Discovering Education in Communities of Digital Musical Instruments

ongoing

This project lies at the intersection of the disciplines of music, technology and education. It focuses on digital musical instruments, investigating current approaches for teaching the design of new musical interfaces in professional and higher education contexts. The research will identify, compare, and critically assess teaching practices by engaging music technology educators and organisations through surveys, interviews and fieldworks. The fellowship will produce a first broad and systematic analysis of instrument design education, across academic and non-academic sectors. In addition, the project will advance art-technology disciplines by providing practical accounts and accessible resources on best educational practices, combining technology innovation with socio-cultural awareness, diversity and inclusion. DECODMI aims to examine art-technology education to better understand the modalities through which cultural values are being transmitted within different communities of practices, allowing us to ask what alternatives might exist, and develop resources that could facilitate the circulation of knowledge, methods and tools across disciplines, sectors and cultural contexts. The project will be hosted at InfoMus (University of Genoa): a research centre specialised in the development of interactive multimodal systems for the arts and wellbeing; under the supervision of Prof. Antonio Camurri, a leading scholar in the fields of affective and creative computing, with extensive experience in music technology education. The fellow, Dr. Giacomo Lepri, is a prominent musician with an extensive interdisciplinary academic record merging composition and performance, human-computer interaction, and technology studies, whose research focuses on the socio-cultural implications of instrument design. The fellowship will also feature a placement at CHAIR, a German company conducting research on haptics and audio interaction design.