Conference Agenda

We live in times of rapid digital development, where especially the latest innovations in artificial intelligence have come to challenge the status and functions of knowledge and educational practices (Zhang & Aslan, 2021). At stake is not only the survival of the subject matter as a specific content of knowledge worth conserving for future generations, but also the question about what makes knowledge meaningful, relevant and worthwhile studying in the first place. In this paper I will discuss the possibilities for education and teaching to bring life into subject matter, as a content of knowledge, in ways that cannot be done through digital technologies alone (c.f., Stiegler, 2010). In this discussion, I develop the concept of acousmatic teaching as a practice that brings forth the material, sonorous and transformative functions of the subject matter.

In its most basic definition, music is a human form of expression that uses the physicality of air to produce vibrations that encounter and resonate with the minds and bodies of human beings (Nachmanovitch, 1990). On the one hand we can understand music as a vibrating gestalt of sounds that confronts us (Bucht, 2009), and on the other hand we can understand ourselves as musical configurations that confront the world we inhabit (Lingis, 2004). The genre acousmatic music explores the spatial and material aspects of music and focuses on sounds rather than on what produces these sounds. The materiality of the sounding object and the space it creates produces an acousmatic materiality that calls for heightened attention (Bertrand 2020). Jettisoning the idea of music as a linear and rhythmic process founded in a tonal center, we can describe it as a sonorous and acousmatic space in motion that manifests itself through factors that allude to, e.g., nearness and distance, or difference and identity (Rytzler 2023). Acousmatic music calls for the listener to perceive sound with a reduced sensibility to the sound’s identity (Frappier 2020).

If we follow the aesthetic theory of Jacques Rancière, acousmatic teaching would be about performing a dis-identification of the subject matter in order to make it accessible to the students as well as a dis-identification of the students in order to make them encounter the subject matter as unique subjects (Biesta 2014). In acousmatic teaching the subject matter, by addressing the students, produces a partage du sensible that enables new things to be said, thought or done. As such, the encounter between the students and the subject matter could be described as one of resonance, to speak with the sociological thinker Hartmut Rosa. Rosa (2019) uses the notion of resonance as a productive contrast to Marx’ notion of alienation as it describes transformative encounters between humans and the world. In times where the state of knowledge as we know it is at stake, Rosa's notion reminds us that knowledge is something that connects humans with the world, that situates them in the world and something that lets them discover, encounter and navigate in the world. Bildung, according to Rosa, is deeply connected with resonance. When being in a state of resonance, Rosa claims, we never stay the same. Building occurs when a relevant domain of the world starts to speak to us, when it addresses us. This experience of resonance transforms us, and this encapsulates what it means to exist as a human being.

Dialogic approaches to education have received a significant amount of interest across Europe particularly with regard to the role of language in education (Mercer, et al. 2019). Dialogic theorisations, however, offer a rich array of conceptual tools for exploring space, time, relationships, embodiment and aesthetics as part of educational experience (e.g. Vass, 2019; Kullenberg & Säljö, 2022). In response to recent calls for greater recognition of the aesthetics of education, waking students up to the world (Biesta, 2022), and the importance of contemporaneous educational encounters (Biesta, 2023) this contribution uses the dialogic notion of chronotope (time-space) to explore how interpersonal entrainment, that is a collective moment of unity, takes shape within whole-class music playing in a Finnish sixth grade classroom.

Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope is particularly useful in the exploration of education as a form of aesthetic interconnectedness experienced from the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’ (Bakhtin, 1981 & 1986). Examining phenomena from the outside involves attending to the arrangement of space, the relationships between participants, the availability and use of time. Examining from the ‘inside’ pays attention to how participants listen for and respond to one another, interanimate each other’s contributions, sense coming together and differentiate between self and other. Through this ongoing dialogue participants become part of and contribute to something beyond themselves within a particular moment. Music-making, by its very nature, is a form of symbolic and embodied dialogue across time. When people gather together to make music, their joint action is characterised by interpersonal entrainment, that is in-time synchronous interaction between participants through music (Clayton et al., 2020; Phillips-Silver and Keller, 2012). While there is a great amount of literature on music as affective and embodied communication (Clayton et al., 2020; Stern, 2004; Trondalen, 2016), entrainment has often been examined through quantitative, rather than qualitative, approaches and whole class music-playing as part of mainstream education has received little attention to date.

The theoretical significance of this research lies in going beyond the existing metaphor of participation in education to explore education as an encounter in which individuals constantly listen to and map the rhythm of their social environment co-authoring the world through their responsivity (Holquist, 1983; Sabey, 2021, Kullenberg & Säljö, 2022). The aim of this study is to explore the centripetal coming together of individuals through music to create a unified body by carefully mapping the time-space arrangements of a 6th grade classroom and by qualitatively analysing the reflections of students and teachers on their experiences and perceptions of whole-class music playing. The research questions underpinning this contribution are:

1. how does interpersonal entrainment take shape in whole class music-playing within the context of mainstream music education classes in the sixth grade of Finnish basic education?

2. what do students and teachers attend to in their reflections on the embodied, aesthetic experience of interpersonal entrainment?

The educational significance of this research lies in going beyond words and oral dialogue to embodied and aesthetic forms of meaning-making. This research is an important contribution to music education research as the data is from mainstream, rather than specialised, music education highlighting the potential of ‘regular’ classrooms for different forms of meaning-making. Moreover, this research highlights the multiplicity of relationships that are mutually informing and fundamentally present within educational settings. The findings from this study draw attention to the responsibilities of educators in curating and orchestrating learning environments and activities and the active roles and responsivity of students in their individual and shared being and becoming. The key contribution of this study further is to expand understanding of dialogic education as embodied, contemporaneous relationships mediated through a shared, yet-forming environment.