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.
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?
“Children should copy first and understand later”.
This statement from a well-meaning but pushy parent was one of the big factors which drove me to start Rhythm Circle.
About 5 years ago, I was struggling to engage with a new transfer student – a 5 year old boy who had a very poor understanding of musical elements despite having had a year’s worth of piano lesson.
I explained to his mother that I would like to spend some time helping her son gain had a better understanding of musical elements and notation instead of pushing on with pure pianistic skills. However, she disagreed strongly, and insisted that I taught him the piano by rote, saying “Children should copy first and understand later”.
This was immediately abhorrent to me as a teacher and as a parent: how could we hope to raise a new generation of critical thinkers if we began by bludgeoning and disrespecting the natural intellect and learning capacity of a child?
She was not entirely wrong, however. Children ARE natural and curious parrots – I suppose it is part of their survival instinct to copy the actions of their grown-ups.
But educators and parents can do so much more to channel that natural instinct whilst nurturing the child’s intellectual faculties at the same time. The learning journey does NOT need to be dumbed down just because the learner is a child. This sentiment is felt strongly by Zoë Challenor , the founder director or B’Opera and a working partner on the Digital Games Project.
Zoë Challenor , in a performance of A Winter’s Tale, an opera specially created for babies and toddlers.
The incident with the pushy parent drove me to think about how I could encourage children to engage more with music: not just as operators of an instrument, but as curious explorers who WANTED to understand every aspect of sound.
Music is organised sound. There are several different
elements which work together to create music. A small child experiencing the
world is constantly bombarded with a constant influx of information. He/she
learns gradually how to filter out less interesting or less important bits and
to focus on specific elements.
For a young child, sound exploration is no different to….
….mud exploration!
To promote concentration amongst my youngest students, I embraced some commonly used concepts in Early Years education. One of the most useful was the Montessori practice of ‘isolation of quality’. This meant eliminating all other elements apart from the one which you wanted the child to learn. Very useful for children who are easily distracted as it promotes focus.
This idea was incredibly helpful in my work with
neurodiverse children: one of the common characteristics shared by those who
have learning differences is that they experience sensory overload, and do not
have the ability to filter out less important information.
Isolation of quality : only blue plastic milk bottle caps which are identical in size and shape have been used. The only different element present is visual: the note value symbols
Whilst recording musical examples for the Rhythm Circle Digital Games Project, this meant recording the same piece of music played in different ways to demonstrate the difference between loud and quiet instead of two different pieces of music which demonstrated the same thing. This was particularly important as chords are often mistakenly associated with loud music and single notes with quietness.
When choosing shapes to use in Dynamic Dots, a graphic score activity , this meant using different sizes of a single shape , colour and material. The size of that shape is the single changing element which corresponded to the ‘size’ of a sound.
Learning by exploratory play was also another idea from Early Years education which was particularly useful. For me, this concept kicked of the creation of many musical games and activities (e.g musical versions of Bingo, Tic Tac Toe, Bowling).
Scientists tell us that when knowledge or skills have recently been learnt, new neural pathways are created in the brain. Repetition of that knowledge strengthens the pathways and aids long term retention. Since, children find games and activities fun they will want to keep repeating those games. So musical games REALLY help learners retain music knowledge !
B’Opera’s presence and support in this project has been a strong reminder about respecting the learning journeys of our youngest members of society – both in the depth and breadth of experiences offered to them. So many neurodiverse children have delayed learning and it is crucial that the Digital Games Project understands how to leverage good Early Childhood working practices to support their learning.
In the next blog, I will be charting my digital working partnership with Trifort Solutions.
Exploring a box zither – what sound would you get if you plucked the strings?
It is said that children are natural scientists who have a natural urge to explore and experiment.
We have been exploring the world of string instruments this term at the Rhythm Circle Virtual Music Club. Part of that exploration involved making our own string instrument and you can’t get any simpler than a box zither – twangy rubber bands stretched over a box.
This was a lovely sensory thing to do and completely engaging. The children tried out different ways of playing it – plucking, hitting, strumming the strings. If you hold it on your cheek, the vibrations of the strings and box make a lovely buzz which you can feel on your skin.
We tuned it to get three different sounds – low, medium and high pitches (older children might want to try tuning them to a musical scale). Dots marked on the rubber bands were a useful visual aid: you could see that the dots were moved closer to the edge of the box when the rubber bands were stretched. It made it a lot easier to see how much stretching was needed to produce higher pitches.
No need to go out and start buying materials. Empty plastic ice-cream tubs and boxes from the recycling bins would get you started off. Smaller rubber bands can be stretched over the short end of the boxes instead and coloured ones will differentiate the rubber bands tuned to different pitches.
If chocolate was a sound, what music would it make?
It dawned on me a few years ago, that when I teach almost all my metaphors are food-based. Food is one of my great weaknesses. Might have something to do with growing up in Malaysia, a society well-known for being food-obsessed. We talk a lot about food, eating, flavours, cooking, and cuisines!
Food is something we all need and have experienced all our lives. So whether you enjoy it or not, flavours and textures of food are something our senses understand.
Last week, I was searching for a way to help a piano student who was struggling to interpret and make sense of musical dynamics in particular piece of music. Two sections were clearly marked ‘quiet’ and ‘loud’ but all he was able to do was to mechanically produce two different volumes without understanding WHY the music demanded it.
I suggested that he played the sections again and asked “What food do these sections of music make you think of?”. Instantly, the light bulb went off. He pointed to the section which had a prominent bass tune and said “Lamb curry….maybe mutton. Something rich with gravy”. The other section with all tunes high up in the treble was ” Light and bubbly…like lemon sherbet or champagne?”
And just like that, he wanted to show off a light sparkly sound in the ‘quiet’ section and the ‘loud’ section took on a full-bodied tone.
So…. back to my original question. If chocolate was a sound what music would it make? I think of cellos and French horns as ‘chocolatey’ sounds. Coffee is Latin American music: wakes me up and makes me happy.
Brejeiro – one of my favourite pieces by Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth
