Situated within postdigital music education, Maker Music Education (MME; Treß, 2024) reframes music technology from “toolification” (Marenko, 2021) to mediating condition and articulates design principles for participatory, empowering, and sustainable music learning (e.g. project-based learning, multimodality, inclusivity, critical engagement with materials). Building on this framework, this presentation reports first reconstructive findings from an after-school instrumental teaching that combined e-waste upcycling, tangible sound devices, sound exploration and group improvisation.

Within Documentary Design Research (Buchborn, 2022; Treß, 2020), data were gathered via systematic videography (multi-camera classroom video). Analysis followed the Documentary Method: transcription, formulating interpretation (what happens), and reflecting interpretation (how practice unfolds). We reconstructed implicit orientations in participants’ material handling, embodiment and musical interaction and illuminated the relation between normative lesson design and actual praxis. The reconstructive insights feed back into iterative DBR design decisions.

Initial insights into the data suggest that human-object interactions play a special role in the context of improvisation and music technology. They seem to initiate aleatoric, creative musical processes through unintentional sound production. However, they appear to function not only as musical actors and stimuli, but they also play a crucial role in steering the distribution and focus of attention in the room.

The presentation consolidates MME’s initial design principles with empirical detail and demonstrates how documentary reconstructions can steer iterative DBR cycles that align improvisatory practice, technological mediation and equitable participation in music education.

Within the collaborative project DigiProSMK, we have developed a concept for professional music teacher training that emphasizes exploratory engagement with digital media. The Teachers’ Soundlab offers a deliberately low-threshold environment in which teachers can gain hands-on musical experiences with digital sound generators in concrete music-making situations. From the outset, exploration is embedded in an improvisational framework—without improvisation being explicitly introduced—so that participants naturally act as improvising musicians within a shared sonic space.

The concept intentionally avoids directive instruction, drawing instead on principles of Reggio pedagogy (Knauf, 2017), animative didactics (Opaschowski, 1996), and enabling didactics (Arnold, 2012; Arnold et al., 2017). Participants enter a carefully prepared, sensorially rich learning environment that invites exploration and experimentation, with autonomy and voluntary participation as key elements. They decide freely whether to listen, perform, or reflect on their experiences in an adjoining reflection space.

A guided interview study explored participants’ musical and learning experiences in this setting. Despite the intended accessibility, participants reported various personal and contextual barriers that needed to be overcome to engage in improvisation. Through qualitative content analysis, we categorized these barriers and developed a framework for understanding challenges in improvisational music-making. The findings invite further discussion on the transferability of the Teachers’ Soundlab approach to other improvisational and educational contexts.

How can mobile hybrid technologies be integrated into music education in such a way that all learners participate in processes of musical experience and creation? To address these questions, a case study focusing on group improvisation processes using Playtronica had been implemented at the University of Music in Trossingen from 2023 until 2026. Within a design-based research framework (McKenney & Reeves, 2018), a range of improvisational games and pedagogical learning strategies were systematically developed through iterative cycles, engaging different participant groups involving university students, teachers, and school pupils.

Mobile, digital and sensory devices equipped with MIDI functionality, such as Playtron and TouchMe (MIDI Controllers developed by Playtronica), expand existing improvisational concepts and enable new possibilities for music-making with everyday items. The results show how objects that can be described as “unconventional” instruments enable a low-threshold entry point for all pupils and do not presuppose specific skills or prior knowledge. Consequently, musical classroom-conversations can develop rapidly, and pupils in heterogeneous settings begin to engage and interact with one another through music with fewer inhibitions. In this process, various forms of improvisation open up new opportunities for increased participation in music lessons, enabling pupils to develop their own musical conversations (Werner & Rotsch, 2025).

The presentation focuses on the behavior of participating pupils (grades 3–6) during their initial contact moments and decision-making processes showing how they explore and fathom group improvisation processes. A high level of freedom in deciding, structuring and designing their ideas and ways of making music together forms the basis for a first step toward enabling democratic and participatory processes in music lessons.

This project presents a proposal for sound creation and improvisation centred on the dialogue between analog and digital technologies (Play Box), contemporary graphic notation, body movement, and visuals. This practice unfolds within an educational and artistic framework informed by postdigital ecopedagogies (Jandrić & Ford, 2022) and the live arts, situated in a context of open, collaborative, and non-hierarchical processes.

Rooted in the aims of understanding and emancipation in educational research from a pragmatic perspective (Biesta, 2020), this qualitative study seeks to develop an integrated understanding of the improvisation process through the interaction of diverse artistic-technological languages and the body.

From this perspective, improvisation is viewed as a performative practice embedded in an ecological and relational process that fosters shared attention and vulnerability as conditions for encounter. In this context, pedagogical “malfunctioning”—such as failure, dissonance, or technological interruption—is embraced as an opportunity for reflection and the reinvention of creative practices. Sound creation through the Play Box, an analog instrument designed for musical experimentation and creation, arises from the interaction between bodies, objects, and technologies, transcending the traditional boundaries of music and music education within a hybrid environment. The observed results also indicate an increase in participants’ aesthetic sensitivity, cooperation, and ecosocial awareness.

This proposal positions improvisation and sound creation as critical and emancipatory practices capable of constructing a postdigital learning space that is inclusive and ecologically conscious, where music education intertwines with artistic experimentation and contemporary thought. This approach to performing arts live arts facilitate an understanding of this experience as a contemporary pedagogical ritual, in which education is experienced as performance and performance as process.