Attuning to what’s in/out of tune: From listening-as-usual to opening up more parts of the world to love in music education research and practice

What does human exceptionalism and a human-centred analysis do to what counts as music, education and education research? This article troubles that question by ‘sticking’ to a video clip of two boys performing a song on a beach in rural Norway. Through a diffractive method of ‘Listening without Organs’, it traces the agency of sound waves and explores music education’s entanglement with everyday life. Through an agential realist analysis of the video clip as a phenomenon, we argue for the porosity of taken-for-granted research concepts such as ‘data’, research ‘site’, research ‘participants’, theories and methods. Knowledge-making as a worlding practice troubles human exceptionalism and opens up more parts of the world to love in music education research and practice. By extending the theory and practice of listening to include more-than-human and ‘lesser’-human sounds, concepts such as music, education and children are also stretched and opened up.