Creative Synergies 2026

Music education is being reshaped by shifting student expectations, changing professional landscapes, new technologies, and evolving ideas about what “musicianship” should include. This roundtable brings together educators, researchers, and practitioners to take stock of where music education is right now, with a focus on four connected areas: curriculum design, emerging student profiles, (artistic) research, and hiring practices. This roundtable is an open discussion where participants share a snapshot of what music education currently looks like from their perspective.

Within this roundtable we think of cross-platform aesthetics as way of thinking. It is a mindset that invites artists and students to explore what becomes possible when one stays curious about how artistic material can be created, articulated and shared across media, disciplines, and modes of presentation. By expanding one’s repertoire of possible creative actions it can open new pathways for searching, testing, and discovering artistic solutions, increasing the likelihood of arriving at outcomes that resonate both with one’s own aesthetic intentions and with an intended audience.

For many artists, work is no longer anchored to a single format, medium, or presentation context. It can take the form of a stage work, an installation, a film or documentary project, an app, a VR/AR experience, a work developed in a game engine, an intervention in public space, a multichannel composition, or an interactive system where audiences shape the work through movement, attention, or choice. In this sense, the “format” is no longer simply inherited. It is something we increasingly design, negotiate, and build.

A central question is necessity. If cross-platform work is framed as necessary, what does that mean? Professionally, artists increasingly work in hybrid contexts and collaborate across disciplines and platforms. Educationally, cross-disciplinary projects can build communication skills, role flexibility, and shared languages across different aesthetic systems. But necessity isn’t obvious: emphasizing cross-platform skills means de-prioritizing something else, raising questions about specialization versus generalization and which crafts or disciplines should remain protected. If teachers or programs can’t explain why cross-platform competence matters for artistic growth, does it risk becoming an activity that takes time without actually developing students’ skills or creativity

A second issue is feasibility. Even if cross-platform education is relevant, it requires conditions that aren’t automatically in place. Feasibility isn’t just about budgets or infrastructure. It also involves curriculum design, assessment practices, staff skills, and the coordination needed for interdisciplinary projects. Institutional traditions, habits, and expectations also shape what is possible.  Importantly, feasibility is also tied to student motivation. In arts education, low motivation can turn ambitious interdisciplinary projects into friction-heavy exercises. Educational design therefore matters: how learning experiences are scaffolded, how difficulty is calibrated, how roles and expectations are clarified, and how students gain a sense of mastery rather than only exposure.

This round table brings together practitioners, educators, researchers, and technologists across theatre, film, electronic music, instrumental performance, and creative programming to reflect on the relevance of this mindset in performing arts programs. The aim is not to assume consensus, but to surface what participants experience as necessary, what they experience as costly, and what they find feasible to teach and learn.

Questions to facilitate reflection and debate.

• Beyond infrastructure and funding, what practical challenges arise in making interdisciplinary, cross-platform projects work in an educational setting?
• How are institutions adapting to students who already operate across multiple media, genres, and technologies?
• How can educational design foster motivation and a sense of mastery, rather than simply exposing students to new formats?
• How should programs decide what to prioritize — cross-platform skills or discipline-specific craft? Can both coexist effectively?
• How should learning outcomes be assessed in projects that span multiple media and contexts? Does traditional assessment adequately capture cross-platform competence?
• How might cross-platform thinking shape the future of artistic practice? Are there risks or opportunities in framing artistic work as inherently hybrid?
• What structural or cultural changes are needed to support cross-platform education? How can curricula balance depth in a discipline with breadth across platforms?

Further challenge statements:

• What do we mean by “cross-platform aesthetics” in practice: translating a work across contexts, or creating work that depends on context? Can an artwork ‘not’ be the result of cross-platform aesthetics
• When does cross-platform thinking deepen work within existing formats and when does it dilute focus, craft, or artistic identity?
• What would justify not prioritizing cross-platform aesthetics in a program (for example, protecting disciplinary depth, avoiding generalism, resource limits)?
• How do differences in prior experience, access to the right tools and spaces, personality and working style, and background (for example growing up around the arts versus not) shape students’ ability to engage in cross-platform work?
• How do students relate to cross-platform demands (curiosity, overload, resistance, pragmatism, ambition), and how can educators recognize these positions without treating them as personal deficiencies?
• What are the real costs of doing this well (time, coordination, infrastructure, assessment), and who tends to carry those costs?
• How have recent technological developments (spatial audio, VR/AR, sensors, game engines, new distribution channels, generative AI) changed what is feasible and desirable, and do they change the relevance of cross-platform aesthetics compared to earlier periods?
• How should performing arts education respond to generative AI as a cross-platform “bridge” that lets students prototype beyond their own expertise (for example cover art, visuals, or coding musical ideas), while negotiating ethical implications and the risk that AI-based shortcuts reduce incentives to collaborate with specialists and learn shared craft across disciplines?

[This roundtable will build directly on the student roundtable on entrepreneurship from the previous day]

Over the past 15 years or so there has been a shift in how musicians are managed and supported.  We have moved from the era of powerful, larger than life managers who acted as dealmakers for artists, through the independent manager as representative between artists and label, towards an emphasis on the musician as self-managing entrepreneur.

The shift is reflected in the growth of academic courses and degree programmes, alongside a range of government and private sector initiatives offering musicians training in management and entrepreneurship.

The idea of what it means to be a musician is changing. Rather than focusing on their art as songwriter, producer, and performer, musicians are increasingly expected to think and behave like entrepreneurs. These expectations often draw on ideas from business education and on familiar images of the ultracompetitive, heroic entrepreneur strongly associated with the tech industry.

• What are the consequences of this shift for musicians and music education?
• How should we think critically about the ways business and management are introduced into musical practice and education?
• How do we move forward and develop new practices and pedagogies given existing research which suggests:

Ideas of entrepreneurship are often treated uncritically. Are generalised ideas from the study of business and management suitable for musicians? Do musicians need entrepreneurial skills? If so, which ones?

Entrepreneurship is often presented as a set of generic skills that can be introduced into the curriculum. Yet studies of musicians suggest a wide range of career paths, experiences, and needs. How should we assess and respond to this diversity?

Musicians are increasingly expected to take on risks and tasks that were once handled by managers and record labels. Is this realistic, viable, and sustainable?

Evidence suggests that entrepreneurial demands reduce the time and energy available for music-making, and contribute to stress, anxiety, and mental health challenges. How should music education address these effects

Finally, what alternative models or forms of support might help musicians engage with the economics and business of the industry while remaining fulfilled and productive as artists?

Case: Formative peer assessment (interpretation or feedback settings).

This roundtable invites participants to explore the role of risk in learning within music education and other performance-based programs. While risk is often treated as a broadly positive ingredient in artistic training, it is not always clear what “risk” means in practice, whether it is truly necessary for learning, or how it should be cultivated, limited, or redistributed across students, teachers, institutions, and the wider artistic field. The discussion therefore focuses on risk not as a slogan, but as a pedagogical condition that can take multiple forms and produce multiple consequences.

A starting point is the observation that when people are asked to move beyond what they already know, they often encounter resistance, uncertainty, and vulnerability. In some contexts, this is understood as a sign of meaningful learning. In others, it can signal overload, misalignment, or a breakdown of trust. The roundtable creates space to compare how different programs interpret and respond to these situations: when resistance is seen as productive, when it is treated as a warning sign, and what kinds of support structures help keep risk generative rather than discouraging.

The roundtable also considers how risk is negotiated across the learning ecology. Participants are invited to reflect on where the “gravitational pulls” toward risk and toward safety come from. Sometimes students push for experimentation while teachers protect coherence and standards. Sometimes teachers act as change agents while students seek stability, mastery, or predictability. Sometimes institutions enable risk through resources and trust, and sometimes they constrain it through metrics, evaluation cultures, and operational pragmatics. External forces matter too: expectations from the professional field, platform cultures, technologies, and employment conditions can all shift what kinds of risk feel worth taking, or what kinds of safety feel necessary.

These dynamics also include how power and role asymmetries shape who is exposed to risk. Hierarchy can reduce risk for teachers and institutions by allowing uncertainty to be managed through authority, credentials, or fixed standards. It can also reduce risk for students by offering clear expectations and protective structure. Yet the same asymmetry can make risk uneven: students may be asked to put their work and identity “on the table” while teachers remain comparatively safe as evaluators. Taken together, these gravitational pulls toward risk and toward safety do not only shape behavior, but they also shape how the value of risk itself is defined, justified, and negotiated across students, staff, institutions, and the wider artistic field.

Rather than assuming stable roles (teacher as risk-taker, student as resister, institution as limiter), this roundtable asks how risk appetite and risk aversion move between actors, contexts, and moments. The aim is to surface the forces that shape risk-taking, the conditions that support it, and the conditions that quietly discourage it.

We have gradually moved beyond the initial wave of fascination with what artificial intelligence can offer in terms of (re)producing artistic expressions. Many of us have been impressed by text, sound, and image generators, along with their ability to (mis)understand. Artificial intelligence provides both groundbreaking artistic opportunities and legitimate concerns—fears about how, and especially how quickly, the job market for artists is changing.

We should also reflect on the consequences of "outsourcing" creative work and decision-making to AI systems. Should we, as both creators and audiences of art, be concerned about how artificial intelligence might influence our ability to judge and appreciate creativity? Does engaging with AI sharpen our critical perspectives, or does it risk dulling them?

Another pressing issue is the hegemonic cultural biases embedded in many commercial tools. Creativity shapes how societies perceive themselves and imagine new possibilities. When AI systems reinforce dominant cultural patterns while marginalizing alternative perspectives, they risk narrowing public discourse, reducing cultural diversity, and strengthening existing norms at the expense of exploration and innovation. This raises critical questions about cultural agency: Who decides which stories are told, which images are shown, and which ideas shape our shared reality?

Some additional questions for reflection and debate include: 

• What kind of creativity can we attribute to AI models?
• How can artists integrate generative AI systems into their ideation and production processes while maintaining creative autonomy and avoiding the risk of machine-driven homogenization?
• What are the cultural and ethical implications for artists and audiences when AI systems are integrated into creative practices, and how can these issues be addressed to ensure diversity and originality?
• How might the interplay between AI and human creativity reveal new insights into the act of creation, its impact on audiences, and the social influence of art on contemporary society?
• How do we envision musical practices evolving as a result of AI—whether through practices that embrace artificial intelligence or those that resist and oppose it?
• And what about the credibility of art as a form of expression—will it change now that we cannot always be certain whether a human or a machine is behind the work? 

These are broad, important, and challenging questions, and we have invited a diverse group of artists, educators, and researchers to discuss and explore potential answers.

This roundtable is leaning on key objectives from MishMash Centre for AI and Creativity (2025-2030) and is a collaboration between MishMash and CreaTeME.

This roundtable brings together songmakers, producers, and scholars to share and discuss insights and perspectives on the evolving relationship between songmaking and production within industry, higher education and culture. We are using the term ‘songmaker’ to be inclusive of the variety of roles that contribute to the making of new music including topliners, producers and writers.

The discussions will revolve around key issues concerning how songmaking is taught (and learnt), researched, experienced and practiced across a variety of countries and contexts. The core aims of the group are to recognise and celebrate songmaking as a diverse creative practice and to cultivate a dynamic community of practice. The group also seeks to foster knowledge exchange and collaborative networks and advance critical and creative inquiry into the process and products of songwriting.

Implementing Artistic Research in Bachelor and Master’s Programs brings together educators and artist-researchers to discuss what it means to implement artistic research from a PhD and research context into bachelor’s and master’s education. Much of the field’s theory formation and methodological debate is developed at doctoral level, where candidates are typically expected to design and argue for their own methodological approach. When similar expectations are introduced in BA and MA settings, a new set of questions emerges: what kinds of methodological agency are realistic at different levels, what forms of guidance and scaffolding are needed, and how can programs avoid turning artistic research into a practice that primarily rewards students who are already strong in academic articulation?

The roundtable also engages core questions that remain unsettled across the field: what the artwork is expected to do as knowledge, what the text is for (argument, documentation, contextualization, reflection, method, mediation), and what requirements follow from these different functions. How should the artwork and the text relate and interact, and is a text necessary in all cases? What counts as a “good” alignment between practice and reflection, and how do programs communicate expectations without narrowing artistic inquiry into standardized formats?

A recurring concern is that as students’ capacity for articulation increases, articulation can also become a form of insulation: persuasive accounts of intention may function as rationalizations that protect decisions from critique rather than opening practice to being changed by critique. If artistic research promises stronger reflection on creative action, what pedagogical and assessment designs ensure that reflection also pressurizes practice? How can programs prevent writing and methodological argument from becoming an end in itself, and instead keep artistic research oriented toward risk, development, and transformation in the artwork?

Rather than aiming to settle definitions, the discussion focuses on implementation and pedagogy: what teachers actually do in practice (supervision models, group teaching formats, seminar structures, peer-feedback routines), how curricula are structured and sequenced, how assessment is conducted in ways that are credible yet not reductive, and whether artistic research is best framed as dedicated courses or embedded across the entire program.

Participants are invited to share concrete curriculum designs, teaching methods, and assessment approaches.

This roundtable focuses on how performance-centered programs discuss artistic growth with students. The emphasis is on formative assessment, dialogue, and shared language: how teachers and peers articulate strengths, limitations, and potential for development in ways that teachers and students can understand, act on, and eventually internalize (Feedback culture).

A key premise is that artistic education is not only about producing better work, but about developing self-awareness and self-direction. If students are to grow beyond what they already know how to do, they need ways of recognizing where they are strong, where they are stuck, and what “next steps” could mean in practice. Over time, the goal is not just that students receive feedback, but that they become able to map their own development: to diagnose what a work is trying to do, identify what is currently limiting it, and choose strategies for change.

At the same time, these conversations are never “just talk.” They are shaped by underlying assumptions about what we are actually assessing. One way to name this is through the containers or boundaries of assessment: are we assessing the individual practitioner, the work, the performance event, the process, the collaboration, or the practitioner-in-context?

In many performance-centered programs, “assessing artistic growth” also functions as a practical way of translating a broad, often unwieldy learning taxonomy (in the spirit of Bloom’s) into a smaller set of observable, discussable, and actionable learning dimensions that make sense within music education. These boundaries are value-based. They define where a program believes growth happens, and they set the “size” of what can count as development. If performance is treated as central, then performance becomes a large container for growth. If performance is treated as secondary, the container shrinks, and so does the perceived range of what can be noticed, discussed, and developed. This also means that formative assessment depends on the frames of reference available in the room. Teachers and peers bring different repertoires of listening, different aesthetic priorities, and different ideas of what matters. Narrow frames can shrink the space of possible feedback, while broader frames can expand it, making more developmental pathways visible.

The roundtable invites participants to compare how different programs facilitate and structure these conversations. We will discuss what we are actually trying to assess in formative dialogue, how we draw the boundaries of what counts as “growth” (the individual, the work, the process, the performance event, the collaboration, or the practitioner-in-context), and how those boundaries reflect underlying values about what education is for. We will also share practices for building feedback cultures where students can engage critically with each other’s work without reducing assessment to taste, hierarchy, or vague encouragement.

Auto-Tune and related technologies have transformed contemporary music-making, reshaping how singing, listening, and authorship are conceived and experienced, and thereby how voices in popular music are valued and circulated. What began as pitch-correction software designed to smooth imperfections has developed into a set of aesthetic tools and creative instruments. These technologies are now widely used for experimentation and sonic design, enabling artists to explore and establish distinctive vocal signatures.

As a result, technologically mediated voices foreground the body as both a site and a medium of transformation — aesthetically, politically, and affectively — challenging established ideas of what an “embodied” voice can be and influencing how we experience vocal intimacy and forms of relational listening. In doing so, they open new ways of thinking about the voice, where embodiment, vocality, and identity are negotiated through the interplay between the human voice and technological mediation. These practices also prompt wider questions about how technology blurs familiar boundaries between the natural and the technological, the embodied and the disembodied, and the authentic and the artificial.

This round table invites artists, educators, and researchers to share experiences, practices, and perspectives on how technologically mediated voices are shaping contemporary music-making, performance, and listening across creative, pedagogical, and cultural contexts.

Suggested questions for Round Table Discussion:

• To what extent can the technologically mediated voice be understood as part of embodied vocal practice, and how might this reshape how we think about embodied expressivity in popular music
• How might Auto-Tune and related technologies challenge or unsettle singers’ and songwriters’ trust in their own bodily knowledge and ability to express themselves aesthetically and affectively through their voices?
• How do singers experience and negotiate muscular, sensory, emotional, and existential aspects of singing in relation to the technologically transformed sound of their voices? Moreover, how might these practices affect the way we teach, practise, and talk about vocality in popular music?
• What are the pedagogical implications of technologically mediated voices — including AI-generated music — for auditions, teaching, and assessment in higher music education?
• What are the impacts of technologically mediated voices on live performance, particularly when produced vocal sounds are not possible to perform without technological assistance? How does this shape the relationship between singers and audiences, and how do performers relate to their own voices in these contexts?
• Does our growing familiarity with processed and mediated voices change how we understand the voice as an artistic expression connected to the body and to lyrics rooted in lived experience, and does this familiarity increase our openness to AI-generated vocalities?

This roundtable explores what “history” and “theory” are for in a Bachelor-level education in electronic music and/or music production, and how these subjects can support students’ listening, making, and reflective capacity within electronic music and music production across very different backgrounds.

A recurring challenge is that students arrive in the program with uneven competency and motivations. One way of unpacking such competencies is through different categories of competencies:

• First: some are strong in verbal and conceptual frameworks, with established vocabularies for describing structure, style, and musical lineage.
• Second: some have deep DAW-based production fluency and can reliably create convincing results through tacit “button knowledge,” but don’t necessarily have the parallel vocabulary to describe and explain what they or others are doing in the more verbal and conceptual terms.
• Third: A tacit form of DAW fluency does not automatically imply an understanding of recording and audio technology: students may know how to use plugins and workflows effectively without knowing how they work (for example, what a microphone captures, how signal flow works, or what compression is doing).
• Fourth: many can recognize and reproduce musical events by ear, diagnose them in practice, and mimic them in their own work without being able to name what they hear.
• Fifth: some have a highly developed aesthetic compass, a felt sense of what they want and what they reject, even when they lack a shared language for communicating it.

The variance on how each students, and the class as a whole masters these competencies can create both opportunities and friction: different ways of knowing music, different preferences for how learning should be structured, and different ideas about what “theory” should be for and how it should engage with the cannon formation (history). This roundtable asks how teaching can connect these competencies so theory and history support understanding, imitation, creative agency, and communication, rather than rewarding only what is easiest to verbalize for the students and to teach and assess.

A central tension concerns what we reward when we say a student is “strong in theory.” In one sense, theory can drift toward writing skills, analytical vocabulary, and competence in formalized models. In another sense, theory can be understood as a way of engaging with aesthetic experience itself, including the difficult question of how music resonates emotionally, socially, and artistically. From this perspective, theory is not primarily a way of explaining and describing musical events, but a means of clarifying intention, tracing growth, and articulating why certain sounds, works, and practices matter. The roundtable therefore considers how theory and history can remain connected to listening and making: not only naming structures but supporting students in reflecting on their own aesthetic development, their emotional anchorage in what they create, and their ability to communicate this to others.