This study examines how digital-enhanced lessons can move beyond technological capacity and instead become a highly transformative act toward emotional engagement, cultural identity, and a sense of satisfaction among educators in ethnic music education. The intervention was implemented and evaluated in the China Conservatory School of Music by integrating traditional practices with modern digital tools utilizing a mixed methods approach. The results show that the intervention has a huge transformative impact on emotional engagement, cultural identity, and satisfaction when compared with the baseline measures (all p < 0.001) (for example, emotional engagement increased from 3.20 ± 0.60 to 4.50 ± 0.70; Cohen’s d = 1.96, p < 0.001). Digital enhanced lessons uniformly outperformed traditional approaches in metrics including greater average platform time (45 ± 10 mins vs. 30 ± 8 mins, p = 0.002) and completion rate (85% vs. 70%, p = 0.003). The results of the thematic analyzes demonstrated that ethnic music is a very rich culture, and was a powerful cultural tool for emotional storytelling, intergenerational learning, and inclusion; adaptive creativity was then the process that combined traditional forms with modern innovation, which preserved relevance and cultural continuity. These findings bring forward a scalable framework for adding ethnic music into a range of educational settings, promoting the interplay between preserving culture and pushing innovation.