Every Wednesday we’ll be adding a new #MidweekMusic activity for you to do at home or in school. You’ll find all the help and resource you need by clicking the folders below, and you can share your responses with us too!
Week 5: Composing Music
IntroductionWarm UpMain ActivityExtension 1Extension 2Cool Down
Exploring Sounds and Creating Graphic Scores
Making up our own music is a great way to explore how we feel, and enables us to tell a story about what’s going on in our lives. This week we are going to explore all the different sounds we can make on our instruments or using our bodies and create some graphic score symbols to represent them.
Use the Chrome Lab spectrogram tool to investigate how different sounds can be reflected as different shapes and colours. Click on the mic button to input your own sounds – experiment with different voice and body percussion sounds, instruments if you have them or even everyday objects like pencils and paper.
Open Chrome Music Lab
In music when we write instructions for playing music it’s called a score. Some scores look like this:
Other scores use pictures and symbols to tell us which sounds to make. This is called a graphic score.
Here’s an example of a graphic score for a piece of music called ‘Kitchen Noises’!
See if you can follow the score while you listen.
Hear Kitchen Noises See Kitchen Noises
Look at these symbols. How would you make a sound that reflects that symbol?
- Experiment with your voices, body percussion or instruments.
- Is it high, low, quiet, loud, short, long, sharp or soft?
- A few different notes or just one?
Now it’s time to make your own graphic score
- Draw, colour or cut out four symbols, words or shapes. If you are stuck for ideas, think of a theme: try cartoon noises or emoticon faces.
- Decide what sound you are going to make for each symbol. Practise them in different orders and decide on a final sequence. Are you going to repeat any sounds? How will you know how long each sound is going to be? What will the ending be like? Draw or stick your symbols on a piece of paper in the order you have decided and add any other details.
- Finally – perform your piece! You could use the backing track in this video to add a pulse (steady beat) to your music – or you could keep it totally free.
Have a look at some more examples of graphic scores.
Graphic ScoresChoose one of the scores to perform yourself – decide what sound you will make for each symbol. Here’s a good one to try:
Wiggles and SquigglesAsk someone else to perform your graphic score.
Think about what instructions or information they might need. You could create a key like in ‘Kitchen Noises’.
How does it sound different?
Can you perform the music using different instruments and sounds?