Stockholm Soundscape Project New Directions in Music Education

Abstract

The challenges facing today’s experimental music educator are increasingly different from those of any other period. With the proliferation of information technology and mass communications media and the ease of access to the Internet, computer games, mobile phones and hundreds of TV channels broadcasting around the clock, the outlook of the student body in any hyper-developed Western country is changing radically.

Many students today are computer-literate and able to handle more information at a higher rate, and for the most part they listen to music through means of electroacoustic reproduction. This situation is, of course, a mixed blessing—the fact that access to more information seldom equals better quality information (improved signal-to-noise ratio) needs no qualification.

What follows are notes towards the documentation of a practical project, with the principal intention of finding ways of extending and developing new approaches to creativity within the framework of a secondary music curriculum. The concept was to take techniques and methodologies developed by the acoustic ecology community and use them directly (in the first instance) with secondary school students.