Found Sounds

This lesson is an easy (and free!) combination of music and science learning objectives. Students in fifth, sixth, or seventh grades will likely be able to accomplish the objectives of this lesson without lengthy preparation. It could also be adapted for younger students. The initial lesson can easily extend into additional projects. 

Objectives: Students will explore the properties of sound on improvised percussion instruments.

Standards: Science

• Describe how sound energy is transferred by wave-like disturbances that spread away from the source through a medium, describe how changes in energy cause changes in loudness and pitch or a sound, predict how the properties of the medium (e.g. air, water, empty space, rock) affect the speed of different types of mechanical waves (i.e. earthquake, sound)

Standards: Music

• Echo rhythmic and melodic patterns of increasing complexity on classroom instruments
• Improvise short rhythmic and melodic patterns
• Create and notate a rhythmic and/or melodic ostinato accompaniment within the teacher’s specified guidelines

Materials
Classroom space for discovering sounds

Anticipatory Set
 Find out what students know about how sound travels

Teaching Proces

• Walk around the room and hit or scrape different things to make sound
• Discuss why some things sound different from others (what they are made of, how thick they are, etc.)
• Experiment as a class with ways to alter the sounds (use something different to strike an object, for example)
• Have class members find their own sound somewhere in the room
• Have the class echo four-count patterns initiate by the teacher or a student leader
•  Have the class make up their own patterns to answer the leader’s patterns
•  Have the class members each make up a complementary pattern to be played at the same time as the leader’s repeated pattern to make a class “groove.” In other words, start the repeating pattern and invite others to join in gradually, “grooving” with the initial pattern but not overpowering it
• Divide the class into groups to develop their own grooves
• Have the groups invent notation to represent their grooves

Closure:  Let each group play their groove for the class

Extensions: Use the grooves to accompany raps, poems, songs, or times-tables.