Music: Organising Sound

Today’s music class was on organising sound. It started off, with us hearing the “Rainforest” by B’ttuta.  We closed our eyes and tried to conjure the pictures that were painted in our minds with the music. Surprisingly, the picture I got in my mind was of the rains and the forests. I have never tried this exercise before and was astonished by the ease with which the music made me think of the forests and the rain.

This is an excellent exercise for the children to learn about the power of music to evoke our imagination and senses. For the first time since our music classes started, I found myself enthusing about using music in my classroom to engage my students in learning various topics. Students can listen to the music a few times to familiarise themselves with it and make a clearer picture in their minds. As an extension to this activity, students can be asked to listen to the music to try and name the various musical instruments that are used in it. Students can try to understand how effectively certain types of sound can summon certain kind of images, memories and feelings to our mind. After multiple listening, as part of this exercise, students can be asked to write a story or paint a picture that comes to mind based on the music.

Soundscapes- Creating story with sounds

Another fascinating topic that was covered today was the concept of creating stories with sounds. The following diagram tells the story of journey in a train (work sample done with the theme ‘Transport’: Stage 1) with a beginning and end with 4 or 5 interesting events in between. Each of these events, the travelling sound and the motion of the train can be accompanied by a sound. Starting from the station (whistle), train travels, through a railway crossing (triangle), over a bridge with birds flying above (two different notes on a xylophone, past a grazing cow (cow bell), up the hill and down the hill (using xylophone), until it ends at a station (whistle).

 

                                                        Soundscape of a train Journey

Students can be asked to create their own story with a beginning and end, with events in between. They can illustrate their story as above, and then add sounds that can invoke the image in the illustration. This activity can be a fun way for students to explore various instruments as there are no wrong choices they can make with the sound, just more apt choices of instruments to make sound.
 

 

Soundscape of an ocean environment

The above diagram is an alternative to the traditional musical notation that can be used to engage children. The waves can be represented by a continuous sound, star fish a dainty, radiant sound like the one made by a triangle, the tentacle movement of octopus can be depicted using a tambourine etc.
The soundscape our team created today was about “Getting caught in the rain”. It depicted the story of a person walking home in the evening in a city. Soon the rain starts falling (first gently then pick up the tempo), and thunder strikes, he takes shelter in a café, waiting there until the storm abate before leaving the café. We captured the sounds of the walk(tambour), traffic in the city(horn, oral sounds), rush of feet to escape the rain (tambour), rain, thunder(cymbals, big drum),café door entrance (finger cymbal), café murmur and chat(maraca), clinking of cutlery(triangle) etc to tell our story.

Image: ‘Getting caught in the rain’ soundscape

Music in literature

Next we explored the possibility of using music in literature through a story book Three Billy goats gruff. We read the book and thought about the various sound effects we could add to the movements and actions of the characters. (Eg.3 billy goats hoof beats by using 3 different sizes of the drum or 2 tone wooden block, paper crinkling to capture the sounds of goats chewing etc.)

We also looked at the possibilities of exploring beat and rhythm through rap. This is what we came up with :

Sitting in music class trying to write a rap
Thinking that we’re clever and this should be a snap
We know that we can sound just as good as the herd
But it is just so tough tryin’ to find the right word

So, today’s lesson (my favourite lesson so far) was full of possibilities that I could use in a classroom and the definite potential of music in engaging with various KLA’s .