Remix Portal: Connecting Classrooms with Local Music Communities

Abstract

We present an exploration of the potential benefits of connecting music classrooms with the surrounding music community through the act of music remixing. Inspired by the rise of an online participatory culture involving music remixing, we conducted a study where we transposed these activities from their informal, online context to a formal, classroom context. Our goal was not to make students proficient music remixers, but instead to explore whether remixing could serve as a tool to engage learners in their formal education and increase their desire to participate in both online and local music communities. Qualitative methods were used to gather data before Activity Theory was applied to evaluate the issues surrounding moving remixing activities between contexts. Our contribution is three-fold: (1) A demonstration of the benefits and challenges around connecting classrooms to local music communities through music remixing activities (2) Remix Portal, an easy to use music remixing and sharing application which can help young people move beyond a position of passive consumer of music towards a position of active contributor (3) The identification of key design criteria for growing the remixing application into a sustainable and social platform.