I have never met a child who didn’t absolutely love and adore making sound. Have you? Sound is communication, language, dialogue, expression and listening. Silence is the quiet empty space around sound where a sound ends and another begins, a place to pause, take a breath, or emphasise sound through absence.
Just think of all the things that we can do with sound! We can make it high or low in pitch, loud or soft in volume, long or short in duration, and anywhere in between. We can make sound alone or collaborate with others. We can blend all kinds of sounds and timbres together in a myriad of different ways. We can conduct sound by gesture, draw a picture that serves as a road map for how to sound it out, or simply discuss how we want the sounds that we make to overlap and interact with each other as they unfold through time. And none of these activities requires any special skills or abilities.
It is best to simplify sound down to its absolute essence: pitch, volume and duration. Only after you and your students are playing with sound and silence daily, several times a day, will the other two core elements of sound – texture, and how it is performed – whether freely, or within a recognisable beat, pattern or tempo – come into play.
Definitions
Pitch: The pitch of sound pertains to whether it is high like a whistle or birds chirping, or low like the roar of a lion, and anywhere in between.
Volume: How quiet or loud a sound is. Does it stay at the same level of volume? Does it begin quietly and get louder? Does it start loud and get quieter? Does it do both? Can your students make controlled, deliberate sounds at three different levels of volume: quiet, medium, loud? Can they make controlled sounds that get both louder and quieter, and in any combination?
Duration/length: How long the duration of the sound lasts. Is it long and sustained like a race-car driver revving a car’s engine, or short in duration like a single hand clap?
Quick focus warm-up: 15- to 45-second call and response
- Without speaking, begin clapping your hands. Start out slowly, then clap faster and faster. Clap softly and then loudly. Stop for a second or two and begin again. Try to clap fast and keep the volume soft. Clap slowly, but make each clap loud.
- Now rub your hands slowly, then faster and faster. Clap once and stop. Stomp a foot. Clap three times and stop. Mix it up between rubbing, clapping, stomping and patting.
- Change things up with all kinds of sounds – stomping, patting, vocalising, calling out silly syllables, crazy sounds, scat singing. Incorporate different levels of volume, etc.
- Once your students become familiar with the warm-up, each should have the opportunity to be the one to lead it.
Why is this activity so important?
- This engages your students’ active listening skills. By practising waiting for their turn to respond, by making and repeating all kinds of sounds, children develop all the attributes of executive function ability: inhibitory control and self- regulation, working memory and cognitive flexibility.
- When vocalising and sounding out all kinds of sounds and silly syllables and rhyming, children develop their phonemic and phonological awareness, which is pre-reading literacy.
- Clapping hands and stomping feet help develop hand-eye co-ordination.
- For children with special needs, patting their arms and legs develops their physical sensory perception.
- Being good leaders and good responders raises self-esteem.
- Having fun together as a class develops mindfulness and creates more empathy among students.
Eunice, an educational coach to whom I taught Creative Sound Play and who in turn taught it to her teachers, said that their students with language delays were now empowered to be more creative when communicating.
