My area of interest is music composition and the becoming of musical learning and teaching in a practice where digital hardware and software are co-creators. I am also interested in the research process and how methodologies need to be shaped and reshaped with research material to attempt to illuminate teaching and learning in music as entangled practices. My research is situated theoretically and philosophically within a posthumanist area of interest with a socio-material perspective. Advanced digital tools for music creation are becoming increasingly accessible to many, both in terms of cost and in the human-machine interface. Interfaces and the design of digital software are also more diverse today than just a few years ago, not least due to the possibilities created by AI technology. This implies, in extension, that what and how we learn about/in/through music creation in schools is constantly changing. Therefore, it becomes important to understand not only what we learn but also how we learn in an ever-changing socio-material practice.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Becoming Cyborg Composer: The Ecology of Digital Music Composition Didaktik

  2022. Jonas Asplund.

  Thesis (Lic)

  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.

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• Cyborg learners: Becoming-with in the ecology of digital music composition

  2022. Jonas Asplund. Finnish Journal of Music Education 25 (1), 8-28

  Article

  Digital technology for musical purposes creates new means for embodiment and expressions of music. The aim of this article is to explore a non-linear digital music composition application in relation to two composers active in the field of contemporary art music. Drawing on the posthumanist ontological turn the study offers a sociomaterial understanding of learning practices. The empirical material consists partly of an interview with Jesper Nordin, a composer and music/composition application creator who is active in the contemporary art music field. In addition, the author’s own a/r/tographical exploration together with the iPad application called Gestrument, for compositional purposes constitutes a part of the material. The generated material was analysed through a posthumanist narrative, constructed and presented as entangled stories of learning/becoming in relation with the digital actant Gestrument, with human and nonhuman actants in a wider sense. The results introduce a discussion on the implications a posthumanist sociomaterial understanding can have for music education practices. For example, the composition here becomes relata, it is diffracted to multiple becomings in relation to different interpreters, musicians, traditions, compositions and so forth. When employed for the purpose of composition as an activity within music education, digital hardware/software can offer multiple ways of intra-acting with music, other ways than via common musical instruments, and by that differentiate the process of conceptualizing subjective ideas in multiple directions, emphasizing diffraction and relationality. In this understanding of music creation as relational and fluid, the employment of specific digital actants seems to help corroborate modes of conceptualizing music, but also act as a partner of renewal as well as a sounding board for musical ideas.

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• Compositionism and digital music composition education

  2022. Jonas Asplund. Journal for Research in Arts and Sports Education 6 (3), 96-120

  Article

  This article aims to explore the sociomaterial relational activities within digital music composition education via the posthumanist concepts compositionism and assemblage. The study is an attempt at a nonlinear and non-reductivist understanding of educational activities where matter, nature and culture shape performative practices. Engaging with Latour and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and its onto-epistemological manifest as compositionism the explorations also find impetus from posthumanist thinking, Barad’s intra-action, Haraway’s becoming-with and post-qualitative inquiry. Four year 9 classes in a Swedish compulsory school took part in the composing activity and the research intervention. During a four-week participation period the music composition lessons were video-recorded. Sociomaterial transcriptions of the recorded lessons were transformed into assemblage compositions to explore the outcomes and becomings that emerged. What these sociomaterial compositions brings to the fore is the hybridity of digital music composition outcomes in learning activities. 

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Show all publications by Jonas Asplund at Stockholm University