"Get Smarter" Music: Making knowledge from know-how

Abstract

This paper provides an account of a range of activities included in the Bachelor of Popular Music (BPM) program that are intended to enhance the creative skills of popular musicians. These processes are largely a reflection of learning practices that are normal in the practice of popular music in the broader community where self-assessment, peer feedback and self-directed study are common. Popular musicians are thought to acquire their abilities to make music through immersion in popular music culture, a learning by osmosis process that results in high levels of implicit know-how and the ability to actually make popular music rather than the production of high levels of knowledge that can be spoken or written about. Within the major study Popular Music Production, students reflect in writing on their creative processes; this brings their knowing of popular music out of the domain of implicit know-how into conscious awareness, as speakable knowledge. It is this engagement with both know-how and knowledge and the relationships between them that is the focus of this paper.