MIR IN SCHOOL? LESSONS FROM ETHNOGRAPHIC OBSERVATION OF SECONDARY SCHOOL MUSIC CLASSES Dan Stowell and Simon Dixon Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London dan.stowell[]eecs.qmul.ac.uk ABSTRACT To help maximise the usefulness of MIR technologies in the wider community, we conducted an ethnographic study of music lessons in secondary schools in London, UK. The purpose is to understand better how musical concepts are ne- gotiated with and without technology, so we can understand when and how MIR tools might be useful. We report on some of the themes uncovered, both about the range of tech- nologies deployed in schools and about the ways different musical concepts are discussed. Importantly, this rich ob- servation elicits some of the nuances between various high- and low-technologies. In particular, we discuss issues of multimodality and the role of technologies such as Youtube, as well as specific issues around musical concepts such as genre and rhythm. 1. INTRODUCTION Over the past decade the field of Music Information Re- trieval (MIR) has blossomed, leading to the creation of many useful analysis techniques and systems. We wish to increase the benefit of MIR techniques to society, and to help develop MIR in ways that connect with new use cases in real-world contexts. This requires that we work with user groups di- rectly, adapting our approach and conceptual toolset to that of the user groups: in other words, it requires recognising that MIR has its associated culture with its own assumptions and interests, which may differ from the assumptions and in- terests of a particular user group, and working to bridge any divides. Connecting with user communities in this way is not just a way to disseminate research outputs, but can bring fresh ideas and perspectives into the research process. The present study was conducted in this spirit, with a spe- cific view to investigate how new digital music technologies might be developed or adapted for the school music context. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. c  2011 International Society for Music Information Retrieval. This paper discusses some of the issues brought out from research conducted in London secondary schools over the period November 2010 – March 2011. The full ethnographic analysis cannot be represented in six pages; in this paper we first describe the setup of the study before considering a range of findings relevant for the MIR community. We dis- cuss the use of different musical concepts (Section 3) and different technologies (Section 4), before ending with a dis- cussion reflecting on the lessons for the use of MIR technol- ogy in the school music-lesson context. 2. SETTING AND METHODS We chose to use an ethnographic approach, so as to elicit a rich thick description of the way music-related ideas are used and relate to each other in a specific context. The sen- sitising questions used to guide the ethnography were: What music-related concepts do teachers and students negotiate in music classes? How do they achieve this – with, and without, technology? We note that such “sensitising questions” do not serve as narrow research questions to be answered specifically, but as a thematic core for the observations and analysis. The study was conducted in music lessons at two sec- ondary schools in London. The two schools were selected after contacting a small selection of comprehensive secondary schools in the London area with music programmes. • School A was located in East London, with around 1200 students. The school had ≈ 15% having special educational needs, and ≈ 50% obtaining five or more A*–C GCSEs and equivalent (a standard UK measure of attainment) in 2010. The music department had six full-time music teachers. • School B was located in West London, with around 1000 students. The school had ≈ 15% having special educational needs, and ≈ 30% obtaining five or more A*–C GCSEs and equivalent in 2010. The perform- ing arts department had two full-time music teachers.