Since the autumn 2018 a research project concerning Transformative Technology (TT) for the increase of wellbeing and the reduction of mental dissonance has been launched at the School of Music in Piteå. Seed money has enabled a pilot project where students within higher music education can use different types of TT. This poster will show the different types of TT used in the pilot project and some preliminary result from the user experiences. The technology in use are (i) the Heart Rate Variability (HRV) sensors and Heart Math application, (ii) the Muse headband and meditation app, (iii) the Soma Mat and Breathing Light developed at SICS and KTH, as well as the (iv) ARK-crystal developed at the Torus Tech lab. The purpose of the pilot study is to investigate how students respond to different kinds of sensors and actuators used in this TT and most importantly how the students find the technology transformable in regard to amplifying their well-being, empowering and refining their aesthetic resonance and diminishing stress and anxiety blocking them in their musical performance and development.

Understanding of cognitive strategies in supporting artistic expressions, reducing stress, performance anxiety and emotional blockings are of paramount importance to empower students’ and prepare for a sustainable work life as musicians. How can we aid musical artists to cope and master their emotional and mental dissonances in order to empower creative and artistic progressions in a sustainable way within higher music education?

This pilot has several aims including investigating possibilities for higher education to interact with societal artistic communities as well as students’ DIY culture using available technology in order to analyse and co-create a professional development including artistic competence, holistic awareness and personal balance. The project will explore transformative technologies; HRV, Muse (EEG), Soma Mat & Breathing Light (heat and breath feedback), and the ARK-crystal, which differ regarding presented data (biofeedback) and function. Further, how these devices relate to research theory and methodology. We pose the critical question: Can these applications contribute to the identification, interpretation, and organization of the First Instrument, the students’ own aesthetic sensory information, embodied behaviours and cognitive strategies?

This presentation will include methodological challenges discussed and interpreted in the transdisciplinary research group SANE – embracing researchers in art, quantum physics, medicine, sustainability learning, and biology.

In higher music education, techniques for expanding creativity and bodily awareness have traditionally focused on instrumental skills and “in-music” aspects. Voices have been raised for facilitating mind-body integration and for a more holistic approach to creative processes. Tutor experiences have paid attention to student’s need for understanding their own creativity and innovative strategies. Earlier research has actualized the challenges with performance anxiety and methodological development within first-person measurement and technology. Observed challenges with stress, anxiety, self-actualization and emotional stability in music making practices have raised awareness of the need for new ways of facilitating students’ artistic development in higher music education.

Transformative Technology and high tech optimizing technologies in the health, sport and adventure sectors are filling personal curiosity and needs. The intention to support change and development or optimizing processes and abilities make the technology transformative. This technology, in the form of (DIY) gadgets and applications, involves procedures and products that offer the user in-depth feedback. This feedback can involve figures, diagrams, sounds, colours, shapes etc as representations of inner states of mind and or body. The development of transformative technology, hitherto mostly done by commercial and market forces, has placed academia in a peripheral position.

One starting point in this project is the assumption that by increasing attention and awareness of what we here label as the “first instrument”, i.e., the human herself, artists can apply valid self-regulating strategies that both heightens creative processes as well as supports a sustainable working life. This intunement ought to be of great importance when it comes to an artistic performance but also in composing and learning strategies.

The article communicates an investigation of how collaborative learning is constituted in a PhD-course, namely Collaborative learning in music educational settings. The course was organized and run in a way that aimed to investigate, develop and encourage collaborative learning among students and teachers in the third circle. Material produced and analysed included log-books, assignments, peer-response, after-thoughts, and a Facebook discussion-thread. The results are presented as descriptions of the constituent parts of collaborative learning occurring in the “rooms” of the course. The results show the importance of structure as well as awareness when it comes to roles and kinds of participation.

This paper presentation wants to visualize and create an interactive discussion about the legitimation of higher music education within popular music – its obstacle and potentials as an institution of plurality within a university context.There are some well-known conditions that are more or less tabooed and sometimes act as sources for the noncompliance in institutional flexibility. The schools of music are traditionally constructed by three; at least, “biotopes” of definable thinking and acting from which students, personnel and management have experience of and are recruited from. These fields are the conservatoire tradition, the Free Church’s organizations (perhaps mainly in Sweden), and the recycling system of musicians/teachers inside music institutions on different levels of education. This trinity of spheres brings on shared experiences of expertise, social training and familiarity but also exclusion, non-equality, self-righteousness, anti-intellectual preferences and conventional preferences. This is not by any sense exclusive for higher music education but in a faculty that could facilitate innovative expressions, self-independence and global engagement – why not go for it!Circumstances above results in the fact that even if popular music (in a broad sense) is the essence of music activities in the conservatories in Sweden, the learning contexts are still predictable bosoms for music students all the way from voluntary music school (during elementary school years), through aesthetic gymnasia, pre-educations like folk high schools, straight forward to the School of music to, perhaps, a teacher education for elementary school and voluntary music school. As a consequence of this recycling situation the plurality and differences that e.g. Biesta, 2006 highlights as necessary, can perhaps be linked more to genre expansion than to democratic and existential content.

A music teacher student 2013 will meet children born 2040, during their career. Scandinavian as well as the rest of the worlds university curriculum have an elusive picture of what kind of learning contexts they will have to design when meeting the “Millennium children” and who can blame them? What we can do is to facilitate an institutional consciousness expansion in how to assist student music teachers developing sustainable skills for acting flexible in future, unfamiliar and multicultural contexts. This collaboration with “the other” has to go beyond music genre and subcultural identities and interact with societal changes and needs. Institutions are not in its essence flexible and new or alternative music styles will probably always be “pedagogizied” to fit in educational settings. The informal and socialising “rules of the conservatoire game” is still stronger than the millennium voice of internationalisation and collaboration in global communities. Globalization can become a kind of new renaissance. It is a paradigm shift that directs toward a circulatory worldview. “The others” will be in our lives no matter what. The question is – how do we want to respond to that. With fear or dialogue?The university as a whole is also in an era of “paradigmatic transition” (Santos, 2012, p8). It is ”confronted with strong questions for which it has so far provided only weak answers”. Or as Kemp resonates, “The great theme in political debate and within political movements, national as well as international, have since the end of 90th been the phenomena globalization. It is this globalisation that gives the idea of a cosmopolitan new actuality. But, as earlier said, it has not reached our institutions of learning and education. Many of our teachers within compulsory school are still blind for the fact” (Kemp, 2005 p29). When discussing the position of the university in the new world order, Santos (2012) raises the question whether the university can successfully reinvent itself as a centre of knowledge in a globalizing society with many other centres. The question of legitimation of university educations in future society is of great importance when it comes to global artistic expressions like music.

Arno Gullberg (1930-2002) var en av Sveriges ledande jazzmusiker när han flyttade till Piteå i slutet av 1950-talet. 1971 började han undervisa i gehörsspel vid Framnäs folkhögskola, vilket kan ha varit den allra första gången jazzmusik förekom på en svensk musikutbildning. Berättelsen om Arno Gullbergs liv speglar vad som hände med jazzen när rockmusiken tog över. Dessutom visar den något om hur svensk musikutbildning förändrades när både jazz och rock kom på schemat. Den innehåller dessutom myterna om musikern och ett nära porträtt av människan Arno Gullberg

The general purpose of this presentation is to discuss how alternative forms of learning strategies in exclusively designed contexts may strengthen the development of musical, social and personal competences. Research in music education has confirmed that how knowledge in music is created is highly correlated with context qualities, as for example the organization of musical learning and social interaction. Still, it is difficult to free the practice of learning in music from conservatoire tradition and didactic "hidden curricula's". Formal learning situations means benefiting from experienced teachers and mentors, but music institutions all too often suffer by institutionalization and a levelling of cultures. On the other hand informal music learning is largely characterised by co-creating and peer learning. By not paying sufficient attention to learning processes within smaller groups, the great opportunities for powerful growth in personal and social skills, are also passed over.In the autumn of 2005, a completely new curriculum in music education - BoomTown Music Education (BTME) - was born within the School of Music in Piteå but as a branch of the municipal music project BoomTown in Borlänge. The educational baseline is resting on scientific theories and previous research dealing with informal learning strategies. Peer learning and playing by the ear is here acknowledged and strongly supported. The philosophy of BTME opens up to a wider musical, social and ethnic variety and is supported by a mixture of guest musicians, artists, innovators etc. Several research projects are started, and data is already collected by observations during rehearsals and concerts. An interesting body of knowledge will also come from student's diaries and written reflections, collected since the start. Research results will in time contribute with important knowledge about how learning in music is affected by the organisation and design of learning contexts.