Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Functional piano skills constitute a core component of music teacher education, enabling future educators to support classroom instruction through accompaniment, improvisation, harmonic realisation, and adaptive musical interaction. Despite their pedagogical importance, research consistently indicates that these skills are insufficiently developed in many undergraduate curricula, which tend to privilege repertoire-based performance and technical proficiency. At the same time, higher education is increasingly influenced by digital transformation and the emergence of creative technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI). Within this context, flipped learning has gained attention as a pedagogical model that reallocates instructional time and promotes active, student-centered learning. This short research paper presents a critical theoretical review of literature on functional piano skills, flipped learning, and AI-supported music education. By synthesising research from music pedagogy, educational technology, and learning sciences, this paper examines how the integration of AI tools within a flipped learning framework may address persistent challenges in functional piano instruction. This review highlights pedagogical affordances related to self-regulated learning, metacognitive development, and motivation while also considering limitations and research gaps. This paper positions this synthesis as a theoretical foundation for future empirical research in undergraduate music teacher education,whose preliminary results will be presented at the conference.