The Music Learning Profiles Project: Let's Take This Outside uses ethnographic techniques and modified case studies to profile musicians active in a wide range of musical contexts not typically found in traditional music education settings. The book illuminates diverse music learning practices in order to impact music education in classrooms. It goes on to describe the Music Learning Profiles Project, a group of scholars dedicated to developing techniques to explore music learning, which they call "flash study analysis."

Twenty musicians were interviewed, invited to talk about what they do, how they learned to do it, and prompted to:

The Music Learning Profiles Project offers a nuanced understanding of the myriad approaches to music learning that have emerged in the early part of the twenty-first century.