A new month, a new game

This month's free music game is for any number of people and is suitable for a wide age range, from about 6yrs to adult. It is particularly good for waking up your group's powers of concentration and getting brain and body working together. If you have a regular group, or are a classroom teacher, and can keep returning to the game, you will notice steady improvement over time. Once children, in particular, know the format it can be used to good effect in odd moments of 'spare' time.

Target is a counting exercise. The object is to place a sound , be it a handclap, word or note, in a specified place in in a bar. In my experience musicians don't generally count in the literal sense of the word. It's more a case of feeling or knowing. If I were to show you three apples or four pencils you wouldn't need to count them to tell me how many were there. You would just 'know'. We don't usually count numbers of five or less because we can tell the quantity at a glance.

Musicians, who don't usually deal in numbers bigger than four, begin by counting but soon learn to feel when a certain number of beats or bars has passed. The counting becomes internalised and subconscious. This game will help speed that process for beginners. It will also improve the rhythm and timing skills of experienced players.

Cartoons

But now they're called animations of course. And a friend of mine, Matt Reeve, recently asked me to write the music for one he was making to enter into a competition. The competition was organised by a company called Aniboom and called for a Sesame Street style animation.

We opted for a counting song and Matt managed two sequences to go with the same piece of music. One is called Ten Divers and the other is called Ten Cannonistas.

Clicking on either link takes you to the page where you can view that animation. If you can be bothered to vote then please do. It may help us to win, or at least remain in the top 100. Voting is a bit of a faff - you have to register - but it's election year (in the UK anyway) and you'll be glad of the practice.

I found writing a counting song surprisingly difficult, although once I got the hang of it they just kept coming. The problem was that songs move in multiples of 2, 4, 8 etc. whereas we tend to count in tens. I could have written a song that stopped at eight but, in all my years of watching pre-school TV, I didn't see any that didn't make it to ten. And somehow I don't think a composition in 5/4 would cut it with the under fives.

Well, actually I think under fives might go for a counting song in 5/4 but the judges, presumably adults, might disagree. Anyway, I'd love to know what you think of both the song and the sequences.