Music production literacies in diverse creative contexts

Popular music production (PMP) pedagogies tend to emphasise the development of skills and practices within creative cultures relevant to audio-only contexts. Increasingly, however, music is consumed in emergent contexts such as the audio-visual domain of TikTok and YouTube. This suggests that alongside developing skills in music production, PMP students may benefit from developing awareness of production processes relevant to other contexts, such as video production. This chapter examines the professional workflows of contemporary screen media composer/producers, showing how their high level of competence in music production and their knowledgeability of other related disciplines enables them to respond to emergent creative contexts. It then considers how PMP pedagogies might address the need to develop students’ capacities within PMP while simultaneously promoting literacy in fields peripheral to PMP. A pedagogical framework is proposed that progresses learning from an acquisition of context-specific skills in PMP to an accumulation of broader knowledgeability of other disciplines. By engaging students in learning activities that require them to activate their familiar disciplinary skills in unfamiliar interdisciplinary contexts, student identity shifts from being rigidly defined by their disciplinary role, to being an individual practitioner with negotiable responsibilities. To support this approach to learning, the educator must shift from the role of discipline expert and focus instead on guiding students to adapt and activate their knowledge in unique and responsive ways.