ABSTRACT
Musicians’ experimentation with electronic sounds, electrical instruments and tape recording techniques has a long history (Taylor, 2001), but the technologisation of music education is a more recent development, particularly with regard to computer-mediated composition and performance in primary and secondary classrooms (Webster, 2002). The fast-paced development and accessibility of digital music technologies gave rise to music technology as an academically viable discipline and, since the 1990s, there has been an exponential increase in technology-related degree programmes. In Britain alone, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Services (UCAS) listed 351 degrees in the category of music technology encompassing composition, sound and music production, and sound-and musicprocessing technologies (Boehm, 2007). Accompanying this burgeoning of technologyrelated programmes is a particularly gendered phenomenon. In 2009, Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education in Britain) reported that boys were five times more likely to be entered for the post-16 A-level Music Technology examination, and recent research has shown that males make up over 90% of the student uptake of technology-related undergraduate degrees in Britain (Devine, 2013). While music education research has critically explored the ways in which gendered practices are constructed and reproduced in the classroom as they relate to performing and composing (Green, 1997), music learning preferences (Ho, 2004), boys’ and girls’ instrumental choices (Abeles, 2009; Bruce and Kemp, 1993; Hallam, Rogers, and Creech, 2008) and the gendered nature of popular music activities in the classroom (Abramo, 2011), far less attention has been paid to the gendered aspects of digitally mediated music education practices.
