Designing Tools to Support the Social Learning of Music Mixing Skills

Abstract

Formal music education has been criticised for failing to meaningfully connect with the lives of the young people it serves. This research explores an alternative, technology-mediated approach to music education based around music remixing, where the activity is used to connect young people with established local musicians. However, the tools used to create impactful music remixes are often complex, which may present a barrier to participation. Accordingly, this research follows a design-based research methodology to develop an online, learning-focused music remixing and sharing platform – Remix Portal. Five field deployments of Remix Portal involving 20 sessions and 127 participants within education settings are reported, which resulted in three significant design revisions. Each field deployment produced insights for the design of learning-oriented music (re)mixing interfaces, as well as insights for the configuration of the social contexts within which such interfaces are used. Remix Portal’s initial, basic music mixing interface was refined to add text feedback facili ties. The show-and-tell iteration that followed, enabled feedback givers to add control change suggestions so recipients can see, hear, and read a justification for proposed mix revisions. The multi-layered interface iteration encompasses five interfaces of increasing complexity, to enable users to select a layer that matches their abilities and desires, thereby avoiding the issues associated with using an interface that is either too basic or too complex. The contributions of this research are four-fold: First, this research makes an artefact con tribution in Remix Portal whose code is made available as an open-source system. Second, an empirical contribution is made through the data that resulted from the field deployments, which revealed insights into participants’ experience with both the artefact and with the surrounding so cial configuration. Third, conceptual contributions consist of the development of a framework for understanding music mixing skills development; the expanding of the concept of ‘local learning ecologies’ to include young peoples’ transitions into a community’s cultural activities; a show and-tell feedback approach which couples descriptive and depictive information representations within learning feedback; and the integration of flow theory and cognitive load theory and their relationship to multi-layered interface design. The research also makes a fourth, methodological contribution, as two novel data collection techniques were developed to capture user data which served to inform the design of a multi-layered interface. This research contributes most directly to human-computer interaction literature in the domains of music education, learning feedback, and multi-layered interface design.