Classical music is not for everyone.
Yet for many children learning about music in the classroom, their first musical experiences focus on this genre.
Of course, this isn't the case for all music lessons. And students can learn so much from classical music.
The team at Soundbops have sought to revolutionise the way that young children learn to play and read music in the classroom.
In this article for educators, Lewis Clarke from Soundbops discusses his own musical education experience and digs into how timbre can be taught to children.
Roll over, Beethoven!
Almost everyone listens to music in some capacity: whether you’re an avid fan of one band, you ‘listen to a bit of everything’, or just like sticking on the radio to fill the void. So why is it, when so many of us have this lifelong shared interest, that teachers often feel unequipped to talk about music in the classroom?
Perhaps this is because our conception of what type of music is best to learn from, and which skills make a good musician, are often tied up with classical music!
My classroom experience with music would have led me to believe that the only type of educated musician was one sitting in an orchestra who could read and play music from a sheet of paper, despite the fact that the musicians I was actually interested in did nothing of the sort.
Music, in all its forms, stimulates the brain in amazing ways. Wouldn’t it be great, then, if we could talk about the kinds of music we actually listen to, and what’s going on in music today, rather than hand out another copy of Ode to Joy? Music still takes all of the skill and has all of the creative depth that it did 300 years ago, and neither you nor your students should stay trapped in the past.
I want to provide you with ideas and perspectives that are:
- fun for kids and get them thinking about sound in creative ways
- you can attempt no matter how musical you are
- inspiring for teachers who want to bring some pop music into the classroom.
This article will focus on the topic of timbre.
If a tree falls in the woods, does it have a timbre?
As well as being the most misleadingly spelt word in the English language (pronounced ‘tam-buhr,’ as in tambourine), timbre is the characteristic and quality of a particular sound. For instance, we could play the same note on a piano, a guitar, and a xylophone, and although the pitch of the note would be the same, what allows these instruments to sound different from one another is their timbre.
I like to think of it as a more personal description of a sound than just recognising the instrument. For example, the timbre of an old, honky-tonk piano that spent a few decades in a saloon in the Wild West would be quite different to the timbre of a well-maintained piano in a concert hall. Likewise, when two people sing together, both voices are still distinguishable from each other by a timbral difference.
Timbre also applies to non-pitched sounds, like percussion and drums, or could simply describe the difference between tapping a metal surface and a wooden surface.
To try this concept out in the classroom, create some sounds of your own. Encourage your class to try a range of materials, objects, and surfaces - or whatever is on their desk - and pay attention to what is similar or different about each sound.
You could ask the class to make some notes about its properties (such as if its sound is gentle/harsh, soft/hard, short/long).
If something makes a sound, it has a timbre!
You'll notice that things made of the same material often have a lot of the same sonic properties, and this is true of instruments as well. However, no two surfaces will sound exactly the same, and realising the infinity of possible sound is a big part of today’s lesson.
Timbre is just as important as harmony or rhythm in informing how we might feel about a particular piece of music, but we don’t often think about it beyond what we hear in classical music and from traditional instruments. That’s because these timbres have been fixed and limited to the sounds that physical materials are capable of producing for hundreds of years.
In pop and electronic music, timbre is even more important because the range of sounds we now have - made possible by technology - is so vast and different. How artists express themselves has, unsurprisingly, changed with technology and we now have the freedom to make new sounds!
The shape of sound
So, what is actually going on here? The answer is going to take a little bit of physics.
As you may already know, all sounds are just vibrations travelling through the air, interacting with tiny hairs inside your ears. You can think of it like having your own mini radio antennae that wiggle in response to any vibrations strong enough to register and be heard.
All of the sound experiments we did earlier sounded different because they literally produced different shapes of vibration. As these travel, the shape and pattern of each vibration are mimicked by the cochlea (our ear-hair radio) when they interact, and the brain converts this shape to an electrical signal which we can understand as sound.
Fascinatingly, that means we’re translating these shapes into sounds and experiencing music in a far more tactile way than we might first imagine. We are always ‘feeling the music.’
We can link this process back to pop and electronic music by understanding how this music is made.
The vibrations from the materials in our sound experiments will have had quite complex and inconsistent shapes compared to what it takes to make a pitched note:
Meanwhile, traditional instruments have been designed for hundreds of years to try to smooth these random shapes out and make them more pleasant to listen to:
What modern music technology allows us to do is to have complete creative control over these shapes, and thus control over their timbre. This can range anywhere from the incredibly simple shapes used in 8-bit video game music, to the absurdly complex ones used in dubstep and EDM, or even copy an existing instrument’s shape to create a digital version.
Food for thought
The common critiques of pop music - that it’s simplistic, repetitive, or less authentic - have always bored me. The truth is that music has changed a lot, and timbre - controlling how sounds sound - is far more relevant in music today than a traditional music education teaches.
