In this article, DJ and scholar Jake Williams speaks with Maria Chavez and Elijah about their ideas concerning education and pedagogy in electronic music. Although they come from very different musical backgrounds, the rationale for the joint interview was twofold: first, they are both DJs who think deeply about their practice and have strong pedagogical commitments; and second, their pedagogical practices have led to them to work between informal and formal educational spaces, across a range of age groups. The talk touches on their views on music education, academia, definitions of success, what it means to be ‘open source’ and, of course, DJing.

Between 2022 and 2023 I ran two experimental DJing workshops in a school in East London with Year 10 GCSE music students. They were experimental in the sense that I had not run workshops with this age group before and that I was sharing some experimental techniques with digital DJ technology (DDJT) that I had been exploring in my own practice. They proved to be highly engaging for the young people and highlighted significant, and sometimes unexpected, benefits of using DDJT in the classroom. The results of the workshops are analysed in the context of the 2016 addition of DJing as an ‘instrument’ for the performance component of the GCSE assessment, alongside claims that this is a ‘challenge to colonisation’. While the addition is viewed as positive, it is questioned whether viewing DJing as being equivalent to other instrumental playing captures the plurality of a practice that is distributed across sonic, social and discursive realms. Historical and conceptual precedents for viewing DJing both as an instrument and as an art are explored, and it is suggested that it could also be assessed under the GCSE Art & Design criteria.

This article presents a history of alternative electronic music education in Melbourne, Australia. It documents early examples of experimentation with non-traditional classes and programmes in tertiary institutions and subsequently the emergence, over several decades, of alternative teaching and learning in community centres, nightclubs, retail stores, message boards and magazines. The article uses Scheffler’s Models of Teaching to provide a framework to document the differing pedagogical approaches, and draws upon archival material, interviews, essays and first-hand experiences to explain how Melbourne’s rich history has informed and influenced today’s learning practices. It posits that the adaptable, dynamic and flexible practices found in Melbourne’s electronic music education were the result of influences from key educators, the needs of the communities that enabled them and the adaptation to cultural and technological changes.

‘Sound, Image and Motion’ (SIM) is a unique interdisciplinary programme in Brazilian higher education, blending visual arts, audiovisual and sound creation. We start with a brief historical overview of avant-garde traditions in Bahia and delve into the university’s principles and guiding plan in order to situate SIM among art courses and its available resources. We explore its flexible curriculum in detail, considering the limitations posed by a new university with scarce resources, and describe the curricular structure to analyse experiences with teaching and constructing an interdisciplinary sound creation qualification within this programme.

Within computer-based and live electronic music, the values of competition, power, control and innovation dominate. Women continue to be under-represented in technical roles across production, management and software development. To address this imbalance, I examine how feminist frameworks and values can be applied to challenging the biases that influence uneven gender distribution within music technology development. Focusing on live embodied composition and computing where performative and design roles intersect, I explore the work of women composers who design or co-create bespoke systems that feature the body, reimagining the norms of music technology development while exposing insights about gender, race and body types in the sound and music industries. Referencing the work of Laetitia Sonami and Lauren Sarah Hayes, I argue that their embodied design practices constitute a type of activism that promote the feminist values of human computer interaction (HCI), including collaboration, transparency and empathy, countering dominant audio equipment and software design values oriented towards precise, perfected and disposable designs created in a hierarchical fashion.

Learning about music, sound or audio can present significant challenges for individuals who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). Given the advancements in technology and the increasing emphasis on equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in education, this article proposes pedagogical approaches aimed at facilitating the learning process for DHH students in the areas of music and audio production. These approaches encompass sound visualisation, haptic feedback, automated transcription, tactics in non-linear editing and digital signal processing. Importantly, these approaches do not necessitate advanced technical skills or substantial additional resources, thus lowering barriers for DHH students to overcome challenges in music and audio production. Furthermore, these strategies would enable content creation and editing for individuals with DHH, who may have previously been excluded from participating in music and audio production. Recommendations are provided for the implementation of these approaches in diverse educational settings to promote the integration of EDI in music and audio education.

The National Film Board documentary Bing Bang Boom (1969) depicts Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer (1933–2021) teaching seventh-grade students in a suburban public school in Scarborough, Ontario. A close study of the film informs the larger trajectory of the composer’s previous and later writings and compositions over the next several decades, while a deeper dive into archival materials and concurrent productions from Canada’s National Film Board (NFB) illuminates the organisation’s strategy of nation-building at a crucial moment in the country’s history. Together, Schafer and the NFB illuminate Canada’s problematic relationship to Indigenous peoples, places and sounds.

Based on the theories of radical education, this article discusses the education of electronic music in Venezuela. After a historiographical review of the state of music education in the country, which shows that there is little information on the subject, the institutional life that has promoted electroacoustic music in Venezuela is approached from a critical perspective. This documentary research gathers and analyses data provided by a bibliographic review and unstructured interviews with experts in the field. Among the most salient findings is the discontinuity in the teaching of electroacoustic music, as well as a critical review of the notions of radical education in the case of Venezuela, where the educational system shows stagnation in the face of the global context.

This paper examines Smalley’s preliminary taxonomy of the sound shape and the subsequent application of graphical notation in electroacoustic music. It will demonstrate ways in which spatial categorisations of the morphological sound shape have remained relatively untouched in academia, despite a codependency of frequency, space and time. Theoretical examples and existing visualisations of the sound shape will be considered as a starting point, to determine why the holistic visualisation of space is warranted. A notational system addressing the codependency between spatial and spectral sound shapes will be presented, with reference to its context in Cartesian-coordinate sound environments. This method of electroacoustic notation will incorporate the visualisation of Smalley’s categorisation of spatial sound shapes and ideas of spatial gesture, texture and distribution within Smalley’s composed and listening spaces. This visualisation and notation of composed and listening spaces will demonstrate that audio technologies are imperative drivers in the future analysis and understanding of the sound shape. It will measure the modulation of spatial sound shape properties for Cartesian (height, width, depth) and spherical (azimuth and altitude) across linear temporality, to better represent the complete form of Smalley’s sound shape. This spatial notation will aid the rounded visualisation of Smalley’s morphology, motion, texture, gesture, structure and form. Use of this notational framework will illustrate ways in which a new tool to score electroacoustic sound shapes can inform new practices in computer music composition.