Shake and create: Reappropriating video game technologies for the enactive learning of music

Abstract

This chapter explores the culture of hacking and its role in supporting engaging and meaningful educational experiences for diverse groups of learners. The discussion focuses around two case study examples. The first, KIDI, is an interactive museum exhibit that is located at a Fenton House in London, a National Trust property, and which repurposes interactive audio routines and hacked force-feedback controllers to facilitate engagement with a collection of keyboard instruments, the Benton Fletcher Collection, thus enabling visitors to learn about their sound and playing characteristics through play. The second, BitBox!, is an interactive gestural digital musical interface, which is designed to deconstruct and explain the underlying technical frameworks that support adaptive video game soundtracks and which draws upon a vocabulary of spatial and gestural controls from both video gaming and music performance. Both case studies highlight the importance of play as a vehicle for learning, harnessing both the physical and conceptual aspects of play to test and explore the limits of our skills and understanding.