Online Sessions Programme

Mercedes Castillo

Exploring Sound Art to Spark Musical Creativity in Early Childhood

📍 Location: Online
🕒 Date/Time: Tuesday, March 17, 2026, 5:00–7:00 pm

This presentation introduces an innovative approach to early childhood music education through Sound Art, highlighting its potential to foster musical creativity in young children. It will explore Murray Schafer’s concept of the soundscape, inviting educators to understand the acoustic environment as a pedagogical resource that nurtures active listening, imagination, and sonic experimentation. The session will also examine the use of non-conventional graphic representations—including lines, symbols, and sound maps—as tools that allow children to express musical ideas beyond traditional notation, expanding their creative possibilities. Furthermore, the talk will outline the unique benefits of Sound Art compared to other musical practices in supporting creativity, such as its accessibility, its emphasis on sensory exploration, and the freedom it offers for manipulating diverse sound materials without technical constraints.

University of Granada, Spain Mercedes Castillo-Ferreira holds a Ph.D. in Musicology, with her work on ‘Música y Ceremonia en la Abadía del Sacromonte de Granada’ and three degrees in Geography and History: Musicology and Art History at the University of Granada, and Piano. She has undertaken several research stays at the University of Cambridge, University ‘La Sapienza’ in Rome and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Since 2000 she has been a Lecturer in the Department of Music Didactics, University of Jaen, and from 2018 she teaches at Granada University. In 2007 she was awarded the Manuel de Falla prize for music research for her work on The Choir Books of the Abbey of Sacromonte. In 2011 she was invited by the University of Cambridge to participate in the Norman MacColl Symposium. Her research interests are broad and include the role of Sound Art in Education, History of Music Teaching, Performance Practice related to Music Pedagogy, and Historical Musicology.

Eva Schurig 

Performance anxiety – causes and treatment

📍 Location: Online
🕒 Date/Time: Thursday, March 26, 6:00–8:00 pm

In this lecture, we will take a closer look at performance anxiety. What causes it? Are there people who are more prone to performance anxiety? And is having performance anxiety and being a professional musician mutually exclusive? We will try to find answers to all of these questions and more based on studies in music psychology, and discover different treatment methods recommended by researchers.

University of Oldenburg, Germany Eva Schurig is a postdoctoral research assistant at the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg. After receiving her BA in Musicology from Bremen University, she went to England to study Psychology of Music for her Master’s degree and to get her PhD in Sociology. She then worked in a project in music education focusing on the musical activities of young adults. Her research experiences cover qualitative methods, e.g., interviews and participant observation, as well as quantitative approaches, such as online questionnaires and experiments. Eva’s research interests are broad, covering areas such as listening to music through headphones while in public, the hearing health of professional and amateur musicians, the perspectives of applicants on entry exams to study music education, and the relationship between leisure activities and childrens’ health and wellbeing. She is part of the editorial board of the Yearbook of Music Psychology and a reviewer for several journals. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3710-7966

Christina Anagnostopoulou

Making sense of music: From theory to computation

📍 Location: Online
🕒 Date/Time: Saturday, April 18, 2026, 10:00 am–12:00 pm (CET)

How do we make sense of music, and how can this process be described, analysed, or modelled computationally? This talk presents a conceptual trajectory from traditional music-theoretical approaches to contemporary computational and cognitive perspectives on music. Beginning with core analytical notions such as structure, repetition, pattern, expectation, and musical meaning, it examines how these concepts can be reformulated as formal representations, algorithms, and data-driven models. The talk addresses key questions at the intersection of music theory, musicology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science: what constitutes a musical pattern, how listeners segment and organise musical streams, and what is gained or lost when musical understanding is translated into computational terms. Through selected examples from symbolic music analysis, it illustrates how computational models can formalise theoretical concepts and critically inform established analytical practices, highlighting computation as a complementary framework that promotes explicitness, enables large-scale analysis, and supports new perspectives on musical knowledge.

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece Christina Anagnostopoulou is an Associate Professor of Music Informatics at the Department of Music Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She studied Music (BMus Hons), Artificial Intelligence (MSc), and completed a PhD integrating the two fields at the University of Edinburgh. She has previously held academic appointments at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Glasgow, and Queen’s University Belfast, where she was awarded tenure, and during her time there she also obtained a postgraduate qualification in Higher Education Teaching. Her research interests include computational musicology, music cognition, music in the community, and the semiotics of music.

Yannis Mygdanis

Mapping Music Education 4.0: A Post-Digital, Anthropocentric Music-Educational Framework Integrating Emerging and Immersive Technologies, AI, and STREAM Strategies

📍 Location: Online
🕒 Date/Time: Saturday, April 18, 2026, 10:00 am–12:00 pm (CET)

This presentation examines the transformative potential of Music Education 4.0 within a post-digital, anthropocentric framework. Instead of perceiving technology as the primary catalyst of change, the framework regards emerging and immersive tools as resources that enhance human agency, musical meaning-making, and culturally and socially grounded learning. From this perspective, Music Education 4.0 revisits traditional pedagogical approaches through immersive, interactive, and reflective learning experiences, aligned with STREAM strategies that promote cross-disciplinary thinking and the development of communication, creativity, and critical judgment.Music Education 4.0 establishes a foundational framework for an extended, adaptable learning ecology in which learners engage with music through embodied participation and iterative experimentation. Students investigate digital music production to compose, remix, and refine musical ideas, while maker-oriented practices encourage hands-on building, prototyping, and redesign of instruments and sound artifacts, thereby enhancing creativity and problem-solving skills. Programming and immersive environments, such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), can further enhance spatial, musical, and conceptual comprehension through situated exploration and interactive scenarios. Concurrently, AI-enabled tools—ranging from generative music systems to personalized assistants—provide timely and responsive feedback and scaffolding, supporting differentiated learning pathways while emphasizing questions of authorship, accountability, and ethical use that are integral to post-digital educational contexts. Participants will explore current developments in the fields of Music, Technology, and Education through the analysis of real-world αnd authentic case studies and recent research findings. This consideration includes how post-digital conditions influence both opportunities and challenges in music teacher training. The session further highlights how STREAM strategies can effectively integrate arts and sciences, allowing educators to create comprehensive, context-aware learning experiences that are explicitly centered on human values, critically informed, and adaptable to the swiftly changing musical and technological environments. 

Onsite Sessions Programme

José Luis Aróstegui Plaza

Directions for School Music Education in the New Globalization

📍 Location: Onsite
🕒 Date/Time: TBA

This session discusses how school music education should evolve in the emerging era we are experiencing, marked by uncertainty in key political and economic issues and by pressing challenges such as global warming and the rapid irruption of AI in our lives, beyond the digitalization of recent decades. It argues that, as our world changes, school music education should change as well. The talk organizes these new curricular features into four areas: integral and transversal teaching, passing cultural heritage to new generations, the need to contextualize learning, and digitalization of the teaching and learning process. It concludes by highlighting the importance of attending to policy issues and proposes a key shift from a content-based curriculum to a student-based one.

University of Granada, Spain José Luis Aróstegui Plaza is a Professor of Music Education at the University of Granada. He is Head of the SEJ-540 Research Group in Music Education and Principal Investigator of project PID2021-128645OB-I00 on Transversality, Creativity, and Inclusion in School Music Projects: An Evaluative Research (TCIEM). He has been included in the World's Top 2% Scientists list compiled by Stanford University (2023 and 2025 editions).

Gunter Kreutz

Music, health and wellbeing in the 21st century - prospects and challenges

📍 Location: Onsite
🕒 Date/Time: TBA

This talk addresses how today’s stream of multiple crises has created a climate of uncertainty alongside deteriorating living conditions in many parts of the world. It considers the rising levels of anxiety and depression noted across countries and discusses strategies that can support wellbeing and resilience under increasing external pressures. A key focus is self-efficacy as a psychological mechanism linked to health and wellbeing. The session reflects on issues that emerged during the recent pandemic, including its profound negative consequences for the creative sector, and highlights the role of structured leisure activities in childhood and adolescence and their association with individual self-efficacy. The talk concludes by arguing that arts education in general, and music education in particular, can meaningfully improve life perspectives for younger generations and support them in pursuing goals within and beyond music.

University of Oldenburg, Germany Prof. Dr. Gunter Kreutz studied in Marburg, Berlin, and San Francisco, received his doctorate from the University of Bremen, habilitated at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, and has taught systematic musicology at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg since 2008. Psychological, physical, and social meanings of music-making, singing, and dancing among laypeople are at the forefront of his research interests. He is the author and editor of numerous professional publications as well as two non-fiction books. Finally, he is a member of various associations, e.g., German Society for Music Psychology (DGM), European Society for Music Perception and Cognition (ESCOM), reviewer for numerous journals, and founding editor of the online journal Music Performance Research. His research has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).