As popular music practices continue to evolve and expand in parallel with technological and social changes, popular music educators can engage in reflective practices that problematize the current curricular offerings and music-making experiences in relation to the ways people engage with music outside of school. My own particular interest when looking at popular music-making practices is to explore music-making and learning that blurs or disrupts disciplinary boundaries and silos. This chapter briefly introduces some of the ways people blur the disciplinary boundaries between popular music and computer science, which raises questions about the places and purposes of such engagement.
Read MoreSince the introduction of music education within public schools, curricular offerings have not developed in parallel with the myriad of practices popular musicians engage with outside school contexts. In other academic disciplines such as computer science, curricula and practices are iterative in nature and are responsive to the ever-changing practices that people engage with outside educational contexts. Although popular musicians are using computer science practices for music-related purposes, such practices are seldom discussed within music education scholarship. This article begins with an exploration of such intersections by describing hardware practices popular musicians use to modify, design or build electronic devices for music-related purposes. The following section introduces coding practices that people use to create and modify music software, as well as to make music with code. The article concludes by unpacking potential implications and considerations for educators interested in the intersections of popular musicianship and computer science practices.
Read MoreRecent initiatives by for-profit corporations and funding measures instituted by governments intend to support the preparation of students for careers in computer science and technology. Although such initiatives and measures can indeed increase opportunities for students’ engagement with computer science and technology in K-12 schools, we question whose needs are being served, for what purposes, and at what cost. In particular, we ask whether music educators might be complicit in advancing technology that subordinates human needs—specifically students’ interests in making music in their own creative ways—to modes of production that benefit certain dominant commercial interests in society. After discussing how current computer technology narrows students’ choices, we counter this determinism by highlighting a music subculture that creates and appropriates music technologies for music-related purposes. Our example of the “chipscene” illustrates how music educators might reconceptualize “music making” through modification of existing music technology and thereby restore students’ freedom to “reclaim making” in the age of neoliberalism.
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