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.

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.

Recording the blacksmith

Back in May, Cogitator posted a short clip of a blacksmith hammering away at an anvil. This made a strong impression on me and when I came across a blacksmith at a camp in August I knew to take advantage of the situation.

Dave Perks brought a portable forge with him to the camp and set it up in the shade of some trees. He was very happy to demonstrate the rhythmic nature of his hammering technique: so many beats on the iron being forged, interspersed with beats on the anvil in order to maintain momentum. He had brought along an unusual piece of scrap iron, a disc with fins, that he wanted to make mountable as a gong. I managed to capture most of the process in one way or another and have made the results into a short movie (3'52).

July's Free Game - Limelight

The summer term is almost over. I have the last school concert to attend this evening and have already fired up my last examination entrant for her Grade 5 flute exam on Monday. A strange time, therefore, to remind you of July's Game of the Month? The last thing anyone involved in classroom teaching will be thinking about right now is September's restart but it will only take you a moment to cut and paste it into your games folder. (You don't have a games folder? Shame on you!)

For those of us workshopping in the summer break this is a good game for a new and disparate group of varying ages and abilities. It is sufficiently robust to withstand a little anarchy. Just make sure you are holding the loudest, beatiest instrument and lead from the front. Enjoy!

Quick Tick Tock

This a good exercise for quickly assessing the ability and attention levels in a group. It can work for any age and is good for groups small and large, including classes of about thirty. It can also be a starting point for a number of related exercises.

For very young children it may help to take along a ticking clock as a prop in case the only ones they've come across are of the silent digital type. A pendulum clock would be wonderful but is obviously impractical. However, the pendulum image is very useful and I have portable clockwork metronome (pictured below) that I take along for this purpose. Its tick is suitably audible and regular. It's a great talking point but I stop short of passing it around.

Before you begin, arrange your group in a circle so that everyone can see every one else. If this means moving chairs and tables then so be it.

• Explain to the group that you will imitate the ticking of the clock by taking it in turns to tick and tock around the circle. If you, yourself, are a 'tick' then Albert, immediately to your left, is a 'tock'. Beatrice, sitting next to Albert, will be a 'tick' and Cuthbert on her left, a 'tock'. Continue demonstrating this by allocating ticks and tocks to Dorothy, Edmond, Felicity, Gawain and Henrietta. By now everyone should have got the idea and will probably carry on ticking and tocking around the circle when you stop.
• Stop them if they have carried on and check that everyone else understands what they are supposed to be doing. Now say you will count yourself in. Don’t explain why. Either count "One Two Three Four" or "One Two Three And". This is just an attempt to establish some kind of pulse and is very likely doomed to failure.
• Count yourself in and say 'tick' and look expectantly at Albert, helping him with his 'tock' if necessary. Follow the sound around the circle, giving eye contact to each child and continuing to mouth the words silently. Stop when it gets back to you. Don't be tempted to go round twice. If you didn't know already you have learned whether you have an odd or even number in the group. You also know if anyone needs further explanation of the exercise.
• Say how well it went but tell group you want to see if it can be as regular as the clock you showed them. By now everyone knows the rules of the game and the next attempt at tick-tocking around the circle will tell you something about the levels of attention and ability within the group.

Remember that it is important that everyone can see everyone else. Otherwise children will find it hard to tell when their turn is coming and this will distort your findings.

Pyramid

This month's free game at playwithsound.com is called Pyramid. It is a way of using instruments to demonstrate relative note values. Because the sounds sustain it is well suited to chime bars: the group gets the sense of playing semibreves, minims, crotchets etc, so it is a good way of introducing this terminology. When played with chime bars it can be very soothing and that's no bad thing. Of course it does rather depend on your choice of notes. (And, it goes without saying, if you have more than one player to a part then you should give them the same note as the others playing that part.)

Game of the Month

There are only a few days left in which to view this month's free game On the Beat at playwithsound.com. Every month I post a different game on my website and this one is a good introduction to rhythm. It is also a good test of how alert and able your group is feeling at any given time. It's a good opener for a workshop as it can be used as a name learning exercise. But you could also try playing it later in a session to see if it has a different quality.