Education and Practice of the Creative Arts in the Age of Digital Technology

Abstract

“The creative arts” describes a wide range of arts in the humanities, comprising music, fine arts, and theatre arts, all of which deal with human creativity from various psycho-motor activities. The practice and teaching of the creative arts in the pre-digital era entail the use of analogies in the representation of reality and was characterised by the use of dedicated information storage and reproduction media. Hence, creative art education largely relied on teacher demonstrations within traditional classroom settings. The digital revolution, however, has provided alternative media in which the representation of real-life events now relies on successive dichotomy based on binary numbers to represent reality. This presents a more efficient and reliable representation that enables any form of data to be stored and reproduced using a single multimedia platform. Using Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation theory, this paper undertakes a critical exploration of the education and practice of the creative arts in the age of digital technology. It engages a discourse of educational practices in the creative arts in the pre-digital age, examining the effects of the digital revolution on creative arts education, with a particular focus on music. In the creative arts, digital technology has provided tools with which artists can easily produce and express their creativity. In music especially, digital technology has impacted composition, performance, recording, distribution, analysis, and criticism. There is a need for music educators to engage students in the use of digital tools to boost productivity, especially those that relate to their areas of specialisation, to maintain their relevance in the labour market, especially as music-making and performance have become volatile. Although there are ethical concerns surrounding the use of digital tools, music educators should devise ways by which students can personalise their use in such ways that they do not lose their ability to think critically.