Spanner Glockenspiel Workshops

Making your own musical instrument is a fun way to explore sound. Recently, I introduced students at the Folville Summer Music Camp to Spanner Glockenspiels. The Spark Arts organised these lovely music sessions and were brilliantly supported by the staff of Folville Junior School in Leicester.

The same workshop was delivered to two groups:

  • 22 students in Years 2 and 3
  • 18 students in Years 4 – 6

We got into our musical groove with a drumming session on Folville’s marvellous collection of djembes. As an introduction to graphic scores, students were asked to compare loud/quiet sounds and to choose shapes which represented them. Students was invited to create a pattern of loud/quiet sounds using foam circles and we all played their compositions.  I was particularly impressed with the excellent musical discipline and ensemble work shown by the older students.

Next, we discussed how sounds could be made using a spanner (tapping , knocking, scraping on various surfaces). I demonstrated the sound made by a suspended spanner when it was tapped firmly with another spanner. The clear chiming sound and extra resonance it produced caught the attention of the students. We then compared the sounds of two different spanners, concluding that one was higher than the other and used coloured stickers to identify the spanners which made high/low sounds.

After a quick tutorial on how to assemble the spanner glockenspiel, each student assembled their own instrument. Most students found that their constructs were rather wobbly. Some came up with clever ideas to stabilise their instruments by stretching a third pair of rubber band at right angles to the other two pairs.

The students recorded their ideas using a simple pitch graphic score with coloured stickers to differentiate the pitch of their spanners. The older students added different musical elements to their graphic scores:

This graphic score included timbres. Squiggly lines = scraping sounds, coloured circles= tapping sounds. 
Another student chose to add rhythms: brown circles  for high pitched spanner and long sounds, blue circles for low pitched spanner and short sounds.
Pitch and Dynamics : loud= big circle, quiet = small circle

One student traced and coloured in the shape of his spanners to decorate his graphic score

The workshop ended with some musical colouring and a few rounds of musical bingo.

If you would like to have a go at making your own spanner glockenspiel, you will need :

  • some spanners
  • a sturdy box (square or rectangular biscuit tins, or wooden boxes / trays. Sturdy cardboard boxes will also be fine as long as they can hold their shape. Plastic takeaway boxes are another good option)
  • 4 big rubber bands
  • a variety of beaters.Any metal/wood/ felt/rubber/silicone-tipped kitchen implements tend to be perfect for sound exploration. I use chopsticks, table knives, silicone spatulas, and pencils.

I prefer to use recycled / found materials to make  these instruments. It encourages sound explorers to adopt a more informal can-do approach to music making, and helps them think of creative uses for things in their everyday environment.

To make the spanner glockenspiel:

Step 1. Collect lots of old interesting spanners. The old fashioned heavy ones are the best as they create the nicest sounds. The Reusers in Sutton Coldfield is one of  my go-to place to stock up on spanners  for Rhythm Circle workshops. It took me 2 visits over 2 years to acquire 40-45 spanners of just the right kind.

  • Before…
  • ….and after the ‘Spanner Spa’ treatment

Step 2. If you need to clean your spanners, soak them in some mild acid and dish-drops to shift the rust and grime (you don’t need industrial strength acid bath for the job. In a pinch, Coca Cola or vinegar will do). Soak the spanners in the acidic solution for a couple of hours, then scrub them to remove more rust and grime. Best tools seem to be a steel mesh scrubber and toothbrush to clean the little grooves and hard-to-reach places. 

Step 3. Dry the spanners and rub lightly with oil to prevent further rusting. Skin-friendly oils are preferable as the spanners will be handled by little hands. I used Johnsons’ baby oil, but plain cooking oil will also work.

Step 4. Now for the fun bit! Stretch 2 rubber bands around your box and keep them bunched up together. Tuck one end of a spanner in between the rubber bands. Repeat with the other two rubber bands and tuck the other end of the spanner in. Before putting a second spanner into your rubber band cradle, twist each rubber band around the other one in its pair. This will tighten the rubber bands around the first spanner to stop it from wobbling in its cradle.

Step5. Tap spanners with a beater. Metal-tipped beaters give a clearer bell-like sound and wooden/soft-tipped beaters make a muted sound.

You can group the spanners in sets which are in tune with itself – they don’t need to be arranged according to concert pitch tuning. For younger students, I normally start with 2 spanners:  one high-pitched and one low- pitched. 

To extend learning, you can add more spanners of different pitches to explore more complex pitch patterns, or introduce different musical elements. Older students can be challenged to arrange a bunch of random spanners by pitch order, or to compose tunes which they can play on their spanner glockenspiels.

Enjoy!

Sensory Music: Exploring the sensory and well-being aspects of music

“What part of your body did you use to experience music?”

It is always a pleasure to explore a Rhythm Circle pet topic and one of my favourites is the multi-sensory aspects and benefits of music.

For the second year now, I’ve had the privilege of introducing this aspect of Rhythm Circle work to doctors of the future. At the University of Leicester, 3rd year medical students who chose the SSC Disability and the Arts module spend several weeks with the Attenborough Arts Centre learning how art in its myriad forms support people with special needs.

  • Composing music for spanner glockenspiels

This year’s intrepid medical cohort rose to the challenge by assembling, playing and composing music for spanner glockenspiels and balloon drums. They used a simple graphic score to capture ideas about sound patterns and this led explorations of different playing techniques (tapping, glissandi and different ways of combining different pitches.

Simple graphic scores capture ideas about sound patterns – each coloured dot represents a different spanner. Each team had slightly different ideas – we even had performance directions to use specific beaters (1st score at the top) and glissandi was represented by a dots played in rapid succession vertically (4th score from the top).

We concluded that the experience of making, playing and composing music involved many parts of the body, not only the ears and fingers, but also eyes, skin, and brains.

Many thanks to the fabulous Marianne Pape and the Attenborough Arts Centre for hosting the annual event.

Talking about Timbre


Timbre is a musical element which describes the quality of a sound.

You could describe a sound in terms of pitch / intensity / duration / whether or not it had a repeated pattern but also in terms of its timbre (clanking / rasping / chiming / thudding / buzzing / metallic etc. sound). Interestingly, this musical element can be simultaneously easy and difficult to articulate with words depending on one’s vocabulary and life experience.

We use lots of onomatopoeic words (zoom, bang, whoosh, hiss, etc… words whose sound matches the sound of they describe) to describe sounds found in everyday life. So it can be just a little step to apply these words to music.

Commonly used onomatopoeic words. What is your favourite?


This summer, Rhythm Circle’s Musical Holiday Club ended with a workshop on Timbre. We explored sounds which you could make using the human body (no rude sounds allowed!). Cue lots of foot stomping/ clapping / finger and tongue clicking / hair swishing. What made a ‘tap’ different to a ‘boom’? How could you make whispery sounds without using your voice?

Vocal sounds were great fun and led into a discussion about how a face might look when producing a particular sound. It was great spelling practice for the students to write down their lists of sounds.


In the RC workshop, two different groups of students used Rebecca Rochelle’s poem ‘Fireworks’ to create a musical soundscape. The poem consisted of words which described the sound of fireworks. The students explored and demonstrated ways to create sounds which matched each word. We discovered that ‘zoom’ seemed to inspire movement, and everyone unanimously agreed that ‘whizz’ was the hardest one to demonstrate.

Good Vibrations: Listening with your skin

Last week, I had a multi-sensory music playdate with Tim Baker, resident musician at Sense TouchBase Pears. This was my first visit to the beautiful West Midlands hub of the charity Sense which supports people with complex disabilities.


From his music studio at Sense TouchBase Pears, Tim runs music sessions for people with special needs. I had ‘music cave’ envy – this was heaven for a multi-sensory sound junkie like me.

Tim’s collection ranged from traditional instruments (guitars, drums, xylophone bars, bell chimes, rain stick, shakers) to digital equipment which enables users to feel amplified sound vibrations (SUB-PAC and vibrating floor) and an awesomely cool Om wand.

  • Om Wand – every kid needs one!

It looks like a kite frame with a very thin, clear wide rubber band stretched around it (like the kind you find on invisible straps in clothes) You swish this around in the air and it makes a low sound like a lightsaber.

The vibrating floor and SUBPAC were a revelation – best experienced with ear defenders to minimise sound coming in through your ears.

As a musician, I know that sound is produced by vibrations – in guitars, the strings vibrate and is amplified by the body of the instrument. In a drum, the stretched skin of the drum vibrates, etc. But this was the first time I’ve ever experienced the vibrational qualities of music mainly through my skin instead of my ears. Eureka moment!

  • Ear defenders make the SUBPAC experience MUCH better

The SUBPAC is basically a subwoofer attached to a backpack which fits snugly against the users back. If you play music through it, the user experiences music as vibrations. Low sounds are felt most clearly, but higher tones have their own buzz too.

  • Tim Baker sitting on his vibrating floor
  • Hidden subwoofer under the floor


The vibrating floor is a specially commissioned piece built by Bria and Nathan at GROOVE . It is essentially a subwoofer attached to the underside of a wooden platform. Tim says “I got the inspiration at the “Aural Diversity Conference in 2019, and Luke (Woodbury) from DotLib lent his insight and experience from building the one used then”. You can stand, sit or lie down on the floor to experience the vibrations music channelled through the wood. I even played the piano on it – barefoot with ear defenders to enhance the experience. After a few minutes of using the vibrating floor, my skin began to tingle. When I took the ear defenders off and stepped off the vibrating floor, my skin felt hypersensitive and continued bringing me sensations from every sound in the room including our voices.

There is a very useful toolkit on the Sense TBP website with great suggestions for trying out sound and vibration activities on your own.

If you’ve never visited it, I highly recommend dropping in to the beautiful and inclusive space which is Sense TouchBase Pears. There is a cafe adjoining the Selly Oak library, community classes, outdoor seating areas, and co-working spaces.

Developing My Creative Practice: Rebecca Rochelle

Cross-disciplinary art: exploring words and music with Rebecca Rochelle

Kindred spirits are hard to come by, but I recently found one in my new mentor Rebecca Rochelle.  

In 2021, Arts Council England gave me the chance to delve into some long over-due professional development via their Developing Your Creative Practice grant.

Rebecca is a writer/actor who introduced me to the various techniques she uses in workshops with young children. I was delighted to discover that we had a common belief in offering children a rich artistic diet and in teaching through exploratory play.

Musicians use a lot of descriptive words – not just the standard descriptions like high, low, fast, slow, loud, quiet but also words like swooping, sticky, oozy, crunchy, dark, bright, sparkly, grumpy. Those who have a good vocabulary tend to have more confidence in sharing their musical ideas.

So my initial discussions with Rebecca centred on ways to help young children build a rich vocabulary: using visual aids for pre-readers, onomatopoeic words, acrostic poems, creating ‘word banks’, different techniques of writing poetry.

Music and Words

Visualising musical elements

Music can be such an abstract thing, lacking in concrete visual elements. Once it has been presented, it is gone unless you capture it in some form of notation or sound recording.

One of the best ways to teach the musical element of rhythm is to use the long/short sounds present in spoken word. Children acquire a spoken vocabulary before they can read or write and are quick to catch on to the rhythms of different words.

For slightly older children, one of my favourite activities to explore words and music is by using haiku – the evocative but minimalist way of writing poetry which had its roots in Japan. In using haiku as a creative stimulus, I chose not to follow the strict rules of each line having 5, 7 and 5 syllables but adopted instead the spirit of the poetic form which used words sparingly to conjure different moods.

This haiku was composed by F, my 8 year old student. It was about her recent summer holiday activities:

rainy cliffs
train to castle
ice cream!

F clapped the rhythm of her haiku. I asked her how she could use familiar musical notes (semibreves, crotchets, minims, quavers) to represent the duration of each syllable in her words. She experimented for a while and wrote down her ideas. Suddenly she exclaimed “Look each line adds up to a different number of counts!” Cue excited scribbling of time signatures…

Next, F chose different instruments to play her rhythms: the triangle to represent the sound of raindrops, fast drum beats to show the excitement of the speeding train, and slow piano notes to describe her memory of savouring an ice cream.

Graphic Score Love

After exploring the concept of articulation (smooth and ‘spiky’ sounds) one of our young students S surprised us with this graphic score which she created entirely on her own.


She explained that “They each make different noises. The red one makes smooth sounds, the orange one makes the loudest sound. Yellow makes spiky”. S drew triangles in different colours to represent her ideas.


The idea that there are different types of sounds can be a very abstract one. Most young children find it helpful to visualise their understanding of how a particular sound can be different to another.


The symbols we use for articulation then simply become another way of ‘writing down’ sounds – this time using lines: a curved line for smooth and joined sounds (legato), dots for short separated sounds (staccato), and a wedge for accents.

Artist in Residence

Reflections on online workshops delivered to young people with special needs.

A pivotal moment in my inclusive work came along recently in the form of a residency  at the Attenborough Arts Centre’s BBC Children in Need’s Inclusive Youth Arts Programme (IYAP). I led a monthly multi-sensory online music workshop called Sound Play for young people with special needs.

Challenges

When I was invited to take up this role, my first thoughts were about how to offer young people with learning needs a meaningful musical experience. It seemed important to create a sophisticated musical experience that would support their well-being, invite active participation, and offer them ways to develop and explore their musical interests.

The IYAP workshops stretched me:

– to expanded my understanding of what it means to have different learning needs, how wide those range of needs can be, and the best ways to support them

– to develop new musical resources which would suit a variety of needs and ages. In the same workshop, there would be participants ranging from those with limited mobility to those with ADHD. It was quite a challenge to produce an activity pack which could  1.) be posted out easily 2.) be safe to handle 3.) would interest both a 3 year old as well as an 18 year old

– to sustain engagement and promote musical exploratory play in online sessions. Pacing of the 60 min sessions was important – should I move on to the next activity, or allow more time for exploration? In participant-led sessions, what happens if one group wanted to move on and another group wanted to explore?

Cardboard Guiro
Cardboard Guiro – a multi-sensory way to explore timbre and rhythm. Tracing different lines and shapes result in different rhythms

Building bridges

Being able to address the same core group of young people and their families repeatedly became a highlight of the programme.

  • there was time to get to know the families who showed me how they adapted my ideas to better address their young person’s needs.
  • repeated engagement with the IYAP families enabled me to recognise meaningful responses:  in inclusive sessions, it is not uncommon to get what looks like a lukewarm response from an attendee. In actual fact, this could turn out to be quite a profound response from the young person in question. Unless you knew how they normally responded, this could easily have been dismissed as disinterest.
  • these sessions were ideal to fine-tune new resources and approaches. A young person who might offer indifferent response to an activity, might become quite animated and responsive when the same activity is presented in a different way – instant feedback about what methods worked and what didn’t.

Support from the AAC

All good online experiences tend to come with good support. Having had to deliver other workshops entirely on my own, I was very lucky to have the support of Hannah Pillai (IYAP Project Coordinator). Her insights, experience and enthusiasm underpinned successful deliveries of every Sound Play workshop. It was especially useful to have another pair of eyes and ears on board to keep things on track. Thank you, Hannah!

Beyond IYAP

Other areas of my work were enriched by my IYAP experience:

  • I headed a team on the Digital Games Project to create online musical games for neurodiverse young people. The IYAP residency gave me early first- hand experience of addressing this audience remotely. I was able to test out some of the resources created during IYAP workshops –the playdough video and activity to explore musical tempo was especially popular. We also tried out a 3D version of Dynamic Dots activity using big /small pom-poms to represent loud/quiet sounds (hint: if you do try this at home, really big glue dots work best to stop the pom-poms from flying off your worktop).
A graphic score made using pom-poms
Dynamic Dots graphic score made with pom-poms
  • Most of my piano students are fairly happy learning with ‘mainstream’ teaching approaches. Others have specific learning needs and learn best in their own unique ways. But all of them were far more engaged in their musical learning when I incorporated lessons learnt from the IYAP residency.

Rhythm Circle Digital Games Project – Part 3

Digitizing Rhythm Circle – a long and twisty road from analogue to digital

‘I want big buttons and no clutter’ was the quick / panicked answer I gave to my long-suffering digital consultant who asked what I wanted in the digital versions of my RC games.

Before we began this project , I was already using digital ‘quick wins’ – simple ways of digitising my teaching resources e.g. downloadable pdfs, audio and video explainers. These digitised resources helped me reach out to my students in remote lessons, and circumvented the vagaries of dodgy internet connections. But I still delivered the lessons live and in-person albeit remotely.

The Digital Games project forced me to contemplate digitising my business processes. As a music educator, this meant digitising my teaching methods – an important consideration for this project because I, the teacher would not be with the students to guide them through the games or check their answers.

How would I introduce a musical concept? How would I provoke thought and experimentation? Make corrections?

A fun way to familiarise students with musical symbols .

In Musical Sudoku, the processes we wrestled with involved pedagogical choices: should players be allowed to put down wrong answers? Should the programme make auto-corrections to wrong answers or should the player analyse and correct their own mistakes?

The teacher in me valued the process of self-correction and so Wayne, our digital consultant designed the game programme to allow the player to fill in the game board with any symbols chosen from the menu. The programme would automatically highlight wrong answers – this made it easy to take note of where the wrong answers were. But the programme will not tell a player what the correct answer should be.

In Dynamic Dots the process is much simpler: the game programme was designed to prompt players step-by-step to create a simple graphic score.

Big or Small? A Dynamic Dots ‘game board’ prompting the player to choose a size to make a pattern .

Digitising working processes can be expensive: Trifort Solutions advised me on the best value-for-money digitisation I could achieve with a tiny pot of funds:

  • Automation was necessary to allow users to generate new and different game boards for Musical Sudoku – something thing which raised a cheer amongst my Sudoku-fiend students . LOTS and LOTS of new Musical Sudoku boards to be had at the press of a button!
  • Good digital design was always a priority so we spent lots of time in this area: to support users with visual processing disorders, the game ‘boards’ were designed with an emphasis on clean, clutter-free displays and large buttons (I did mean it!). Only small amounts of information are shown in an organised fashion.   High-contrast visuals are used and backgrounds are lightly tinted to remove the usual glare from stark white screens.

For other digitisation options, I used open-sourced software which was either free or very affordable:

  • Audacity to edit sound samples
  • Inkscape to create better pdfs using vector graphics which scaled beautifully without losing their sharpness (instead of enlarging picture files)
  • Animaker to edit and produce live capture / cartoon video explainers

We are now nearing the end of the project and my thought to share with anyone looking to digitise their work is this:

  • think about the whole user’s experience from beginning to end and beyond. Not just the person who is your average Jane, but also users who have different needs.
  • think about your working processes and define it: how and why do you do things? Digitising your working processes will most certainly help you work with more efficiency and clarity.

More importantly ….. just have a go! It could be anything from live capture of audio samples, creating your first pdf worksheet / video explainer, signing up for your first CRM (customer relationship management) system.

Whatever you choose to digitise and however you choose to do it , your first attempts at digitisation might not be perfect but it is so worthwhile to try. I thought I’d learn loads about digital working – and I have, but I also far more about Wai Sum Chong – the teacher, the musician and the person.

Graphic Scores

Accessible and inclusive music notation

What do you do when you have time on your hands and a glut of tomatoes? Make a tomato graphic score, of course!

Last summer during the 2020 Covid pandemic, my little veg patch produced an abundance of 3 different varieties of tomatoes, little Sungold cherry tomatoes, big fat Mallorcan ones, and some random ones which self-seeded from previous years’ crops.

I laid the semi-ripe tomatoes out in the sun to hasten ripening and amused myself making little impromptu graphic scores. Musical doodling using fruit.

  • Polyphony – multiple layers of sound, with a pattern of loud and quiet sounds.
  • Pitch – highs and lows
  • Crescendo and Diminuendo – sound gradually getting louder, then quieter

Graphic scores  are a way of ‘writing down’ sounds .

They are a very accessible, creative and intuitive way to record and share ideas about sound: a non-conventional form of music notation. Different musical meanings can be assigned to shapes, colours, and lines or simply left to the interpretation of the player.

You can use anything to create graphic scores. I have tried sand (real, kinetic, edible), cardboard, bottle caps, vegetables, sticks and stones, leaves, flowers, pasta shapes, shells, even scrunched up balls of paper.

Runner beans are very useful vegetables. Different lengths represent different durations of sound
Pumpkin pulse! 3 beats in a bar represented in pumpkin form.

Graphic scores are very useful to children with special needs because we can tailor a graphic score to meet the needs of that individual.  You can make ones which can be contained within reach for people with restricted mobility or spread out over a wide area to promote movement for those who crave kinaesthetic input. Those who find deep pressure calming may like graphic scores made out of playdough which they can knead and form into shapes.

A 3D graphic score made from building blocks. Each knob is 1 count and blank spaces represent musical silences.

It allows children who have limited mobility, are non-verbal / speech-delayed / pre-literate  to express and share their ideas about sound and music. Visually-impaired learners are able to feel textures in 3D graphic scores and ‘read’ musical ideas much like they do with Braille text.

Pitch sirening activity - if you're handy with a hot glue gun, these coloured glue squiggles are very satisfying to trace and vocalise.
Tactile coloured squiggles (made with a hot glue gun) are very satisfying to trace whilst using vocal pitch to match the rise and fall of the line.

Although they are primarily visual and/or tactile, enticing possibilities are there to develop associations  with scent or taste as part of a more multi-sensory experience. For example:

            a spiral shape + lemon scent = fast music (whirlwind)

            a blobby shape + cinnamon = slow, chilled-out music

I can just feel a baking session coming on… flavoured cookie dough for making edible graphic scores, anyone?