Mapping the Music

No homework for tonight.

Class activities: 2 journal entries and 2 homeworks due today.

1. Viewing of "Music from the Inside Out" segment about color - the musician interviewed has a rare condition called "synesthesia," which she describes as seeing colors in response to music, physical pain, or input from other senses. One of the students in 6D knew that the word synesthesia comes from a Latin root and means "confusion of the senses."

2. Making visual maps of music, part 1: board demonstration of how to use different lines, colors and shapes to follow along with the music. We listened to a piece by Shostakovich and experimented with ways to show tempo, rhythm, pitch and different instruments visually. Students shared their drawings and talked about how they decided to show different parts of the music.

3. Making maps, part 2: we listened to a Dvorak piece 3 times. The first time was to get a sense of the different parts of the music, the second was to hear things that might not have been heard the first time around and refine the drawings, and the third time was to add words to describe what the music was doing, just like in our writing exercises yesterday.

Tomorrow: Mapping the music with our bodies