Elizabeth Dobson

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 engaged in work that traverses multiple social and physical settings. Guided by sociocultural theory of human action, this paper presents a case-study analysis of two computer-based composers creating one soundtrack together. Analysing how collaborative work was undertaken in all of the naturally occurring settings, this paper shows how the students’ interrelationships 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 multisetting digital co-creating to higher mental development through discourse within music education.

Keywords: music; computer-mediated music; sociocultural theory; interthinking; creative process

This paper presents research from an ongoing study analyzing the co-creative practice of two undergraduate studio based music composers working with two peers from dance and video production. Whilst empirical research has explored joint creativity and group working processes within and across performing arts disciplines (including music), situations that bring undergraduate studio based composers into interdisciplinary collaborative creating have not previously been studied. Framed by a sociocultural theory of human activity, this research is looking at how creative achievement and the local social context for creative work is constituted through interaction. This paper explains the sociocultural methods used to build a sequential analysis of joint activity, presenting an extracted analysis before concluding with a summary of some early observations of the issues music technology students can face when creating new work collaboratively.

Women contribute significantly to our digital audio history, however, statistics show that our current music and sound ecologies have become overwhelmingly male, and this climate has inspired a range of feminist responses. This chapter focuses on the glocal impact of the feminist and all-female communities of digital audio practice; introduced here as Digital Audio Ecofeminist [DA’EF] communities due to their anti-capitalist, ecological, intersectional, power-sharing and social justice values. 

In June 2017 Dr Liz Dobson visited five DA’EF communities in North America, to understand how they came to be formed, their activities, and what might be understood about their ecological and glocal influence on the learning and creativities of women in sound. These communities are: Beats By Girlz, The Womens Audio Mission, The Seraphine Collective, The Girls Rock Camp Alliance, and The Society for Women in Technology.

This chapter reveals how DA’EF communities are ecologically diverse ‘public homeplaces’ (Beleenky et al) that foster a wide range of sound and enterprise creativities; including technocultural and distributed creativity, as well as many forms of authorship (such as sociospatial, organisational, intercultural), and practice principles (experimental, artistic, transformative and dialogic). DA’EF communities are set up to teach and create opportunites for knowledge sharing, however, this chapter evidenced collaborative learning through ‘interthinking’ (Mercer) and muse-mentoring (Mulvey); indicating that people who perceive themselves to be learners with a relatively small contribution, actually have significant glocal influence through these communities. 

Presenting an annotated narrative of the most significant ideas addressed through these conversations, this chapter raises questions around the demands on key individuals, the influence of economic benevolence in sound domains, and it calls for further research on DA’EF work, for the benefit of equity in digital audio industries and other communities and industries concerned with providing equity in learning and creativities for all people.

This chapter considers the benefits of extra-curricular interdisciplinary collaboration in HMEIs, drawing on theories of learning through apprenticeship, community based learning (Vygotsky, 1978; Lave & Wenger,  1991; Green, 2002), literature on collaborative emergence and distributed creativity (Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009), musical creativities (Burnard, 2014), and collaborative learning in Higher Music Education (Hakkarainen, 2013). In particular, it explores how music technology students can build their funds of knowledge (Moll et al, 1992) about collaboration and develop their skills and confidence through enterprise creativity. It explains how this can be fostered by five conditions: where the institution by provides a platform for networking and sharing ideas, through offering a community, nurturing the gift of confidence (John-Steiner and Mahn, 2002), providing students with authorship, and by enabling greater risk taking (due, in part, to the absence of summative assignment criteria). Presenting a specific collaboration hub as a case study, the chapter explains how one specific platform, and associated set of conditions, provides permission to play and learn through messy but developmentally valuable extra-curricular education. It also offers insights on creativity, enterprise and collaboration from six of its members of this community; raising questions about their self-awareness and learning through breadth of experience and innovation. Considering the broader implications for creative practice within and beyond a HMEI, this chapter raises questions that may guide new research on extra-curricular collaborative play and enterprise development in HMEIs.

Extract "...The book presents 10 chapters divided into 3 parts. Part 1, The Field of Music, includes two chapters that contextualize myths about musical creativity; seeding the argument for a pluralist view of musical creativities. Introducing Bourdieu’s thinking tools of ‘field’, ‘habitus’, ‘capital’, and ‘practice’ as the theoretical lens, it begins to unpack a spectrum of musical creativities, showing how they are situated in contemporary music practices. Part 2, Narratives of practice, presents an extensive collection of real world case studies. " ..."Part 3, The field of music in education, includes the views of musicians, teachers and children, articulating how they value and evidence musical creativities in their practice. These concluding chapters offer practical models and strategies for unpacking and mobilising musical creativities within education practices."

The full review will be available once published. It is currently with the Journal of Thinking Skills and Creativity editors.

At the University of Huddersfield Liz Dobson has been exploring extra-curricular approaches to learning in music and music technology, by developing an interdisciplinary collaboration hub. This special session outlines some questions raised through her PhD research on longer-term undergraduate and interdisciplinary collaboration, and the theoretical principles that led to developing this approach. The majority of the session will focus on student perceptions of what this extra-curricular forum offers. Some students were interviewed by their peers and some by Liz, however, there will also be a number of students present to talk about their experiences and answer questions about this approach to fostering enterprise and innovation in music technology. The session will end by identifying salient issues that require closer scrutiny, opening possibilities for further investigations that might help to quantify how extra-curricular activities can begin to foster innovation amongst undergraduates, in and around music technology.

This paper presents research from an ongoing study that is looking at the co-creative practice of two undergraduate studio based music composers working with two peers from dance and video production. Whilst empirical research has explored joint creativity and group working processes within and across performing arts disciplines (i.e. Ginsborg et al, 2006; Sawyer, 2006; Seddon, 2005; King, 2006), situations that bring undergraduate studio based composers into interdisciplinary collaborative creating have not previously been studied. Framed by a sociocultural theory of human activity (Vygotsky 1987), my research is looking at how creative achievement and the local social context for creative work is constituted through interaction. This paper explains the sociocultural methods used to build a sequential analysis of joint activity, present illustrative extracts of analyzed interaction to show how creative work and the development of shared understanding in collaboration are resourced. Though the 20 hours of audio and video data of collaborative practice is still being analysed, this paper presents a summary of some early observations, particularly around the issues music technology students can face when creating new work collaboratively.
Ginsborg J., Chaffin R., Nicholson, G., (2006) Shared Performance Cues in Singing
and Conducting: a content analysis of talk during practice. Psychology of Music
34(2) 167-194
King, E., (2006) The Roles of Student Musicians in Quartet Rehearsals Psychology of
Music 34 262-282
Sawyer, K. R., (2006) Group Creativity: Musical Performance and Collaboration
Psychology of Music 34(2) 148-165
Seddon, F. A., (2005) Modes of Communication During Jazz Improvisation British
Journal of Music Education 22(1) 47-61
Vygotsky, L., S. (1987) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological
Processes Harvard

The University Repository is a digital collection of the research output of the University, available on Open Access. Copyright and Moral Rights for the items on this site are retained by the individual author and/or other copyright owners. Users may access full items free of charge; copies ...

The University Repository is a digital collection of the research output of the University, available on Open Access. Copyright and Moral Rights for the items on this site are retained by the individual author and/or other copyright owners. Users may access full items free of charge; copies ...

This thesis addresses a gap in research on collaborative creativity. Prior research has investigated how groups of professionals, young people and children work together to co-create work, but the distinctive contribution of this thesis is a socioculturally framed understanding of undergraduates’ interdisciplinary practices over an extended period.

Guided by a socioculturally framed theory of creativity, this thesis observed 4 students creating a 10 minute performance piece, and presents a longitudinal analysis of the co-creation process which occurred through a total of 28 meetings recorded over the course of a twelve-week term (24 hours of recordings in total). Specific episodes were selected from the full set of recordings, constituting 2 hours of recordings for in-depth analysis. Sociocultural discourse analysis was used to examine how social and cultural contexts constituted an ecology of undergraduate practice in interdisciplinary creative collaboration. Offering a new methodology, this discursive approach for studying context (Arvaja, 2008) was combined with interaction analysis (Kumpulainen & Wray, 2002; Scott, Mortimer & Aguiar, 2006) to analyse how moment-by-moment creative developments and contexts were resourced and constituted through dialogue, artifacts and physical settings.

With implications for theory and practice, the analysis showed how the students’ collaborative contexts were constituted through dialogue, and how their emerging co-creative practice was mediated through multiple social and physical settings. It further evidenced how common knowledge was constructed through the process of collaboration, the value of peer feedback for fostering confidence, and students’ need for ‘silent witnessing’; for space to reflect and contribute to a long-term cumulative conversation.

The thesis also discusses how resourceful the students were, in terms of negotiating unfamiliar and unpredictable co-creating activities. Evidence is provided for the collaborative value of creating and appropriating new tools to develop common knowledge, and for the significance of imagination as a psychological resource for building common knowledge about hypothetical future activities, showing how technology-mediated co-creating can be seen as a complex interactional accomplishment.

This thesis addresses a gap in research on collaborative creativity. Prior research has investigated how groups of professionals, young people and children work together to co-create work, but the distinctive contribution of this thesis is a socioculturally framed understanding of undergraduates’ interdisciplinary practices over an extended period.

Guided by a socioculturally framed theory of creativity, this thesis observed 4 students creating a 10 minute performance piece, and presents a longitudinal analysis of the co-creation process which occurred through a total of 28 meetings recorded over the course of a twelve-week term (24 hours of recordings in total). Specific episodes were selected from the full set of recordings, constituting 2 hours of recordings for in-depth analysis. Sociocultural discourse analysis was used to examine how social and cultural contexts constituted an ecology of undergraduate practice in interdisciplinary creative collaboration. Offering a new methodology, this discursive approach for studying context (Arvaja, 2008) was combined with interaction analysis (Kumpulainen & Wray, 2002; Scott, Mortimer & Aguiar, 2006) to analyse how moment-by-moment creative developments and contexts were resourced and constituted through dialogue, artifacts and physical settings.

With implications for theory and practice, the analysis showed how the students’ collaborative contexts were constituted through dialogue, and how their emerging co-creative practice was mediated through multiple social and physical settings. It further evidenced how common knowledge was constructed through the process of collaboration, the value of peer feedback for fostering confidence, and students’ need for ‘silent witnessing’; for space to reflect and contribute to a long-term cumulative conversation.

The thesis also discusses how resourceful the students were, in terms of negotiating unfamiliar and unpredictable co-creating activities. Evidence is provided for the collaborative value of creating and appropriating new tools to develop common knowledge, and for the significance of imagination as a psychological resource for building common knowledge about hypothetical future activities, showing how technology-mediated co-creating can be seen as a complex interactional accomplishment.

In 2012, on finishing my PhD I started this group to help students collaborate across different disciplines; blurring cohort, course and institutional boundaries. Please email for more information, or read my publication 'Permission to Play'