You could even print out the graphic scores and perform them away from visual prompts on screen to further their notation reading skills. Once this has been done, the children have to play their given sound when they see their symbol come to life on the screen.
You could extend this activity by assigning the shapes that children have drawn to a specific percussion instrument. The magical experience in the classroom every time is seeing children's faces light up when they recreate their drawing on the screen and see what their piece of music sounds like.
This naturally leads into starting to compose their own graphic scores by thinking about how they could order the shapes into a sequence or pattern by drawing their own choice of three or four shapes on a piece of paper. They can then listen to the sounds that these shapes make and try to describe them, introducing them to the concept of timbre. This section of the website allows users to draw shapes on a blank canvas which then automatically transform into animated sounds.Ĭhildren can start composing in seconds by drawing different shapes using an interactive white board, tablet, or laptop. Kandinsky (a musical experiment based on the artist of the same name), can be used to aid the teaching of graphic score composition. Three of these ‘experiments’ – Kandinsky, Rhythm and Song Maker – lend themselves well to helping children to compose their own pieces of music across multiple year groups. One website I use regularly, which is both free and expansive in terms of content, is Chrome Music Lab, which, as the website explains, ‘makes learning music more accessible through fun, hands-on experiments’. There are many free and easy-to-use websites out there, often at the other end of a simple Google search. Using music technology for composition does not need to be an expensive or specialist practice to be an effective part of the primary music classroom.
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