Table of Contents

New Music Alive Book II: Composition Resources in the Classroom

Lesson Five: Collecting Found Sounds

Strand: Listening and Responding
Strand Units: Exploring sounds, Listening and Responding to Music
Curriculum Objectives:

  • listen to sounds in the environment with an increased understanding
  • explore how to suggest sound pictures
  • listen to his/her own compositions and the compositions of others and evaluate
  • in terms of personal response and expressive qualities examine the effects produced by different instruments

Linkage: Composing - Talking about and recording compositions
Concept Development: pitch, timbre
Integration: ICT
Additional Skills: The practical application of music technology in field work

Listen Back
5 min

Listen back to your class tape piece from the last lesson. Does it sound complete? Is there anything you would like to add or take away? Take a few minutes to finish the piece if you need to.

Discussion
5 min

Once the piece is finished, discuss what you liked about it. What are your favourite bits and why? What worked well? Did anything sound unlike you had expected?

Collecting Found Sounds
30 min

If you have a laptop (or another portable, digital recording device) you can go outside to hunt for "found sounds". With a laptop, it might be easiest to leave Audacity recording as you walk around recording interesting sounds. If you are using smaller recording devices, it might be easier to record each sound individually.
You may choose to shield the microphone from the wind or you may choose to actually record the wind.

What sounds could you record?

  • The squeaking of your feet in the yard?
  • The rattle of the railings?
  • The creaking of a swing?
  • The sounds of children playing?
Can you record your sounds in different ways? In a small box? In a large hall? Moving the microphone nearer and further away from the sound? If you can't leave the classroom, you can find interesting sounds inside the classroom or record sounds the students have brought in from home.

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Lesson Five: Supplementary Notes

Discussion

You may want to take notes from the discussion so the class can continue to draw on what they have learnt.

If you plan on having the students do a lot more music composition over the school year, you might like to start a Class Composition Journal. This can keep track of what ideas they might like to explore in the future and what ideas have worked well in the past. And of course, they can always change their mind! The class can also add to their journal with any scores and recordings that are created during the year.

Collecting Found Sounds

This exercise requires a digital recording device such as a laptop, a digital Dictaphone or even a mobile phone or iPhone. This will allow you to take your recordings back to the classroom and start editing straight away.

Note that a device like a cassette Dictaphone would be of no use in this exercise unless you then have the means to play your recording back into a computer.

A Note on Editing

To make music out of your found sounds you will need to remove all the excess noises from your recording. Listen back to your recording in Audacity and delete everything except the sounds you want keep.

You might like to label each sound before adding any effects. This will help you keep track of which sound is which in case the effects render them unrecognisable! To label sounds in Audacity click "New Label Track" in the "Project" menu. Click on the Label Track next to the sound you want to label and start typing.

ICT Skills

You could do this editing task yourself outside of class time or, if the children have access to computers, they could do it for themselves in computer class.

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