I hold a license/ certificate in the Czech Republic for practicing music therapy for children, although I am not currently working in this field (at least not yet). I have lots of ideas. If you are in this profession, or moving towards it, you might find some of them potentially useful.
The general idea is to present activities that are easily assimilated by children, using games or instruments that anyone can pick up and start playing with almost no training involved. There are no threatening situations. It’s all in the name of joyous exploration, which could result in catharsis for growing minds.
Kazoo orchestra
Easy for all children, as you only need to hum. Can be made with combs and rolling papers. Pitch is not important. Encourage improvisation. Depending on the age group, they can be steered toward listening to each other and blending the sound with harmony and rhythm.
Vegetable orchestra
What could be more fun than creating instruments from vegetables and composing with them? Fruits are not covered here, but they certainly could be.
Hand Symphony
Children create musical styles, such as dance, hip hop and Latin with many different ways of making sounds with the hands.
Extended body percussion techniques
‘Call and Answer’ game- one child creates a short rhythm and next child answers it with new short simple rhythm, which may complement the previous one. This can be done individually at first, where the previous child stops and the next one continues. After going around the circle, then everyone can join simultaneously. Simple rhythms can be learned and built upon, as demonstrated in this video.
Harmonic Whirlies
Plastic hoses bring out the lower harmonic series when swung around at different speeds. It’s fairly easy to obtain them, but they are also available as complete tuned sets from Sarah Hopkins (Australia) for use in music therapy.
‘Declamatory’ choir (without pitch)
This is easy for all children, as it does not depend on skillful pitch reproduction. It is more like speech, with exaggerated inflections. When greatly slowed down, speech takes on the characteristics of more discernible pitch.
Perfect pitch for children
If children are not born with this gift, they can still develop it more easily than adults, while their sense of hearing/ listening is still flexible. For example, they are given sheets of blank white ‘keys’ of a piano. They listen to each pitch as given from a real piano (as well tuned as possible, of course, or use a digital source). They use whatever source of color they want (crayons, paint, pastels, etc) to color the keys the way they perceive them. There are no right or wrong answers for the colors. They also describe the pitches in terms of tactile things (i.e. wood, velvet, metal, sandpaper, etc.). This tends to be an ideal calming down activity when the children are a tad rambunctious.
Musical Game
Each child picks a slip of paper from a box with a color name. Each color will appear twice. They walk around and sing the color (blind-folded), and search for their partner with the same color. The blind-fold serves to allow them greater listening focus, and it’s also fun for kids, who usually don’t mind bumping into people or things. (Guide them if necessary to prevent injury!)
******Stay tuned for Part 2.
CommentContinuing with the theme of auditory illusions, combination tones (or resultant tones), when heard in the presence of two audible pitches, can be quite startling. It’s as if there is a third pitch there. This ‘third’ frequency, however, is not actually present in terms of measurable frequencies or volume. It cannot be detected or measured on any spectrum analysis device. It is only the human ear which detects this phenomenon. If two singers each produce pure sine wave- like tones in different pitches, they can move these around, creating different interval relationships, producing the effect of a siren-like sweep of combination tones. The resulting siren effect depends on the relationship between the two changing frequencies produced by the singers, and by the direction they are moving (closer together, or further apart).
The ability of the listener to detect combination tones depends upon certain physiological, experiential and sensory factors. It seems to be related to a function of the brain to focus and categorize the experience. Singers skilled in overtone singing seem to be particularly adept at perceiving these tones.
The imagined frequency can be much lower than the original two. This is due to it being the difference in vibration between the two original pitches. These are known as differential tones.
It can also be higher than the original pitches, corresponding to the sum of their vibrations. In this case, the tones may be referred to as summational tones.
The effect may be especially pronounced given ideal acoustical properties of the space they are in. This is curious, since the differential tones themselves cannot be recorded or measured, yet the very architecture may enhance our ‘perception’ of sound.
The best experience I had in hearing these tones (both listening to other singers and participating in the singing), was in a modern ‘castle’ in the Czech Republic, which had a very unusual ceiling with vaulted areas that produced a very surreal ‘bonus’ acoustic effect.
I highly recommend experimenting with this phenomenon (with a friend), as it is sure to increase your listening sensitivity, and heighten your ability to hear the partials in your own voice.
Check out the Titchener Test for combination tones. It is an excellent self- study program for finding and expanding your level of intuitive listening (as opposed to ‘analytical’ listening). I would call it an ideal companion to the study of perfect and/ or relative pitch, and by extension, the study of overtone singing.
CommentFor all musicians, ear training is especially important. It is a small percentage of the population born with ‘perfect pitch’. Research has shown that those whose native tongue is one of the ‘melodic’ languages are more likely to be endowed with this ability (i.e. Chinese). This can be a huge boost in musical endeavors, but also can prove to be a burden. These people are extremely sensitive to anything out of tune and it can drive them crazy! For myself, I was not born with it, nor have I ever developed it, but I think that at times I’ve been able to ‘memorize’ a pitch if I get a certain anchor tune in my head.
It may be developed later in life, although it may be more successful if taught to young children, whose ears are more adaptable than adults. The best resource for this training is David Lucas Burge’s Ear Training Library.
Relative pitch (also taught through the above link), is quite different in nature and may be taught quite successfully to anyone. Once one establishes a root pitch, they may learn to identify at least a second pitch above or below it. I believe this is by far the most necessary ability for musicians of any kind. In jazz college, I was blessed with a wonderful ear training teacher, Sam Lancaster. He very methodically opened our ears in a progressive system that became quite complex in later stages.
For overtone singing, if one is to pursue serious polyphonic movement particularly, the ability to recognize intervals is very important. Not only does one need to know what the various intervals are (mainly the ones present in the natural harmonic series, and secondarily other intervals as they relate to the movement of the fundamentals), but also the singer needs to really hear these intervals present in their own voice. This requires a certain inner monitoring of oneself. Often, beginning overtone singers produce lovely clear overtones that others hear easily, but the singer still does not hear them themselves. They need encouragement that the overtones are definitely there.
One helpful idea I recommend for beginning overtone singers is the use of tuning forks. The most useful combinations for this practice are those that produce:
- a perfect 5th (C and G above, or A and E above) for recognizing the 6th harmonic
- a major third (C and E above) for recognizing the 5th and 10th harmonics
The next most important would be those that produce:
- a natural 7th (C and Bb above) for recognizing the 7th harmonic
- a major 9th (C and D above) for recognizing the 9th harmonic
The way to use these tuning forks is to first strike the lower pitched fork and hold the end to one ear, just in front of the little flap of cartilage at the mid area. Then immediately strike the other fork and do the same at the other ear. You can try this with alternating which ear gets the fundamental. Done often enough, the intervals become reinforced in the brain.
I will get further into the topic of tuning forks in a later blog, as there are many different frequencies of forks used for various purposes according to various value systems (i.e. not according to ‘artificial’ concert pitch).
Another useful approach to identifying intervals is by the association of certain well known songs with the first two notes creating a certain interval. You can find a good list of these here.
Comment
