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I have had two recent experiences with images which have underlined for me the importance of sound stories in music education.

The first was an image of the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer visiting a holiday club in Milton Keynes in 2025, where children were engaging in music-making. This image of Starmer, a teacher, a child, table, keyboard, headphones, ukeleles, white board, note names – it was a familiar example of music education in England. At the event, the Prime Minister talked about his experiences as a young musician, and the continued importance of music in his life which informs his drive to make sure ‘’. This is (apologies for the pun) ‘music to the ears’ for music teachers and organisations, where, especially in England, the subject has been put under incredible strain over the past decades (Bath et al. 2020), although, as always, the questions of ‘when, how, what?’ are ever present.

Muted stories

And yet, I couldn’t help feeling that the story of music education being portrayed to the public, specifically through the image, was a bit … ‘muted’. It met expected narratives, yes, but somehow failed to capture the ‘x factor’ that occurs in music classrooms across the UK every hour of every school day, where thousands of young people express themselves, engage in critical musical decision-making, and demonstrate nuanced understanding of a huge diversity of repertoire, styles and genres. This is no fault of the setting or the event but is more to do with the challenges and limitations of images to tell music education stories.

This challenge was reiterated to me in my involvement in designing a front cover for the fourth edition of (Anderson et al., 2025). This was a much harder task than I had imagined! How do you capture the energy, diversity and ‘realness’ of our music classrooms? We, as a group of editors, are very conscious that this one image will tell stories about music education that ‘matter’ (Haraway, 2016). What a lot of responsibility!

In my view the book cover captures some of the underpinning practices and theories which run through this new edition, including musical and human diversity, different forms of material, technological and musical interactions and formal, informal learning contexts. But now I realise what was most challenging about this task, and why I felt as I did about the images of Stamer’s visit – there is no sound!

Considering all this talk of stories and images, sound is absolutely critical to music education. It is the reason for being together, the key mode for interaction, a method for sharing ideas, explorations and learning, and essential for building relationships in our classrooms. And yet this brings me right back to considering how troublesome it is to share practitioner and young people’s sounds as part of the societal storying of our subject. We might include links in publications, we might share short videos on social media, and the expansion of non-traditionally formatted journals might offer potential, but often sound is seen as a ‘nice extra’, an ‘offshoot’ of the key story contained in the text.

‘Often sound is seen as a “nice extra”, an “offshoot” of the key story contained in the text.’

Exploring sound stories

So, how might we define a sound story? For me, a sound story shows not only a finished product but the musical experimentation and decision-making in action. It demonstrates how sound is the result of a particular human and material entanglement, in this particular space and time (Cooke 2024). In other words, it ‘pulls back the curtain’ on the types of musical teaching and learning that is happening in 2025, going well beyond the ‘expected societal narratives’ of the subject.

How we create these sound stories, and how and where we share them to develop better understandings of music education among the public, are questions I continue to think with. I know of some very good examples of schools who use digital platforms (such as or private YouTube channels) and social media to share rich sound stories of their student’s classroom work. How we shift these sound stories into research, publications, policy and societal spheres is an important question to make sure the public story of music education continues to evolve.

References

Anderson, A., Cooke, C., Kinsella, V., & MacGregor, E. (2025). Learning to teach music in the secondary school: A companion to school. Routledge.

Bath, N., Daubney, A., Mackrill, D., & Spruce G. (2020). The declining place of music education in schools in England. Children & Society, 34(5) 443–457.

Cooke, C. (2024). Reverberations in music education: What does sound ‘do’ in our learning spaces? Music Education Research, 26(3), 304–317.

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. University Press.