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.