It is not always easy for a fifth-grader to hear the subtleties that can occur when you hit a triangle in the middle or on the side, or with the tip of the striker or with the middle or the back. However, differentiating between listening subtleties is an important part of music and music class.
When the “instruments” are taken away, and students are forced to find exactly the right sound they are looking for from “found sounds” (any old materials at hand that are “found”), it’s a lot of fun to watch.
Over the past few months, middle schoolers have been busily at work making music through their own created instruments. This has culminated over the past week with one final invented instrument and composition created out of materials they were provided with or brought in themselves. The room became part music classroom, part woodshop, and we all got to hear compositions with timbres that were new and unusual.
Middle schoolers classified instruments using the Hornbostel-Sachs method, which uses method of sound production as the classifying factor.
Here are some older performances for Chordophones and class discussions about classifying Chordophones (mostly pizza boxes with strings):
Here are some older performances for Aerophones (mostly glass bottles):
The invented instruments that were created in the music room over the past few weeks are combinations of chordophones, aerophones, idiophones, membranophones, and other unclassifyableophones. Stay tuned for a video of some of those instruments, to be coming soon.
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