Musicalizatech is a project that aims to promote music creation and production activity among students of secondary and high schools and, through this activity, enhance creativity, the use of technology, and collaborative and informal learning. The goal is that each participating group (composed of a minimum of three students) develop the musical production of a song within two months. Musicalizatech has provided different resources to help and guide students in the whole creative process: practical workshops, mentoring from professional musicians (composers, orchestrators, music producers and sound engineers), music production software licenses and an online platform with different areas, including a work area for each group, online tutorials and different forums. Throughout the whole creative and productive process we are focusing on the analysis of the use of the different music technology resources, the behaviour of students in a learning online community and the relation of the former aspects with the informal and collaborative learning process.

The evolution of music and audio technology in recent years has led to a reconsideration of the composition process, the way the musician confronts the job of composing, and the competencies and skills that students need to acquire in order to make optimal and productive use of these new tools and resources. As a recent field study on composition techniques with adolescents concludes, ‘participants’ often work crossed through aspects of pre-production, production and post-production in an overlapping manner, making it difficult and at times inappropriate to use these overarching categories to organize their creative processes’ (Tobias 2013: 218).

The use of digital technology may also have a great impact on the development of creativity (Himonides and Purves, 2010). As Charissi and Rinta (2014) state, various research studies have focused on pupils’ creative behaviour and its relation with the positive effects of the application of recent technological advances (Bolton, 2008; Folkestad et al., 1998; Jennings, 2005; Savage, 2005; Seddon, 2006; Wiggins, 2007).

Aims:

Taking as basis previous informal learning in music technology experiences (Green, 2008; Marrington, 2011), and from a recent study about the use of the sequencer during the composition process (Cuadrado, 2015), different objectives or research questions have been defined:

1. Describe how participants use the music production software, and what factors influence the use made of it.
2. Analyse how the interaction generated among the students influences the learning  and the creative process.
3. Examine the relationship between the progression of the interactions within the group and the evolution of the produced song. Both the subjective dimension (self-perception and evolution of the relationship between participants) and the objective dimension (evolution of the song as it is composed, recorded, edited and mixed) are studied. Through this analysis, our objective is to search for common patterns in the evolution of the interactions that involve any progression, change or improvement in the final result of the song.
4. Examine the impact of communication technologies in the whole creative process: interactions among students, improvement of technical skills, community development, social interactions and collaborative online work.

Bolton, J. (2008), ‘Technologically mediated composition learning: Josh’s story’. British Journal of Music Education, 25:1, pp. 41–55. Charissi, V. and Rinta, T. (2014), ‘Children’s musical and social behaviours in the context of music-making activities supported by digital tools: Examples form a pilot study in the United Kingdom’, Journal of Music, Technology and Education, 7:1, pp. 39–58. Cuadrado, F.J. (2015), The use of sequencer tools during the composition process: A field study’, Journal of Music, Technology and Education, 8: 1, pp. 55-70, doi: 10.1386/jmte.8.1.55_1 Green, L. (2008), Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, UK: Ashgate. Himonides, E. and Purves, R. (2010), ‘The role of technology’, in S. Hallam and A. Creech (eds), Music Education in the 21st Century in the United Kingdom, London: Institute of Education, pp. 123–40. Folkestad, G., Hargreaves, D. J. and Lindstroem, B. (1998), ‘Compositional strategies in computer-based music-making’, British Journal of Music Education, 15:1, pp. 83–97. Jennings, K. (2005), ‘Hyperscore: A case study in computer mediated music composition’, Education and Information Technologies, 10:3, pp. 225–38. Marrington, M. (2011), ‘Experiencing musical composition in the DAW: The software interface as mediator of the musical idea’, Journal on the Art of Record Production, 5, pp. 1–6, http://arpjournal.com/845/experiencing-musical-composition-in-the-daw-the-software-interface-as-mediator-of-the-musical-idea-2/. Accessed 5 December 2015. Savage, J. (2005), ‘Working towards a theory for music technologies in the classroom: How pupils engage with and organise sounds with new technologies’, British Journal of Music Education, 22:2, pp. 167–80. Seddon, F.A. (2006), ‘Collaborative computer-mediated music composition in cyberspace’, British Journal of Music Education, 23:3, pp. 273–83. Tobias, E. S. (2013), ‘Composing, songwriting, and producing: Informing popular music pedagogy’, Research Studies in Music Education, 35:2, pp. 213–37. Wiggins, J. H. (2007), ‘Compositional process in music’, in L. Bresler (ed.), International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, the Netherlands: Springer, pp. 453–67.