Thursday 20th November 2008

Boys aren't keen on singing. Apparently.
You wouldn't have guessed it from the speed with which the male half of Paul Jones' year 5 class, sprang to turn a solo rendition of their vocal piece into an ensemble performance by 18; not just singing but swaying together too.

We're preparing for a small end of term sharing at which we'll bring year 7s and year 5s to show each other what they've been working on. Today Bobbie led a session at Chivenor School in which the children combined four of the melodies that they created a couple of weeks ago. The melodies were created from the speech patterns of excerpts from interviews that the children had done with older people some weeks before. A really good session that we'll build on over the next couple of weeks before sharing it in mid December.

The late afternoon session at Astral Youth Centre built on work we'd done over the previous couple of weeks. In the last session both older and younger people collected sounds from around the building that can be used as sounds in beat construction. Today we used conversation about "Christmas" (very topical) and "Tomorrow" to produce words that can accompany those sounds as percussive elements. We also tried a random rhythm creation exercise in which everyone chose two beats on which they'd place one of the sounds we'd sampled. I'll be using a combination of these to create rhythm loops to go along with the one produced in Chris's session a couple of weeks ago.

Dave

Melody Making

It's Thursday 23rd October and I'm sitting in the IT suite at Astral Youth Centre as we come to an end of a day's melody making. This is the first time we've tried not only turning some of the phrases we've collected from older and younger participants into rhythms, but also into melodies. Children and young people have been getting used to repeating excerpts taken from interviews, and turning them into rhythms, either by clapping them or by playing them on percussion instruments. We've heard the words "nineteen-thirty-one", and "two children, two daughters" turned into catchy grooves, but today we've gone one step further.

During Bobbie's session at Chivenor Primary School, four groups of children, each joined by a resident of Chivenor House, interpreted phrases melodically, and performed them to each other. We even tried combining the four melodies that we came up with, layering them one over the other, which showed the potential for what may follow.

This evening, as I sit writing this, Chris is leading a small group that has mapped a small exerpt taken from a conversation amongst young people at the youth club, onto notes, and is now recording an improvisation that uses the resulting melody.

We still have quite a way to with combining these techniques but I think we're showing the potential of the concept.

More soon!

Dave