Musimage: Using social multimedia to engage pupils in classical music appreciation

Music teachers in secondary schools are facing a great challenge when attempting to successfully engage pupils in classical music appreciation. The distance e-learning sector has for a long time neglected to address the specific needs of teaching and learning music. This paper describes the use of social multimedia technologies to engage pupils in classical music appreciation. The approach relies on different hypotheses: nowadays, classical music needs to be a global experience, combining audio and visual; classical music is actual and generates emotions; pupils need to be active and creative even though they are not able to compose or create music. The resulting social educative platform is described together with the experiments and results that were conducted to evaluate the approach.