Another month, another game

For those who don't yet know, I post a new music/sound game on my website at the beginning of each month. This month's is called Call My Name and is good for developing rhythm skills, good for developing listening skills and, well, just good fun. It's absolutely free so be my guest and take a look. It's aimed at players from nine years old to adult and should keep your group amused and productively engaged for five or ten minutes at least.

From that page you are just a click away from several other games that are permanent features of the site. Again, these are free to play and completely without obligation.

Each month I post a free music game on the Play With Sound website. This is in addition to the other free music games on the site that have proved so useful in schools, drama workshops. December's Game of the Month is suitable for adults and children over nine.

Called Telephone it has a communication theme but is really about developing fluency with three simple rhythmic motifs. The fun bit is using these to contact other players. In order to do that one must develop the skill of of hearing and reproducing the motifs accurately.

Telephone will develop rhythmic, listening, communication and improvising skills. The rhythms can be clapped or played on instruments. Let me know how you get on.

More Free Games

If you haven't yet visited my website then you really should. There is a free game every month and this month's is called Copycat. It can easily be adapted to a Christmas gathering. Although you can certainly play it with musical instruments, it will provide equal or greater pleasure played with objects you find lying around in the festive debris. Don't get too hung up on the rules or on winning or losing. If everyone is having fun then you're all winning.

There are more free music games on the website.

Junk Shop - a game for Christmas and beyond

Can we truly hear something unless we start from a point of silence? Is it necessary to clear the mind of all the expectations we place on sound, and in this case sound organised into music, to respond honestly? To listen without leaping to a judgement?

I wrote last time (http://playwithsound.blogspot.com/2008/12/learning-to-listen.html) about the challenges of developing listening skills in children. The fact is that children have fewer pre-conceptions with regard to sound. The older we get, the more we take for granted. A child, on hearing a familiar sound, is far more likely to look for the source of the sound than an adult. They are open-minded (or naïve) enough to make a visual check that the sound corresponds with what they assume to be the cause. An adult will tend to assume that if they hear a familiar sound then it has a familiar source. And no criticism is intended. If we didn't then our concentration spans would shrink to zero.

What is interesting about this, however, is that it means that children are more open to the possibility of the sounds they hear emanating from someone or something other than the people and things generating them. Of course we are all open to this possibility. If we weren't then sound effects in the cinema, known as foley, would be rendered ineffective. The sound of a stick of celery being broken takes on a whole new meaning when laid alongside a movie of someone getting their arm fractured. Working backwards, some imaginative soul must at some time have snapped a stick of celery and thought 'this sounds just like a bone being broken'.

So here's a game, an experiment really, to play with children or adults. Let's call it Junk Shop as a working title. I'm sure you can adapt it for use at Christmas dinner.

Age group: children, teenagers and adults.
Duration: 20 minutes upwards,including discussion
Aims: to develop listening and concentration skills; to encourage the group to think imaginatively about sound.

You will need:

• A screen – nothing elaborate. A pile of books on the front of a desk will suffice.
• A selection of articles such as paper, scissors, woodworking tools, bottles – plastic and glass, thick cellophane, cutlery, a pair of leather gloves, bubblewrap, a 12" (30cm) ruler, a plastic box full of metal bottle tops, an aluminium drink can etc, etc. Basically anything you can get a noise from. The toys in those Christmas crackers have to be good for something.
  
• Two sheets of lined paper, one with the lines numbered.
• An able, literate and inventive volunteer to make the sounds.

The volunteer hides behind the screen with the assembled 'noise generators' and the numbered sheet. Everyone else sits where they can't see the volunteer and the stuff. It might be good to have them sitting with their back to the screen. The volunteer makes a sound, using the items in front of them, and writes down what they did to create it against number one on their piece of paper.

Now everyone else tries to guess how the sound was made. Record all the suggestions against the number one on your piece of paper. Teenagers and adults will find it easy to guess many, if not most, of the sounds. Here the game is to think of as many plausible causes of the sound as you can before identifying the true source. Encourage outrageous flights of fancy. Once you have exhausted the first sound the volunteer makes another. Keep the sounds coming. Don’t let your group get bored. When you feel you've had enough, have the volunteer step out and tell you whether the guesses were right or wrong. Have them demonstrate some of the more interesting sounds in front of the other players. Now everyone can have a go at making the same sounds; and new ones too.

I'd love to know how this went for you. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention it, there are more games, like and unlike this one, in my book Adventures in Sound available from Amazon.

Learning to listen

Ah, the joys of self-employment! When there's no work I should be resting, basking in the warm glow of past success and spending my well-earned fees. Instead I'm mooching around, fretting that I'll never get any work again and seriously considering applying for unsuitable employment, positions I mean here, that would drive me insane. So when the offers finally come in I want to say yes to everything in case nothing else ever comes. I overload and get stressed by impossible and incompatible commitments and deadlines. But this is the kind of stress I love.

Just at the moment there is very little happening besides my regular woodwind teaching and occasional gigs. But suddenly I have had a variety of offers of work after Christmas, all of it exciting. Would I play clarinet and tenor sax in a production of The Threepenny Opera? Well of course. Am I interested in helping primary school children explore their concerns around death, pollution and the environment through sound? Yes, absolutely. Would I like to work with a performance poet on a project aiming to improve listening and communication skills in eight year olds, taking food as a theme? Count me in. And the icing on the cake: write some music for a video about heroes and villains. What fun!

Of course another thing about being a self-employed artist is that things rarely happen on the timescale that's been given at the outset and sometimes they never happen at all. Apart from 'Threepenny' these are all to be confirmed, but it's very exciting all the same and what fate can't take away is that I've been asked. And that's enormously flattering.

The projects involving schoolchildren will both require them to develop their listening skills and become sensitive and discerning with regard to sound. My years spent teaching woodwind have shown me that it is only when students learn to hear themselves that they become musicians whose playing might please others. This faculty arrives at different ages in different people. Like self-awareness generally it can be encouraged and facilitated but can't really be taught. This month's featured game, Copycat, is ideal for developing listening skills, especially in children, and has applications far beyond the teaching of music. Try it; it's free and without obligation. You will find that many other games in Adventures in Sound add value in a far wider context. We could all be better at listening - to ourselves and to others.