Soundcurrents: Exploring sound’s potential to catalyze creative critical consciousness in adolescent music students and undergraduate music education majors
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine how and in what ways a reorientation towards sound could catalyze creative critical consciousness in high school music students and university music undergraduates. Specifically, this study sought to uncover how and in what ways sonic lifeworlds: everyday sound currents streaming in/out/through participants’ lived experiences at school, home, neighborhood, park, playground, street, alleyway, train station, cyberspace could potentially excite creative aspects of knowing and being via “cultural production” (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2011) and also elicit critical ways of thinking about and responding to the world as “cultural citizens” (Benedict & Schmidt, 2014). This study stems from the premise that “sounds are systems of educational ways of beingknowingdoing” (Gershon, 2018) and is linked to struggles around knowledge, value, control, and power, and thus consequential in learning and teaching spaces.
Scholars in the field of music education have recently rearticulated pedagogical possibilities of sound, citing creative and critical aspects that a thinking in, with and through sound may afford music teachers and their students (Abramo, 2014; Hill, 2018; Recharte, 2019; Thibeault, 2017). In this study, I engage with and extend these conversations and drawing from Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonanz, suggest that a reorientation toward sound in music education spaces carries potential to catalyze creative critical consciousness. Using sound arts-based research (SABR) methods (Gershon, 2018), sensuous scholarship (Pink, 2009) and post-intentional phenomenology (Vagle, 2018), this qualitative research study highlights some of the ways a reorientation towards sound in music education curricula can open spaces for creativity and critical reflection about issues significant in students’ lived experiences.