Listening to the Post-script: Intersections Between Improvisation and Indeterminacy in Music and Education

Abstract

This article begins by exploring how current educational research describes the role of improvisation in education. Drawing on Biesta’s (2017) discussion of the purpose of the educational task, it then argues for a broader consideration of the role of improvisation in education and its potential to positively disrupt traditional linear timescapes. While discussions of improvisation in education often reference jazz music, this study explores a broader range of indeterminate musical forms to gain different insights. Specifically, it translates Stern’s (1988) Table of Transformational and Musical Hierarchies into a framework for education to support educators in considering the role of improvisation in their design and teaching practice. The adapted conceptual model incorporates the dimensions of complex learning environments described by the Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD) framework as discussed by Goodyear and Carvalho (2014), and in the process, surfaces the temporal aspects of the ACAD framework for closer examination. The model highlights several factors that take on a more significant role in highly indeterminate educational forms such as silence, absence, openings, and rupture. It also provides an opportunity to reflect on ways in which technology contributes to enabling or constraining improvisational processes in postdigital education. The study contributes to research on the intersection between sound and education, and to making the sonic dimension of education one of more ‘intentional concern’ as described by Ford and Sasaki (2021).

Postdigital Soundscapes: Sonics, Pedagogies, Technologies

“…Intervening in current scholarship of the role of improvisation in education, Wilson's (2022) contribution moves from studying the silence of the sonic to the broad constellations of pedagogical approaches to educationally engaging with the aleatory postdigital soundscape as a way to counter the temporal organization of education as a linear and developmental process. 'Improvisation' as a pedagogical principle, at least as I understand the argument, provides us a way to enable educational encounters (Ford 2022c) that neither collapse into pure randomness nor fall under the tyranny of improvement.…”

“…Utilizing sound 'as a medium, a tool, a narrative, a speculation and an intervention… a glitch and a malfunction', workshop participants collaboratively produced alterative sensory engagements with the digital and analogue noises of the city and, by doing so, created a counter-map of the city that let them sense the persistence of the past in the present. The project draws on the aleatory and indeterminate nature of postdigital aesthetics in a particular conjuncture, which we might think of as the continuum Wilson (2022) articulates in the prior article, providing the context for practicing critical media design (a component of which, I suggest, is literacy).…”