Becoming Cyborg Composer : The Ecology of Digital Music Composition Didaktik

Abstract: The aim of this licentiate thesis is to explore the sociomaterial relationality of music composition education with digital hardware/software and its outcomes. Two studies were conducted interleaved as original articles in the thesis. Article 1 explores learning in creational processes involving digital actants and two composers of contemporary art music. The posthumanist concept of the cyborg is enacted as a signifier for learning and becoming in relation with material actants. An interview with a composer and music application creator is analysed through a constructed posthumanist narrative entangled with the researcher’s narrative of a music creation process involving the app. Also, the app’s meaning-making capacities are entangled in the narrative. Results show that alignments between human and nonhuman actants constitute a part of learning in music composing practices. Artefacts move from being evident and present to becoming transparent and in a background relation during a learning process.In article 2 a composing assignment conducted in four year 9 classes in a Swedish compulsory school is explored. Employing the posthumanist concept compositionism as a research approach, educational activities are composed into assemblages of actants performing the outcomes of the activities. Results bring the human/nonhuman actants as hybrid originators of outcomes to the fore. Learning with digital actants also showed to be hardware/software specific when past experiences of music composing were limited, with the risk of reducing pupils to intermediaries of information between functions in the digital software.In the summarising parts of this compilation thesis, a background of the research field of didaktik and subject didaktik is delineated. Also, the distinction between didactics and didaktik is discussed and the reason for employing the Swedish/German spelling is explicated. Furthermore, a background of composing and music creation as subject matter in the Swedish school system is drawn. Theoretical and methodological approaches are further developed in the summarising parts. Posthumanism as theoretical onset has a profound impact on understandings of relationality within educational activities and on how materiality is affecting learning. Methodological approaches are actuated in relation to the research material to find new meanings of sociomaterial relationality in music education.As one outcome of reading the results from the studies through posthumanism, the tentative term postdidaktik is proposed and discussed. Following the ontological turn of posthumanism that re-entangles human with nature and matter, postdidaktik becomes an implication for understanding learning in sociomaterial relationality. This also affects an understanding of didaktik as lesson planning, enactment, and analysis. The practical employment of postdidaktik is thus further delineated and proposed for further research.