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Music Week 2015
Feb 02 – 60, 2015
A week for and with music at SUIS Pudong
Music Week 2015 focused on experiencing music as something we all can do – something that naturally lives and breathes within us. Give it a stage, a microphone or a few art supplies and you will hear it!
Five (!) concerts were held and gave students’ talents the chance to be in the spotlight of a full auditorium – stage fright, goofs and roaring applause inclusive. Not only were the performances exciting, but the selection of Western and Chinese instruments and music, including a rendition of New Zealand’s “Haka” by our KS2 Choir, were as well. Prior to the concerts, students had been busy recording a wish. Speaking wishes for others into a black box, 468 voices created sound art and filled our school with the notion that our own happiness is also the happiness of others.
Building various instruments at the Art Station and enjoying different musical genres at one of four Listening Stations completed an exciting week. By combining different musical experiences – listening, performing and instrument building – Music Week accompanied our students to learn through creativity, sound and interaction.
Music Week – Art Station
Our Art Station allows students to build their own instruments during Music Week. Each student has the opportunity to become an instrument maker and build their own shaker, rainstick or other instrument – with results that sound great!
Make a Wish
Make a Wish is an interactive sound installation created for the Music Week 2015 at Shanghai United International School, Pudong Campus, IS Primary Department in February 2015.
Students approach a recording interface – a white circle on the outside of a big black box – and record a wish into a microphone hidden behind it. A computer application realized in the programming environment MAX MSP triggers four independent, simultaneously working playback engines that randomly choose a recording and play it back on either the left, the right or on both speakers at randomly timed intervals. The result is a dynamic, ever changing sound collage of the recorded wishes.
Prior to recording, students spend time composing their wishes. In making a wish for someone else, they explore the notion of selflessness and “walk” along the continuum between personal desire and vital needs of others. Make a Wish was first exhibited in February 2015, after the Western and before Chinese New Year and therefore a time when Western and Chinese cultures traditionally make wishes.
Homework G5 Oct 27 – 31
Answer the following questions:
1. What is a semitone?
2. What is the interval from one piano key to the next (black or white)? What is the interval from one guitar fret to the next?
Good ears, Panda!
Grade 2 Panda showed excellent listening skills yesterday… they could distinguish musical intervals played on the guitar – and placed them correctly on big “piano keys” that I had laid out on the floor.
Not only that: the intervals became more and more complex; in the end I played three different notes (again, with intervals that were difficult to define). They got them all right.
Well done, G2 Panda!
Ensemble Auditions
The selection for our KS2 Choir and the Percussion Ensemble has been completed. Successful students and parents will be informed within this week. Do not be disheartened if your child has not been accepted! Auditions will be held regularly to add new members to our ensembles.
KS1 Choir auditions are ongoing and will be finalized by the end of the week.