Dalcroze meets technology: integrating music, movement and visuals with the Music Paint Machine

Abstract

New interactive music educational technologies are often seen as a 'force of change', introducing new approaches that address the shortcomings (e.g. score-based, teacher-centred and disembodied) of the so-called traditional teaching approaches. And yet, despite the growing belief in their educational potential, these new technologies have been problematised with regard to their design, reception, implementation and evaluation. A possible way to optimise the realisation of the educational potential of interactive music educational technologies is to connect their use to music educational approaches that stood the test of time and as such may inspire technologies to become a bridge between tradition and innovation. This article describes an educational technology (the Music Paint Machine) that integrates the creative use of movement and visualisation to support instrumental music teaching and learning. Next, it connects this application to such an established music educational method, the Dalcroze approach. Through the lens of a set of interconnected aspects, it is shown how the Music Paint Machine's conceptual design aligns to the underlying principles of this approach. In this way, it is argued that integrating Dalcroze-inspired practices is a plausible way of realising the didactic potential of the system. An appendix with example exercises is provided.

Young Musicians' Learning of Expressive Performance: The Importance of Dialogic Teaching and Modeling

“…Davidson et al (2001) proposed that teachers should employ movements and gestures to help pupils experience and understand the direction and intention of the music they are learning. Likewise, Nijs (2017) suggested integrating movementbased technologies to provide children with visual feedback, emphasizing embodied experiences in music making.…”

Teaching young musicians expressive performance: an experimental study

“…Furthermore, effective feedback (Woody 2003) by the teacher (Hallam 1998), through recordings of students' performances (Hallam 2010;Juslin et al 2004;Woody 2000Woody , 2001 or computer software (Juslin et al 2006;Karlsson, Liljeström, and Juslin 2009) can be a useful tool for improving expressivity. Some scholars have suggested that children need physical movements to experience the music they are learning (Davidson, Pitts, and Correia 2001;Nijs 2017), while others have proposed that it might be helpful for teenage musicians to make some expressive decisions for themselves (McPhee 2011). Broomhead (2005Broomhead ( , 2006 found that teacher's enquiry encouraging students' initiative and providing problem-solving opportunities can facilitate expressive performance in secondary school choir rehearsals.…”

Children’s verbal explanations of their visual representation of the music

“…A growing body of literature on music learning aligns with this multimodal perspective (Abril, 2011; Davidson, 2012; Gault, 2005; Juntunen & Hyvönen, 2004; Kerchner, 2014; Manifold, 2008; Nijs, 2017; Nijs & Leman, 2014, 2015). Furthermore, the multimodal of human interaction with music is confirmed in a large body of studies on music and movement (Gritten & King, 2011; Leman, 2007, 2016; Lesaffre et al., 2017).…”