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Soundscapes

Exploring Timbre and Texture in Music

Learning Module

Abstract

Year 7 and 8 students explore soundscapes to develop their aural skills and identify timbre and texture. They create their own compositions using technology, voice and sound effects to demonstrate their understanding of musical elements.

Keywords

Audio, Timbre, Texture, Pitch, Volume, Tempo, Rhythm, Composition, Technology

1. Sounds Around Us

For the Student

Learning Goal: To explore the sounds around us and combine them into a soundscape.

Work with a partner to find out the sounds you can make in our classroom. Move around the room to discover them. Here are some ideas:

  • Tap your pen on the desk
  • Say shhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
  • Snap your fingers
  • Laugh
  • Type on your computer keyboard

Add your ideas for classroom sounds to the comment box below.

Then with your partner, select 4-5 sounds from the list and combine them in a short soundscape of about 30 seconds. A soundscape is like a landscape. Instead of everything you can see, it's everything you can hear. It can be a combination of musical and non-musical sounds.

Perform your soundscape for the class. You could also record your soundscape using your phone or other mobile device.

Have someone conduct a soundscape, combining a few groups and creating different sequences. Record it.

Comment: Add an idea for a sound you discovered. Keep adding ideas until you run out so that we have a class list of possible sounds. Read what other students add so you don't repeat anything. Then after the performance, comment on one soundscape that you liked, explaining what made it appealing to you. Start with @Names so we know which performance you are commenting on.

Media embedded August 16, 2016

 

For the Teacher

 The aim of this initial Update is to introduce the Scholar environment to students and to value their prior knowledge. Working in Scholar promotes:

  • collaboration - connecting students with different levels of expertise
  • students as knowledge creators, sharing their prior knowledge and new knowledge
  • creating and sharing multimodal texts - modern communication involves visual, audio, gestural, spatial, and language modes
  • recursive feedback through comments on other students' comments, learning from and with each other
  • differentiation - all students are able participate, regardless of their starting points
  • metacognition - reflection about their learning in the comments
  • creating a musical composition for real purposes and audiences - real world contexts
  • agency - students become autonomous learners

Scholar Updates

Each activity in a Learning Module is called an Update. Updates are delivered from the Learning Module in the Scholar Bookstore or from your profile to the activity stream of the Community. Students who are members of that community can then access them. For more information on using Scholar, see the Help tutorials in the top right hand corner of this screen. 

Creating Student Profiles

When students log into Scholar, they create their "blips". Creating their profiles is a great opportunity to discuss cyberbullying and how students should represent themselves and communicate in online environments. 

Australian Curriculum Music Years 7-8

Develop musical ideas, such as mood, by improvising, combining and manipulating the elements of music (ACAMUM093)

2. A Day Without Music?

For the Student

Learning Intention: To understand the prevalence of music in our lives.

Choose one day (24 hours) to complete this assignment. During this time, you should not intentionally initiate any sound producing event that involves music in some way. This means, no streaming music, no radio, no TV, no video games, etc. Please set your cell phone ringers to something generic. In other words, do not initiate passive music consumption.

While you should not be actively listening to music you should be actively listening to what is around you. You should feel free to move from one place to another as you normally would throughout a typical day. You may also appreciate the opportunity to visit a location that is out of the ordinary for you whether that be an indoor or outdoor location.

Choose a specific length of time with your "Day Without Music" to make focused observations and take details notes about what you are hearing around you. A time period of 15 minutes to an hour is recommended. You may record this session for review later if you wish. Describe the following:

  • patterns of sounds you are hearing, considering pitch (high and low) and rhythm (beat, patterns of sound)
  • changes in volume of those sounds (dynamics)
  • tempo (fast, slow)
  • anything else that stands out to you as you listen

At the end of the 24 hour period please create a new Update that includes your reflections on the assignment and answers to the following questions:

  • How has going a day without listening to music affected your life?
  • Based on your observations, is it possible to escape familiar music in our contemporary environment?
  • Can the sounds you discovered in your enviroment (or environments) be considered music? Why? Why not?

Comment: After you have completed this Update, read and comment on at least three others from your classmates. To refer to a specific colleague's comments, use @name.

After completing this, you're free to resume your normal music listening habits.

For the Teacher

This assignment should lead students to realize just how prevelant music and sound is in their lives. Students will need to work hard to shut off and tune out the music that has become almost a nonstop soundtrack to their lives.

They should become aware of how many sources of music there are in their everyday lives that they have no control over. Depending on the environment they put themselves in this may be passing period music, in-store background music, passing cars or the sounds of wind in the trees, birds, insects, animals, and so on. Students will almost assuredly notice their daily routine feels different without music. Some may be distracted by it, others may appreciate the brief change of pace and different perspective. 

The goal in this assignment is for students to begin to listen to atmospheric/environmental sounds as musical sounds - sounds that consist of rhythm, pitch, dynamics, and ultimately texture and timbre as explored later in this module.

3. Soundscapes

For the Student

Learning Goal: To listen and respond to a range of soundscapes.

First create your own soundscape with your own tools or the Soundscape Constructor. Close your eyes and play your audios. Can you isolate each sound?

With a partner, discuss: 
How do different sounds combine to make the unique audio environments of specific places?

Listen to the soundscape.With a partner, discuss:

  • What sounds can you hear?
  • How does it make you feel?
  • What do you visualise?
  • What sort of mood or atmosphere is created. 
  • Do you notice any musical elements that you have learned about previously such as rhythm (time/keeping the beat/following the structural rhythmic pulse of the music) or pitch ( highness or lowness of sound)?

Comment: Share some of the ideas from your discussion. Read other students' comments and comment on any that interest you, or that you agree or disagree with. Explain why. Start with @Name so the person knows who you are commenting on. 

Media embedded August 16, 2016

For the Teacher

In this update, the purpose is to immerse students in a soundscape. Other soundscapes may be added or students could find their own.

Australian Curriculum Music Years 7-8

Develop musical ideas, such as mood, by improvising, combining and manipulating the elements of music (ACAMUM093)

4. Defining Texture and Timbre

For the Student

Learning Goal: To understand texture and timbre as words that help us to describe music/sounds.

TIMBRE

Timbre is what makes a particular musical sound different from another - voice, string instruments, percussion, wind instruments, and sound effects. For example, a trumpet has a brash timbre compared with the smoother timbre of a saxophone. A violin and viola have very similar timbres. 

Timbre allows you to distinguish different sound sources, even when they have the same pitch and loudness. Timbre is the difference between a dog barking and a person shouting, or the difference between a male and female voice speaking. Thus it helps you to distinguish sounds in a soundscape. 

TEXTURE

Texture means the overall sound created by multiple instruments or voices in music; it's like a map of the music. Texture is how the melodies, harmonies and rhythms are organised in a piece of music. There are three main types of texture:

  • Monophony means music with a single "part" and a "part" typically means a single vocal melody, but it could mean a single melody on an instrument or multiple voices in unison. Examples - One person whistling a tune, a single bugle sounding "Taps", a group of people all singing a song together, without harmonies or instruments, and a fife and drum corp, with all the fifes playing the same melody
  • Homophony has one clearly melodic line; it's the line that naturally draws your attention. All other parts provide accompaniment or fill in the chords. Examples - a singer accompanied by a guitar picking or strumming chords, a small jazz combo with a bass, a piano, and a drum set providing the "rhythm" background for a trumpet improvising a solo, and a single bagpipes or accordion player playing a melody with drones or chords.
  • Polyphony is more than one independent melody occurring at the same time. Examples - rounds, canons, and fugues (even if there is only one melody, if different people are singing or playing it at different times, the parts sound independent).

Comment: After watching "What is the difference between musical texture and timbre", give one example of timbre and one example of texture. For example, timbre helps you work out the different character's voices in "South Park" while texture is created when people sing the rounds of "Row, Row your Boat". Read through other students' examples to learn more and comment on any that you think are really good examples.

Media embedded August 16, 2016

For the Teacher

In this update the focus is on understanding the concepts in order to experiment with them in the update that follows.

Australian Curriculum Music Years 7-8

Experiment with texture and timbre in sound sources using aural skills (ACAMUM092)

 

 

5. Exploring Texture and Timbre

For the Student

Learning Goal: To identify timbre and texture in musical compositions.

Part 1: Listen to Vivaldi's Four Seasons. 

Media embedded February 22, 2017

Listen to it a second time and see if you can identify the following:

  • Spring: One has bird sounds, brooks and breezes and the storm brewing with distant thunder.
  • Summer: In the first movement you hear a cuckoo and gentle sounds of summer breezes and lazy days. In the third movement the storm arrives and you hear the bass instruments indicating the wind and thunder while the soloist represents the driving rain.
  • Autumn: The first movement begins with a song and dance celebrating the rich harvest and then you hear the soloist imitating the wind catching the fallen leaves.
  • Winter: The first movement begins with the sound of shivering, the soloist enters with the ‘horrid winds’, this is followed by stamping feet to keep warm and then the chattering of teeth against the cold. The final movement depicts the winds in battle and the slippery ice that is hard to resist falling on (you can hear the soloist play fast notes in descending patterns depicting falling over and slipping on the ice).

With a partner, discuss the following:

  • Can you identify any instruments based on their timbre? The bright violin sounds different from a darker-toned viola or from the deep, low cello or double bass, even if it’s playing exactly the same note. You can hear an excellent example of the contrast of timbres between the violins and the cellos shortly after the beginning of “Summer.”
  • What do you note about its texture?
  • Is it a monophony of a polyphony or a homophony?
  • How do different sounds combine to create the unique audio environments of each season?

Part 2: Listen to an excerpt (7.59) of Four4 by John Cage.

Background: Four4 was composed in 1991 for a percussion quartet. It does not specify which percussion instruments, leaving the choice to the musicians. It uses flexible time-brackets to which performers assign a number. The numbers on the score tell the performers when to play. The beginnings and endings of sounds are sometimes separated by silences of more than five minutes. John Cage advised performers to listen in the silences, "hearing sounds wherever they are". Each time-bracket features only one sound. The four performers have 22, 16, 10, and 15 time-brackets each. 

Media embedded August 17, 2016

With a partner discuss:

  • Can you identify the percussion instruments in this piece by their timbre?
  • What four instruments would you choose if you were performing. Discuss the effects of using these other percussion instruments.
  • Discuss the texture of Four4 (monophony, homophony, polyphony). 
  • Are repetition and sequencing important in this piece?

Comment: Find another piece of music where timbre and/or texture are used effectively. Post a link to the piece (or you can create your own update and add the clip). Explain what it is about and describe the effects of timbre and/or texture. Listen to the pieces posted by 1-2 other students and comment on them.

For the Teacher

In this update students deepen their understanding of timbre and texture through exploring two very different musical compositions. 

Australian Curriculum Music Years 7-8

Experiment with texture and timbre in sound sources using aural skills (ACAMUM092)

Develop musical ideas, such as mood, by improvising, combining and manipulating the elements of music (ACAMUM093)

6. Analysing a Soundscape

For the Student

Learning Goal: To analyse a soundscape to understand its audio elements.

Media embedded August 17, 2016

With a partner, listen to the soundscape by Ryan Samuel Bentley again and complete the table, analysing the effect of each musical element. It includes elements that you have learned about before. You may have to listen to the soundscape a number of times.

Musical Element Description of the kinds of sounds/instruments

Effect/s on an audience/how does the listener feel? What is the mood created?

 Timbre: (voice, string instruments, percussion, wind instruments, and sound effects)

   

 Texture: (monophony, polyphony, homophony)

   

 Rhythm: (beat, patterns)

   

Tempo: (fast, slow)

   

 Pitch: (high, low)

   

 Dynamics: (loud, soft)

   
     
     

Comment: After analysing this soundscape and its effects on a listener/audience, what do you think was the purpose of Ryan Samuel Bentley in this soundscape? Read other students' comments and comment on 1 or 2 that you strongly agree or disagree with, explaining why.

For the Teacher

Audio Meanings based on Multiliteracies

This Update focuses on Reference: What do the audio meanings refer to? It analyses the patterns of how an audio piece is constructed to have an impact on its meaning.

Media embedded August 17, 2016

Australian Curriculum Music Years 7-8

Analyse composers’ use of the elements of music and stylistic features when listening to and interpreting music (ACAMUR097)

7. So What?

For the Student

Learning Goal: To understand the importance of soundscapes beyond art/music.

Watch the youtube video: SOUNDSCAPE (ABCTVCatalyst) (13.45)

Media embedded August 16, 2016

In this video you will learn about soundscape ecology. Research other uses of soundscapes.

Comment: Write 2-4 pargraphs about the uses of soundscapes, including what you learn about soundscape ecology. You can write your paragraphs in the comment box below or create your own update so that you add multimedia (video, images, audio) to your post if you like. Read other students' posts and comment on 1-2, reflecting on new learning and/or adding more information based on your own research. Start with @Name so the person knows you are commenting on their comment.

For the Teacher

The purpose of this update is for students to understand the importance of audio soundscapes for the environment, and for people (relaxation, health, entertainment). Looking at the world through sound - soundscape ecology - can be researched further by students and added to their posts. In this way they become active knowledge makers in their class community.

Australian Curriculum Music Years 7-8

Identify and connect specific features and purposes of music from different eras to explore viewpoints and enrich their music making (ACAMUR098)

Literacy Capability

Comprehending texts through listening, reading and viewing

8. Musical Composition

For the Student

Learning Goal: To start my soundscape project and to use the rubric to identify what is important to include.

Project Name: Soundscape Project

Description: Create  a musical composition that translates ideas from a soundscape into musical form. You can use electronic and natural sounds, incorporate sound effects and/or musical instruments. Record your piece and add your audio file to your work in Creator. 

In addition to adding the audio file, provide a short rationale (1-2 paragraphs) of your piece - your thought process, what musical concepts you were addressing, successes and challenges.

Note: Free sound effects

Check the Work Request in your Notifications. Click on this link to open the “Untitled Work” in Creator. Then, change the title, and begin a first draft. Go to About This Work => Project => Description for further project information.

For what you need to do in order to create an effective soundscape, go to Feedback => Reviews => Rubric.

When you are ready to submit, click “Submit Draft” below the work. This is the version of your work that will be sent to others for review.

Comment: Do you have any questions about how Scholar works? Make a comment in this update. If you think you have an answer to another student's question, please answer it - be sure to name the student you are replying to in your comment by starting with @Name.

Fig. 1: Now it's your turn to create your own soundscape as an audio file

For the Teacher

Students should also refer to the Rubric as a guide as they write in Creator. If necessary, look through the rubric with students.

For first time users of Scholar, the following Overt Instruction Updates from The Writer's Toolkit: Strategies for Writing in the New Media may be useful to add to Community:

  • How to Write in Scholar
  • Using the Rubric and Checker

Students apply what they have learned through a soundscape composition. The task is open-ended so students can use electronic equipment, sound effects or musical instruments to record their piece.

Soundscape Project Rubric

 

Students can take their learning further through another composition, adding multimedia to the final presentation.

Australian Curriculum Music Years 7-8

Experiment with texture and timbre in sound sources using aural skills (ACAMUM092)

Develop musical ideas, such as mood, by improvising, combining and manipulating the elements of music (ACAMUM093)

Structure compositions by combining and manipulating the elements of music using notation (ACAMUM095)

Perform and present a range of music, using techniques and expression appropriate to style (ACAMUM096)

Acknowledgements

Title: (Source); Fig. 1: By Edvvc - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 (Source).