Steve Dillon

Assessing the positive influence of music activities in community development programs

This article describes a framework for assessing the positive influence of music activities in community development programs. It examines hybrid music, health and rich media approaches to creative case study with the purpose of developing more compelling evidence based advocacy that examines the claims of a causal link. This preliminary study examines the problems with the research methods and seeks to design a more media inclusive approach that allows music experience to be heard in more compelling ways than text alone. The framework outlined in this paper provides a measure of effectiveness for community development programs that integrates social and cultural aspects. The framework connects notions of resilience as a fundamental building block for healthy communities with indicators of musical meaning and engagement. These indicators have previously been used individually in evaluating the effectiveness of music experience. This article reports on an exploratory research project that utilises this framework across a series of case studies in several culturally diverse Australian communities. The relevance of the research is that it seeks to identify the critical components of music education that have significant transferable implications for community development programs.

Digital technologies and musical participation for people with intellectual disabilities

Research on the aspirations of people with intellectual disabilities documents the importance of alternative zones of inclusion where they can assert their own definitions of ability and normality. This stands in contrast to assumptions concerning technology and disability that position technology as ‘normalizing’ the disabled body. This paper reports on the role of a digital music jamming tool in providing access to creative practice by people with intellectual disabilities. The tool contributed to the development of a spatio-temporal zone to enable aesthetic agency within and beyond the contexts of deinstitutionalized care. The research identifies the interactions between tools, individuals and groups that facilitated participants’ agency in shaping the form of musical practice. Furthermore, we document the properties of emergent interaction − supported by a tool oriented to enabling music improvisation − as potentially resisting assumptions regarding normalization.

Exploring New Kinds of Relationships Using Generative Music-Making Software

This project focuses upon the use of jam2jam, a generative computer system, to increase access to improvization experiences for children and to facilitate new kinds of relationships with artists. The network jamming system uses visual and audio cultural materials to enable communities to be expressive with artistic materials that they value as a community. As the system is part of a network, performances can be shared between communities at great distances and recordings of performances can be uploaded to a digital social network (http://www.jam2jam.com/) and shared both locally and with the wider community. This paper examines a preliminary project where artwork made by Indigenous mental health clients in Far North Queensland was digitized and given to a group of 8–12-year-old urban Indigenous children to ‘improvize’ with and make music/video clips using the jam2jam instrument. It seeks to generate a discussion and identify applications within creative arts-led community health settings to facilitate new kinds of relationships with self, peers, local community, culture and artists through collaborative improvization.

Designing Web 2.0 ePortfolios for music postgraduate study: A practice-led enquiry

This article examines the design of ePortfolios for music postgraduate students utilizing a practice-led design iterative research process. It is suggested that the availability of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and social network software potentially provide creative artist with an opportunity to engage in a dialogue about art with artefacts of the artist products and processes present in that discussion. The design process applied Software Development as Research (SoDaR) methodology to simultaneously develop design and pedagogy. The approach to designing ePortfolio systems applied four theoretical protocols to examine the use of digitized artefacts to enable a dynamic and inclusive dialogue around representations of the students work. A negative case analysis identified a disjuncture between university access and control policy, and the relative openness of Web2.0 systems outside the institution that led to the design of an integrated model of ePortfolio.