This panel brings together approaches to music education through the lenses of technology, community, learning cultures, and inclusive pedagogy. Contributions span inclusive ‘sounding pedagogies,’ community ecology-led projects, and technology-based approaches in primary and higher education. Framed through ‘Listening Otherwise’, pathways for teaching, learning, and collective making in sound practices, show the value of multimodal participatory practices (Lehikoinen & Siljamäki, 2023) in addressing urgent challenges: climate crisis, post-pandemic digital cultures, inequities of access, and the rise of AI (Vallor, 2024; MacDonald et al., 2025).Guided by Learning Compass 2030 (OECD, 2019), we ask how schools and communities foster human and planetary flourishing through transformative competencies. Here, Listening Otherwise becomes a pedagogical orientation that treats listening as a relational and world-making practice, grounded in posthumanist and Indigenous studies, where listening is understood as an ethical, embodied attunement to human and more-than-human others (Robinson, 2020; Ringrose et al., 2019).The session combines short presentations with facilitated discussion for technology-rich, community-engaged, ecologically-aware music education across different sectors, contributing to debates on transforming the field for social change.Section 1: Pedagogies of belongingThis section builds on Demos’s (2020) concept of hopeful futurity to frame ‘Sounding Pedagogies’ of inclusion: practices of making-with-music that are relational, affective, and attentive to the more-than-human (de Andrade, Burnard et al., 2025). By ‘remattering’ musical materialities (Barad, 2007), these pedagogies link sound, environment, and creativity, foregrounding how shared routines generate resilience and equitable participation.Using assemblages of interconnected community music projects in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, as collective ethnographic entry points, this paper will examine how collective routines and communal activities - through the interplay of material-discursive practices in structures, memories, and shared experiences - contribute to the creation of meaningful social exchanges, stability, and a sense of belonging and becoming. It will show that the benefits of music ‘interventions’ are not solely outcomes from isolated activities, but from the accumulative habits and rituals they affect, offering a new perspective on health as a dynamic process. This reframing invites a transcending of measurement in relation to the impact of music on individual and social wellbeing.Section 2: Digital playgrounds in primary schoolsThis paper presents a digital music education initiative in a UK primary school that explores listening, environment, and place-making. Through sound mapping, field recording, and creative listening workshops in 2025, children engaged with their surroundings as sources of creative inquiry, supported by technologies that enabled process-rich, multimodal outcomes. Findings suggest that such tools can position listening as an active, child-led practice, integrating field recording, psychogeography, and posthuman perspectives into music and place-based learning with young people (Taguchi, 2011). Listening extended beyond the classroom to outdoor explorations, where children created archives and documents of community and self. These activities enhanced creative listening while building technological fluency, ecological awareness, and interdisciplinary connections across science, technology, and the arts. The project demonstrates how accessible technologies can reframe music education as a practice of exploration, representation, and celebration of place-based knowledge.Section 3: Listening to Nature: cross-disciplinary resources for an eco-creative curriculumExamples of action-oriented learning will demonstrate the benefits of merging creative and scientific approaches to listening to nature. Cross-disciplinary resources from two projects (funded by UK Research and Innovation) show how teachers and young people engaged with and reflected on environmental issues through tools integrating listening, technology, science, creativity, and wellbeing. The underpinning research contributed to understanding water quality, soil health, biodiversity, and climate change, while helping to turn eco-anxiety into eco-agency. Working closely with teachers, the resources are designed to support interactive and participatory learning that promotes a whole system approach to education. The outcomes are designed to foster the creative, ecological, and systemic thinkers needed for the future, and to contribute to the holistic, transformative forms of education identified by UNESCO’s Education for Sustainable Development 2030 toolbox.Section 4: Interactive listening tools for music in Higher EducationTechnology can support playful, exploratory music learning, including in higher education, by providing access to rich behind-the-scenes materials from composers and performers -drafts, rehearsal recordings, annotated scores, and commentaries that reveal works in the process of being made (AAA, 2020; BBB, 2010). Students engage with these resources through dynamic, interactive analyses, treating musical works not as fixed artefacts but as evolving sites of inquiry. The platform enables learners to navigate scores, recordings, and visualisations in non-linear ways, fostering collaborative exploration, interpretation, and composition. Findings suggest that such environments cultivate curiosity, agency, and co-production of knowledge, reframing analysis as participatory and improvisatory within higher education music learning.