be able to publish at least two different journal articles from this work: one relating to the design and use of instructions, the other building on our previous work and exploring the potential of hybrid digital/physical instrument construction and music performance in education. We also intend to make our designs freely available to the teaching community.

References
Gold, N. E., Purves, R., & Himonides, E. (2022). Playing, Constructionism, and Music in Early-Stage Software Engineering Education. Multidisciplinary Journal for Education, Social and Technological Sciences, 9(1), 14–38. https://doi.org/10.4995/muse.2022.16453

About the researchers

A man subtly smiling, wearing a suit jacklet and blue shirt.

Nicolas Gold is an Associate Professor at UCL Computer Science. His research lies primarily in the comprehension and comprehensibility of design representations. His work is interdisciplinary and his current interests encompass methods for transforming source code and supporting its comprehension, investigating the properties of construction kit instructions and their use in music and engineering education, and modelling of research ethics. He has also undertaken research in computational musicology, creative music systems, healthcare involving music and computing, and research ethics. He is an experienced musician and Fellow of the British Computer Society.

A man with dark hair and beard, wearing a black shirt.

Evangelos Himonides is Professor of Technology, Education, and Music at UCL, where he leads a number of courses and supervises doctoral and post-doctoral research. He co-directs the International Music Education Research Centre (iMerc) and iMerc Press. He is co-founder of the Music-Education-Technology International Conference (MET), edits the Sempre conference series, is associate editor of Frontiers in Psychology and the Journal of Music, Technology and Education), and past associate editor of Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology. Evangelos has developed the free online technologies for Sounds of Intent, Inspire-Music and the Online Afghan Rubab Tutor. He is fellow of the RSA and Chartered Fellow (FBCS CITP) of the British Computer Society. When time is available, Evangelos likes to handcraft musical instruments in order to raise funds for his charitable work.

A smiling man wearing glasses and and a red shirt.

Ross Purves is Associate Professor of Music Education at the Institute of Education, University College London’s Faculty of Education and Society, where he contributes to master’s, doctoral and secondary initial teacher education programmes. A Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Ross was previously Deputy Programme Leader and Employability Champion for BA Education Studies at De Montfort University. Before entering higher education, Ross was a course manager in a large sixth form college and also served as music subject coordinator for a school-led consortium for initial teacher education.