Changing Technologies, Changing Minds: Taking account of music technologies in the curriculum1

Abstract

Our music education history is littered with changing technologies and the future horizon seems equally full of new technological developments. As a part of maintaining quality and relevance in our music curriculums this paper seeks to reveal the way technological change interacts with the music curriculum to change the minds of our students through their musical understanding. Such change can best arise through growth and development in the student through making and reflecting with a variety of technological resources, from paper and pencil to instruments and computer. Although sound recording technologies have been the biggest technological change effecting music education this century, digital technologies, in the form of computers and synthesizers, are the most visible technological change with which we are currently engaged. In order to understand how these changes can best serve music education we need to be clear about the ways in which technologies interact with thinking. The technological environment in which the student can developed is established by the teacher and the curriculum, so choosing engaging activities and appropriate technologies is vital.