A Constructivist Approach to Developing Interactive Digital Technology for Musical Learning (PhD Thesis and Appendix)

Abstract

This is the USIR link to the thesis and appendices for the doctoral research project 'A Constructivist Approach to Developing Interactive Digital Technology for Musical Learning' (2014-18). The project was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.The project involved a study of current issues in creative music education, focusing at key stages 1 and 2, and the development and testing of new software applications as a response to these issues. Several primary schools in the Northwest of England were visited during the study, for music composition sessions using these resources, and the musical outcomes of the sessions were analysed. Data collection and evaluation followed an emergent grounded theory method, but led to an original statement of methodology. Ethical approval was obtained from the university ethics panel.The principle software output, Graphick Score, was developed in Pure Data and used for most of the classroom research sessions. This is available in the appendix, along with musical examples as audio and video files.