Children's Creative Music-Making with Reflexive Interactive Technology discusses pioneering experiments conducted with young children using a new generation of music software for improvising and composing. Using artificial intelligence techniques, this software captures the children's musical style and interactively reflects it in its responses. The book describes the potential of these applications to enhance children's agency and musical identity by reflecting players' musical inputs, storing and creating variations on them. Set in the broader context of current music education research, it addresses the benefits and challenges of incorporating music technologies in primary and pre-school education. It is comprised of six main chapters, which cover the creation of children's own music and their musical selves, critical thinking skills and learner agency, musical language development, and emotional intent during creative music-making. The authors provide a range of straight-forward techniques and strategies, which challenge conceptions of 'difficult-to-use music technologies' in formal music education. These are supported by an informative collection of practitioner vignettes written by teachers who have used the software in their classrooms. Not only are the teachers' voices heard here, but also those of children as they discover some of the creative possibilities of music making. The book also provides free access to a companion website with teacher forums and a large bank of activities to explore. A toolkit serves as a database of the teaching activities in which MIROR applications have been used and provides a set of useful ideas regarding its future use in a variety of settings. This book demonstrates that music applications based on artificial intelligence techniques can make an important contribution to music education within primary and pre-school education. It will be of key interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of music education, music technology, early years and primary education, teaching and learning, and teacher educators. It will also serve as an important point of reference for Early Years and Primary practitioners.

Children's Creative Music-Making with Reflexive Interactive Technology discusses pioneering experiments conducted with young children using a new generation of music software for improvising and composing. Using artificial intelligence techniques, this software captures the children's musical style and interactively reflects it in its responses. The book describes the potential of these applications to enhance children's agency and musical identity by reflecting players' musical inputs, storing and creating variations on them. Set in the broader context of current music education research, it addresses the benefits and challenges of incorporating music technologies in primary and pre-school education. It is comprised of six main chapters, which cover the creation of children's own music and their musical selves, critical thinking skills and learner agency, musical language development, and emotional intent during creative music-making. The authors provide a range of straight-forward techniques and strategies, which challenge conceptions of 'difficult-to-use music technologies' in formal music education. These are supported by an informative collection of practitioner vignettes written by teachers who have used the software in their classrooms. Not only are the teachers' voices heard here, but also those of children as they discover some of the creative possibilities of music making. The book also provides free access to a companion website with teacher forums and a large bank of activities to explore. A toolkit serves as a database of the teaching activities in which MIROR applications have been used and provides a set of useful ideas regarding its future use in a variety of settings. This book demonstrates that music applications based on artificial intelligence techniques can make an important contribution to music education within primary and pre-school education. It will be of key interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of music education, music technology, early years and primary education, teaching and learning, and teacher educators. It will also serve as an important point of reference for Early Years and Primary practitioners.

More than forty years ago, Richard S. Buswell chose the relics of Montana's past as his raw material. Over time, in five books, he has sharpened his focus, moving from panoramic vistas of abandoned buildings to meticulously composed, tightly framed depictions of natural and man-made objects against stark black backgrounds. He has shifted the viewer's attention from his subjects to the form and structure of his pictures. Although rooted in Buswell's experience as a lifelong Montanan, the photographs in this book are no more (or less) "about" Montana than James Joyce's Dubliners, Portrait of an Artist, or Ulysses are "about" Dublin. Most books about Western ghost towns and historical artifacts abound in sentiment. They comfort us with the illusion that we can recover what has been lost. What They Left Behind reminds us that time carries us onward despite our wishes to remain in the past.