Listening to music can facilitate improvement of cognitive skills and emotional intelligence, which are key antecedents of learning. Music listening can also improve auditory perception and memory. 

Adjacent to a concert of music evoking strong emotions, the audience was asked to complete a Visual Analogue Scale (10-cm) before and after listening to the concert, along five variables Arousal, Joy, Degree of upset, Daily worries and Benevolence. Changes in the responses to these scales were subject to analysis.

Statistically significant changes were observed in the outcome measures of arousal (p=0.005), daily worries (p<0.001), degree of upset (p=0.048) and joy (p<0.001) but were not found for benevolence (p=0.93) in 228 concert attendees who completed the questionnaires. Age, gender and previous music experiences did not make a difference to perception of the music.

Attending a music concert with sensitive, emotionally charged topics significantly contributed to stimulating emotional interpretation, which was used as preparation for a reflective participation in subsequent satellite seminars.

In order to promote children’s collaborative musical creativity in new digital environments, we need a better understanding not only of the sound production capabilities provided by the new digital tools, but also of the interaction affordances involved. This study focuses on the interactional patterns emerging in children’s musical creativity, comparing creative group processes on iPad tablet computers (with GarageBand software) to processes on traditional musical instruments. Both instrumentations were assigned to five groups of four 10–12-year-olds for creating sound landscapes for a “space” movie. The traditional instrument groups’ processes were characterized by peer teaching as well as multimodal, improvisatory negotiations with rapid exchanges between the participants, both kinds of processes involving the intertwining of deictic expressions with hands-on musical demonstrations, and clear signs of group flow. By contrast, the tablet groups relied on solitary, parallel planning processes where possible coordinations between the participants took on a more abstract, conceptual form, at a remove from the actual musical ideas and their interplay. Also, there were far fewer signs of group flow than in the traditional instrument groups. In sum, the tablets did not seem to match traditional musical instruments in terms of their interactional and creative affordances. This may be because the traditional instruments offer richer textures of gestural and tactile qualities, visual cues, and spatial anchoring points for facilitating concrete musical interaction, and because the GarageBand software actually requires some reliance on abstract conceptual labels, channelling the participants’ attention toward pre-planning rather than hands-on musical play. The results are problematized with a view to our decision to treat the tablet computer as akin to a musical instrument rather than as an action environment of its own.

Multi-instrumental musicianship appears in various musical traditions, also frequently figuring in systems of music teacher education. Multi-instrumentalism covers forms of musical creativity and versatile professionalism that differ from ideologies of specialization often emphasized in instrumental music education. Thus, it is relevant to ask whether and how multi-instrumentalism might also shape music teacher identities. This question was explored through a case study of three experienced multi- instrumental teachers in the Swedish system of Schools of Music and Performing Arts – exemplifying a context in which teachers have large freedom to shape their work. Teacher narratives were analyzed with reference to the binary oppositions between versatility versus specialization and musician versus teacher. The results show that multi-instrumentalist teachers may not only occupy subject positions as versatile all-round musicians, but that they may also carve their identities as specialized performers, or adopt teacher-focused identities such as gamemaster, coach, or counselor. Furthermore, for some teachers, the shifts between instruments may themselves involve shifts between such subject positions. Based on our findings, multi-instrumentalism appears as a potent teacher resource within educational systems which are extensively driven by students’ needs and interests.