The Sonic Garden: Exploring home made instruments, a pilot project in a SEN secondary school
The Sonic Garden is a project exploring unusual sound making possibilities, DIY instrument design and building. Lifesize delivered a pilot project over ten weeks in the spring of 2021 at Saxon Mount, a SEN secondary school in Hastings, East Sussex. The concept of the project was to create an exciting environment for pupils to re-engage with learning and group work after the long period of disruption caused by the Covid 19 pandemic. We planned the project to be innovative, unique, and memorable. We wanted to facilitate activities that the pupils would be unlikely to experience in their regular school music lessons but that would complement the curriculum and support the school music teachers to further engage the pupils in their lessons. They would have the chance to be creative and experimental, playing unusual instruments, collecting field recordings, manipulating recorded sound, and designing and building instruments.
After a series of challenges (please see my previous Sonic Garden blog post) the pupils took part in creating group percussion pieces and exploring a variety of unusual instruments including some home-made instruments. The instruments we provided encouraged participation and experimentation, they were fun to play and accessible. Pupils explored the sounds of open tuned guitars, the Turkish oud, Japanese Koto, Tibetan singing bowls and the electronic Theremin as well as home-made instruments created from everyday household items such as the pictured plastic bottle xylophone and plumbing pipe plosive instrument. We embedded the accessible notation system figurenotes in our work which was well received by the pupils and school teaching staff. Lifesize has recently been listed as a figurenotes champion for our use of the system in our work: https://figurenotes.org/lifesize/
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