Introduction: Re-Framing and Re-Thinking

This book aims to explore the fluidity of thinking and practice prevalent across the field of technology-based music. In doing so, it acknowledges that as genres emerge and develop, their expanding field of activity comes to encroach on others, sometimes hybridising aspects of technique, soundworld, or technological use, or merely adopting some elements of these. The term technology-based music has been deliberately chosen as an inclusive term to bring together discussion from multiple perspectives on both historical and current practice from a wide range of cultural contexts. It first appeared in scholarly literature a decade or so ago. Jay Dorfman’s Theory and Practice of Technology-Based Music Instruction (2013) proposed a framework for examining music pedagogy that uses technology to introduce concepts and develop skills and new thinking. Though focused on teaching and learning rather than wider cultural trends, Dorfman demonstrates an awareness that the “technology-based music classroom is not immune to the prevailing discrimination and social justice issues that are pervasive throughout institutionalized music education” and that for him “technology-based music instruction … has always been about affording students opportunities to be creative” (Dorfman 2013, xi). Issues of inclusion, social justice, and affording creativity are oft-explored themes in this book.