Tan, Marcus Cheng Chye

Soundscapes engender historical, cultural, social, and aesthetic meanings through acoustical qualities that reflect a community’s lived experiences. In this article, we propose music lesson ideas that help students appreciate and embrace their sociocultural heritage—by creating, performing, and listening to soundscapes that are representative of their locality. These lesson ideas are guided by pedagogical imperatives drawn from key soundscape literature, which reveals sounds as being powerful in sculpting culture and identity as well as impacting ways of knowing. Activities in the lessons serve to develop students’ aurality and their understanding of the sociocultural connotations of sound. The learnings gained may supplement more traditional musical skills and knowledge acquisition in the music classroom.

Examines new and recent Southeast Asian performances and artists Engages specifically with political theatres Expands the discussion around censorship and gender with new and 'inside' perspectives

Theatricality in music performances is often regarded as extraneous, but avantgarde toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan exploits the intermediality between theatricality and musicality to demonstrate how theatrimusicality is imperative to the creation and reception of her music. Curios (2015) is one example in which the work’s structure of meaning and the experience of the carnivalesque are evoked through such a theatrimusical dramaturgy.

Virtual Reality (VR) and Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) are increasingly becoming employed in the classroom to facilitate embodied forms of experiential learning in sensorially rich contexts. This chapter presents the findings of a study conducted with 15-year-old students in a Singapore school. The study evaluated the effectiveness of IVEs as a novel pedagogical approach to the teaching of social and emotional competencies, in the context of Character and Citizenship Education; it sought to ascertain if the affordances of VR and IVEs—immersion, presence and embodiment—when accompanied by real-world narratives would facilitate greater empathy, perspective-taking and responsible decision-making. Students were divided into three treatment conditions: IVEs, “pen-and-paper” mental simulation and video-viewing, and each treatment contained a problem scenario that involved an ethical dilemma young people in Singapore today face. A quasi-experimental, pre-test post-test, non-equivalent group design was employed and the study adopted a mixed-method approach to data collection. The findings show how IVEs can effectively facilitate perspective-taking and empathy, and this is due to its ability to immerse the user in the fictional space of the narrative, thereby encouraging a deeper sense of presence and embodiment.