ABSTRACT
A question that is of widespread interest in education today is 'How can learning tasks be structured to encourage creative thinking in the classroom?' Recent advances in music education research have focused on using technology to assist schoolchildren to learn how to create music. This chapter describes SoundScape, a music composition environment designed to facilitate children's collaborative creativity. The development of SoundScape has been influenced by psychological accounts of creativity, socio-constructivist accounts of learning and accounts of the development of musical expression. Traditionally, music education software has focused upon the use of staff notation whereby students manipulate musical notes to construct their compositions. However, the extensive and sustained research effort into musical representations over the last decade has produced studies reporting music notation as an inhibitor of musical creativity (Walker 1992; Auh 2000), owing to difficulties in mapping the sound properties of music to the visual specification of staff notation. Furthermore, adherence to the traditional notation system excludes those with little to no formal music training.
