Week 1: Visit to Dromore Road PS – music-making and exploring sound

Well the sun was shining today as I travelled from Dublin to the Dromore Road Primary School. My class are a combination of P2 and P3 so there is a variety of ages, ranging from 5 to 7 year olds. And what a lovely group I am working with.

We spent a lot of time chatting at the start and getting to know each other. Over the course of our collaboration, we will be exploring sound and music in every way possible – listening, composing, making instruments, performing – using different materials and ways to do so. Using the software may or may not prove to help or hinder our process but I’m certainly a little apprehensive about how sound can translate across the medium. It will be interesting to explore the way it translates. With that in mind, I thought it would be really good to visit in person and spend time introducing some ways of listening and talking about sound. This introduction will hopefully serve to present techniques that might be used when I’m not physically in the classroom.

So, we first looked at the ways our bodies can make sound. We spent a bit of time with our fingers in our ears, listening to our heartbeat, pulse and the blood flowing around our body. Then we tried to copy the sound using words and sounds we can make with our mouths.

Ba-dom, ba-dom, ba-dom.

Bom, bom, bom.

[There were some squeaks too!]

Everybody got an opportunity to perform the sound that their heartbeat makes. Some heartbeats are WAY louder than others. And the different sounds are both funny and really interesting. We split up into 2 groups and performed our heartbeats, which was great fun.

Then we started trying out other sounds that can be made using our mouths.

Brrrrrrr.
Squeak.
Whistles.
Wheeee.
AWWW.

(…….and many more ensued).

And then onto our hands and feet talked about how we can clap and stamp our feet. At this point, we started looking at performing as a large group and how we might use our clapping and stamping to keep us all making the same sound at the same time. This can be really challenging once a lot of people start playing together. It’s really important to understand the role of the conductor and to listen. Everyone was really great at counting 1,2,3,4 and staying together. By now we had built up quite a collection of possible sounds that we can make. We divided into 4 groups and each group chose a particular sound. We used the count [1,2,3,4] to keep us all together and took turns at playing as a group or doing solo performances.

For our next activity, it was time to take a well-deserved rest and a good opportunity to focus on listening. It was a good time to start moving away from the body sounds and listen carefully to what was in the room. This practice is great for calming the mind and gathering energy. While the children had their eyes closed (most of them!), I did a performance using a sweeping brush and any other objects that I could find in the room. The children were well able to identify the objects I had used and where they were in the room. We also spent time listening carefully for any sounds that were outside the room. So, our palette of sounds was steadily growing and growing over the morning.

The school has a lovely big bank of instruments that were sitting waiting to be played. So, we then moved onto trying out our performance techniques using instruments. We broke into 4 groups again and had a triangle group, a drum group, a guido group and a shaker group. This time we all took turns at doing a short solo.

So, today we covered a lot of musical language and spent a lot of time making music. See you all on Britain’s Got Talent!!

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