Based on the national PBS program The Music Instinct: Science and Song, WGTE Public Media's Composing Science outreach program is an inquiry-based, hands-on exploration of music and science for middle school students.
Students from the YWCA Carrera Program are participating in a workshop series led by educators and musicians from WGTE Public Media and the Toledo School for the Arts. Each workshop session engages students in investigations of music and its connection to the human mind, heart and natural world. A culminating event at Toledo's Imagination Station will immerse students and their families in science of music demonstrations and "radio voices" - student-created and narrated reflections on their experiences with the program.
Support for WGTE Public Media's Music Instinct: Composing Science program has generously been provided by Hope Welles and two anonymous donors.
Major funding for Music Instinct provided by the National Science Foundation, Mary Rodgers Guettel, NAMM Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Rita and Fritz Markus, The Vital Projects Fund, the Irving Harris Foundation, Sono and Victor Elmaleh, Thea Petschek Iervolino, and public television viewers.
Workshop Series One: Hearing vs. Listening
(six sessions held during October 2009)
In this workshop series, students explored how the brain perceives sound and music. After viewing clips from the PBS show The Music Instinct, we answered the following questions:
1) What is sound?
2) How do we feel the sound?
3) How do we make sense of the sound?
We then examined a diagram of the ear and traced how sound enters the brain. In a group activity, students made a model of the ear using paper tubes, wax paper, and toothpicks (see video above).
The second part of the workshop series was devoted to an exploration of music, and the difference between "sound" and "music." We listened to examples of music that imitates sounds heard in nature (birds singing, etc) and discussed what qualities of the music made it sound that way (fast, slow, high, low, etc).
In follow-up sessions at Carrera House, students explored how music (or organized sound) can communicate emotions, by listening to musical examples and reporting on how it made them feel (we also identified the qualities of the music that made them feel that way). In a group activity, students were each assigned a specific "emotion" and then asked to "demonstrate" that emotion for their classmates, first through non-verbal means and then through verbal means (without using words).
Workshop Series Two: Sound Science
(two sessions held during November 2009)
In this workshop series, students learned about the building blocks of sound from Zeb Kellough, science teacher at the Toledo School for the Arts. Using slinkies and tuning forks, we explored how sound waves behave and demonstrated how to make both short and long sound waves.
In addition, students from the Toledo School for the Arts performed musical selections, demonstrating how the size and shape of their instruments affect the sound they make. In a hands-on activity, students used frame drums to demonstrate for themselves how the material and size of an instrument relates to the pitch and frequency of its sound.
Workshop Series Three: Speaking in Rhythm
(six sessions held during January 2010)
In this session, students explored the concept of rhythm, and how messages can be transmitted through rhythm. Dave Gierke, percussion instructor from the Toledo School for the Arts, led the students in a "Rhythm Circle" - wherein the students learned how to communicate with each other solely through percussion instruments, i.e., "call and response," direct imitation, and syllabic representation (beating out the rhythm of a name like "George Washington," "Dr. Martin Luther King," etc.) By combining their rhythms and using different sounding instruments, students created their own "compositions" that contained messages - and took on new meanings through the process of combination. We recorded some of these rhythms for use in session four, PC DJ.
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Workshop Series Four: PC DJ
(six sessions held during February 2010)
In workshop one, students examined how we "hear" and how we "listen," identifying qualities which separate normal sound" from "music." In this session, students examined how the lines between "sound" and "music" can be blurred. Using an excerpt from the radio program RadioLab (from WNYC in New York), we demonstrated how simple speech can (unintentionally) sound like music. Students then listened to an example of speech recorded during one of their earlier sessions, which, when played against a series of musical notes, again sounded like a musical tune.
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April 17, 2010 at the Imagination Station in downtown Toledo
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During session four of Composing Science (PC DJ), students used audio loops sampled from previous sessions at WGTE to create their own compositions. Listen to the songs they made via our audio player (at right).
Track List:
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A Student Program from WGTE
A Student Program from WGTE
