MUSICAL CREATIONS

8B & 8C

Electric toothbrush and plastic tubs become a versatile musical instrument in Dylan’s hands. Cora performs her composition for

coconut membranophone using her own iconic musical notation system.

Ms. Cook’s project assignment was general, broad, even vague:

create something musical that has never existed -

(and teach yourself something about one of the topics on our 8th grade music syllabus).

Students responded with inventions and compositions displaying depths of imagination and resourcefulness.

Liza’s creation - recycled materials used in inventive ways

Elisabeth’s wooden bar idiophone with number system for musical notation

Linus combines chordophone with aerophone in a single instrument

Henry’s chordophone with plastic jug resonator

David, Feline and Serafina display their projects - aerophone, idiophone, chordophone

Eric plays a chordophone with sliding bridge

Emily color-coded her analysis of a movement from a Classical Era Sonatina to show that it is rather simple harmonically.

Lucy performs her composition for triangular plucked chordophone. She found a clever way of tuning the bands and holding them in place using toothpicks.

Noteworthy Projects(not pictured above)

Henri created a multi-voice, a cappella arrangement of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” which captivated us all. He sang every track himself, recorded each one, then layered them using

music software. He also produced a complete score of the arrangement. Whoa!

Shahida created a composition from tuned glasses and video recorded the performance.

Yes, we have all seen tuned glasses, but Shahida added a twist that made her project unique: she used paint in the glasses, each glass holding a

different color, then created a color-coded musical notation for her musical score. It was beautiful to

both eyes and ears!

Joshua and Alex created software to capture the signal of a Wii remote, enabling the user to play a computer instrument remotely - all the way down the hall and around the corner! (We know some folks who would like to hire these two students!)