Post by Yvonne Liu-Constant & Elizabeth Cavicchi,
New England group of Hawkins Centers of Learning
New England group of Hawkins Centers of Learning
Mess About with Sound was the theme for the New England group of the Hawkins Centers of Learning on the morning of Saturday, November 5, 2016. Among the 20 participants were educators of students ranging from early childhood to graduate school, as well as graduate students in education. Materials for exploration included: strings, wires, glasses, water, pipes, tubes, wood, sand, colored sugar, glass bottles, tin and plastic boxes, violin bows and resin, tuning forks, metal bowls, etc. The playful gathering met in a classroom with six working tables, side benches and a sink, at the Edgerton Center at MIT, Cambridge MA.
The MIT Edgerton Center offers a range of experiential learning, hands-on activities and engineering challenge projects and clubs for students and participants from grade school to graduate school. http://edgerton.mit.edu/ Through its many K12 programs, children and teachers from local schools, or coming from other communities and international settings, participate in hands-on sessions and extended workshops. In a single session, children working in pairs design, construct and race a car made from Lego; a summer workshop has teens forming teams for developing and constructing an open-ended engineering of their own design. In doing this work, the Edgerton Center continues the legacy of strobe pioneer “Doc” Harold Edgerton, whose boundless spirit of investigation encouraged students to follow their curiosity in experimenting and questioning.
The MIT Edgerton Center offers a range of experiential learning, hands-on activities and engineering challenge projects and clubs for students and participants from grade school to graduate school. http://edgerton.mit.edu/ Through its many K12 programs, children and teachers from local schools, or coming from other communities and international settings, participate in hands-on sessions and extended workshops. In a single session, children working in pairs design, construct and race a car made from Lego; a summer workshop has teens forming teams for developing and constructing an open-ended engineering of their own design. In doing this work, the Edgerton Center continues the legacy of strobe pioneer “Doc” Harold Edgerton, whose boundless spirit of investigation encouraged students to follow their curiosity in experimenting and questioning.
Discovering the Unexpected
The gathering started with self introductions on personal experiences with sound. Sound is upcoming as a unit for two grade school teachers, who said children enjoy sound, while they wonder about getting into its “intricacies”. A teacher of one-year-olds described the loud screaming of infants as “Just for Fun!”, showing their fascination in the sounds they make. A preschool teacher reflected that, while “Kids love noise!”, you need both noise and silence -”music has silence too”. An education graduate student, having read essays by David Hawkins, was intrigued to play with sound; a jazz musician and her teen daughter sought to connect their music with teaching children.
The activity period began when Elizabeth Cavicchi, an instructor at the Edgerton Center, invited participants to:
The activity period began when Elizabeth Cavicchi, an instructor at the Edgerton Center, invited participants to:
Explore something that makes a sound with materials on your tables.
Materials on the six tables included: soda straws, scissors, balloons, tape, rubber bands, string, popsicle sticks paper cups. Before long, the room was filled with sound, conversations, and laughter, as strangers quickly bonded while: blowing up balloons, stretching balloons, rubbing and drumming with filled balloons, blowing by mouth over the tops of soda straws, producing high pitched sounds from materials, and squeals of hilarity among participants. Suddenly, a balloon popped, evoking shrieks in reaction.
Co-facilitator Yvonne Liu-Constant, early childhood professor at Lesley University, brought new materials, including glass bottles of various heights, to the tables. Both deep and high tones sounded from blowing over the bottles’ top, by mouth and soda straw. Rubber bands were stretched across bottles longitudinally, cookie tins and a dustpan. Fingers or fingernails plucked the stretched rubber bands. After 10 minutes, these activities were brought to a pause when Elizabeth made a ringing sound by hitting a brass bowl to gather people’s attention. Elizabeth then invited participants “to share discoveries, sounds, curiosities”. Those that blew over a bottle by mouth and straw described and demonstrated their “fog horn” and their surprise at producing a “whistle; I didn’t expect a whistle!” The video below reveals Amanda’s thrill at “discovering the unexpected! Whee”:
Co-facilitator Yvonne Liu-Constant, early childhood professor at Lesley University, brought new materials, including glass bottles of various heights, to the tables. Both deep and high tones sounded from blowing over the bottles’ top, by mouth and soda straw. Rubber bands were stretched across bottles longitudinally, cookie tins and a dustpan. Fingers or fingernails plucked the stretched rubber bands. After 10 minutes, these activities were brought to a pause when Elizabeth made a ringing sound by hitting a brass bowl to gather people’s attention. Elizabeth then invited participants “to share discoveries, sounds, curiosities”. Those that blew over a bottle by mouth and straw described and demonstrated their “fog horn” and their surprise at producing a “whistle; I didn’t expect a whistle!” The video below reveals Amanda’s thrill at “discovering the unexpected! Whee”:
This idea of “discovering the unexpected” was a thread through much of the sharing. From another table, Cindy shared about her initial exploration of rubber bands stretched on a tin box:
| I discovered that I didn’t like it. This was too safe, it was going with an idea that I already know existed. It’s more fun to afterwards say, that’s why it wasn’t working! I was trying to repeat something that existed already. I realized I needed to let go of what I already “know” (she gestured air quotes), so I could get into something that I didn’t know. It was fun watching others who were more experimental... |
Several participants expressed an initial sense of relationships holding between the materials making the sounds, and the sounds produced. Noticing that rubber bands of different tautness sounded differently, Devon, an education student wondered if the different sized bottles might sound differently. By blowing into soda straws that she bent sharply (so as to seal off the tube), first in half, then in quarters, Kate found sounds of increasingly high pitch (An interesting extension - we don’t know if she tried it- would be to cut a soda straw to the same length as the bent sealed one, and compare the sounds of blowing into both tubes). Another student found that the loudness of plucked rubber bands was lessened when the bands were stretched over a plastic dustpan, as compared to over a metal cookie tin.
After ten minutes of group sharing these initial sounds and observations, Elizabeth opened the next round of experimenting, saying
After ten minutes of group sharing these initial sounds and observations, Elizabeth opened the next round of experimenting, saying
| "I encourage you to continue taking something further. Amplify it, extend it, change the sounds, see what you can modify, what that means. There are more materials, ask for things. I want everyone to have an experience with a tuning fork.” |
To set the tuning fork sounding, Elizabeth suggested striking it with a rubber mallet or against one’s hand; hitting it on a table or other rigid material could deform the fork.
Gallery Walks
Further explorations extended for the next half-hour. At a point when one table’s sounds, and the hilarity and excitement of its participants attracted the attention of many, Yvonne paused the experimenting, again by ringing the brass bowl. Inviting everyone over to that table, she said:
| Let’s do this next sharing Gallery Walk style. Come over here so we can see it, where the action is. |
While it is difficult to capture all the excitement and discoveries, here are two stories:
Making a Private Sound More Public
| It started with a “dustpan guitar” during the first exploration. As the creator explained, he was playing with rubber bands, but did not like the sound when he wrapped them over tin boxes. So he looked around and found a dustpan in the corner of the room, which made sounds that were quiet and satisfying, “especially when you put it right up against your ear, the vibration is really nice.” Other participants at his table enjoyed it too. |  |
This idea of quiet, private sounds was explored at many tables with various materials, as was evident in the numerous photos of leaning in to listen.
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As the messing about evolved, ways of amplifying the sounds were explored.
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The process of messing about with the volume of sound was beautifully described in this video as “making a private sound more public”.
Seeing Sound
Ann sought out something to do with the shaker of colored ice cream sprinkles. She placed a sheet of paper over a cardboard tea box, and scattered sprinkles on the sheet. The sprinkles fell off. Then Yvonne gave her a large cookie tin. Inverting the tin so its large rimmed bottom was up, over its surface she scattered colored sprinkles, along with bits and pieces of straw and string. On striking a tuning fork into vibration, and placing the tuning fork’s handle onto the tin’s surface, the colored bits jumped around. This video relates from Ann’s “quiet dance of the dots.”
The “quiet dance” that Ann produced by applying the tuning fork to the tin was soon superseded by Mary. Blowing into one end of a whirly tube (corrugated open plastic tube) while the other end abutted the tin surface, a tremendous elephant-trunk like sound was produced. The sprinkles and paper bits sprayed yet more wildly under the influence of this sound. In explanation of her invention, Mary revealed that she had become fascinated by the didgeridoo, an Australian wind instrument consisting of a long, sometimes curved and conical, tube.
 Bits of styrofoam bounce on the cookie tin after Genet applies a tuning fork to it. |  Greater agitation of the same bits arises as Mary applies a corrugated tube to the cookie tin while she blows into it. |
At the close of the gallery walk, Kate, in a different group, observed that the experiments with the colored sprinkles, together with her independent experiment with a stretched rubber band, provide ways to see and feel sound. She reflected how these sensations make sound accessible to those who are deaf:
| We were thinking how sound and vibrations are what you hear. I put a rubber band on this glass; you couldn’t hear it, but you could feel it! I think of those who are deaf, how they hear vibrations. ... [A deaf person] could get an idea. It is like the experiment with colored jimmies, that you can see different sounds! |
Discussion of Readings
The gallery walk, which engendered questions, demonstrations, and group participatory extensions of the sounds, occupied almost 20 minutes. Elizabeth brought this period of experimental sharing to a close by opening time for group discussion of readings, saying:
| I shared with you some readings. We’ll take time to talk about a reading. If you want to gravitate around a particular reading or discuss several. Talk in your groups. What intrigued you about a reading? Or did it gave you ideas of what to try? |
List of Readings
Readings were sent to participants in advance by email; a few paper copies of each were available during the discussion. These readings were:
- Excerpts (pp. 19-20) from “Confessions of a Lay Cello Teacher”, Sylvia Burns. From Outlook, Issue 15, Spring, 1975, pp. 19-22.
- Chapter V from SOUND: Simple, Entertaining, and Inexpensive Experiments in the Phenomena of Sound, for the Use of Students of Every Age, from Experimental Science Series for Beginners, Alfred Marshall Mayer, 1878. NY: Appleton & Co. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=H64-AAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP1
- Excerpt (p. 1-3) from Introduction by Paolo Gozza. In Number to Sound: the musical way to the Scientific Revolution, P. Gozza ed., 2000. Boston: Kluwer.
- Excerpt from “Sound and Sensibility, Pre-Service Science Teachers Bridging Phenomena and Concepts”, Edvin Ostergaard & Bo Dahlin. Paper presented at the NARST conference in Anaheim, USA, April 17 - April 21, 2009. Unpublished.
- The Cicada, A Fable from II Saggiatore, Galileo Galilei 1623. We used the 1976 translation of Philip Morrison, illustrated by Phylis Morrison [unpublished]. The fable appears on p 256-258 in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, Stillman Drake, trans, 1957. NY: Anchor Books.
| Would each group like to share out of your discussions? Does someone have a reflection? |
Exploring - the Cello - and Science Experiments….
The excerpt by Sylvia Burns on exploring the cello inspired several reflections. Cindy found a parallel between the novice exploring the cello as a basis for skilled learning, and how art instruction involves successive phases of exploring. Cindy said:
| When we introduce art to infants, it is really sensory ... When we do it with toddlers, we start to add tools, so we think of it as exploration, they are exploring all those tools, but we don’t show them ‘how to use them’. And when children make the developmental leap to preschool where they are representational, all that experimentation and play with paints and painting tools becomes then the work of art... So it was a parallel, to the idea of playing with music first before and playing with the cello before you learn the skills of a cello. |
When Lucinda spoke of how people come to define themselves as not being “good at” music or science or art, and then giving up on learning that subject, Cindy offered the thought that learners who have explored the subject may be more resilient when faced with such frustrations. Cindy said:
| [maybe] the child hasn’t had that experience to experience it in a playful setting and develop a relationship with it. ...That frustration or wanting to give up, can happen quicker... if it feels too hard. Learning is hard. And we want them to have the passion to push through the hard part to get to the good stuff. |
In identifying with the child’s spontaneous exploration of the cello, Linda recalled her own childhood fascination with science. When her mother gave her science experiment books, LInda started doing those experiments for real. Linda’s story evoked laughter from us all:
| I would do all these science experiments with these books! And some experiments were “out there”! Fill up the bathtub! Crazy stuff! All of a sudden my science books started disappearing! My mother confesses to me now: “I was hiding those books!!” But I never stopped! My books disappeared! I never stopped! I was maybe 7 years old. I loved doing the experiments! So I think when kids see something, they get interested. Then later go to formal learning. That is best way to do it. |
In analogy with Linda’s childhood, one group became energized to do their own experiments while discussing the ‘experiment book’ among our readings, Mayer’s 1878 book on sound. Josephine related how the process of discussing it migrated into having everyone listen to a ringing spoon, an activity she had previously done with children:
| We were talking about different experiments we would like to try!! ...We were interested in the sand [Chladni plates illustrated in Mayer’s book], We were remarking on how it is similar to [Gallery Walk sharing with colored sprinkles] ...We remembered a museum display with violin bow and sand. ... We started talking about things you could do with kids! And we ended up playing some more! A satisfying way to have a private sound moment in the classroom: hang a spoon in the middle of a string, put the string’s ends in your ears with your fingers. Knock the spoon, it sounds very like a bell! Really satisfying. |
 |  Josephine demonstrates how a spoon, hung from the middle of a string [obscured by glasses], conveys a bell sound to her ears. |
Others in her group reported that hanging the spoon from fishing line or a rubber band produced a diminished sound from the spoon. Bill was enthused:
| There are so many different things you can do with spoons! Spoons are such a great musical medium!!! |
Laura applauded this group’s experimental initiative in saying:
| It’s hard to [just] read about experiments. You wanted to do it! |
Yet concurrently, Laura came to an intense rejection of the experiments that had been part of her own school education:
| I remember doing experiments in biology and chemistry. We did experiments. But the experiments were a recipe. It was --Bill interjected “scripted”-- So it is very different, when you experiment. I almost feel now, I resent that I was not allowed to find my own way in school! I feel a little bit of resentment right now! |
In analogy with Linda’s childhood experience in being excited by science experiment books, Cindy wondered what education would be like if the outlook Mayer’s 1878 experiment book was encouraged in schools. Cindy said:
| I wonder what would happen if we took that 1878 book, and put that in our science class? That book’s level of education, that didn’t just skim the surface, that was not to learn that piece of data that you need to answer on that particular test. But really go back to digging deeply into an idea like that. What would science class look like? |
Make Your Own Path
Another group discussed Burns’ cello article in relation to Ostergaard and Dahlin’s study where teachers were asked for creative descriptions of sounds as an opening to their doing projects of developing sound activities for children. Ann was moved by how in making the experience personal, the learner becomes more engaged:
| [In conventional instruction] the path is a standard path, it has nothing to do with me; there is no discovery! It’s different with these articles: the idea of choosing a phenomena like sound, that you can discover and make your own path through. I thought the two articles were really good together. I love this the cello teacher, I think that is a radical idea. Letting someone experiment with an instrument! The idea of personal relationship with object! With science, you are drawn into a relationship with the stuff! Kids are really engaged in are things that they love. Mud, bubbles and sound!! |
Sara spoke of tension that her group members felt, between the delight in experiment that Ann expresses, and the format in schools:
| We talked about what is happening in education and the importance of people being able to experiment. The importance of [doing experiments] in the foundations of learning, hitting that at every grade level. But the difficulty is there is only so much time to get to understand certain concepts. But the question is: “what concepts do students need to understand?” It is a challenging question in the broad spectrum of public education...We have no answers. |
Devon, another group member, interwove the idea of “lifeworld” experience from the Norwegian article, by Ostergaard and Dahlin, with David Hawkins’ sense that a student who explores deeply will come to more “solid understanding of science concepts” than one who hears quick lectures. He had witnessed the vibrancy in this quality of depth, while watching children engage with musical instruments at a “Musical Petting Zoo”, part of Boston’s Jazz Festival https://www.berklee.edu/beantownjazz/kidsjam
Laura described the group Landfill Harmonic portrayed in a 2015 movie, where children in Paraguay make music from landfill junk. A related activity arose in Josephine’s teaching, where four-year olds make instruments from recyclables. As Josephine shared a poignant story from that activity, her own observant sensitivity to the child’s process is revealed:
| One four-year old boy worked on making a trombone. It didn’t produce a trombone sound. It was so beautiful watching him! It was two tubes. He was trying to figure out which tubes to pick, how to make them fit, how to get them to stay! It was a simple but beautiful moment of him remaking a trombone. ... The struggle with two tubes! |
Experiments with Sound
This discussion of the readings and learning engaged the whole group together for half an hour. Elizabeth concluded it by inviting everyone to resume experimenting for another half an hour, to be followed by a final sharing in the context of reading aloud the fable on sound by Galileo:
| You are creating your own instruments, questions, experiments and observations with sound! I encourage you to experiment. At the end, we will read aloud Galileo’s fable, one line for each person. When you read your line, illustrate it with any sound you love that you created today! Come up with a sound that everyone is going to hear. |
Observing Patterns on Vibrating Surfaces
Readers of Mayer’s 1878 chapter on sound were intrigued by its illustrations and amazing descriptions of beautiful symmetrical patterns taken up by sand when a surface that it rests on is set into vibration by stroking its edge with a violin bow. These patterns reveal the character of motion in a vibrating surface, by showing areas of stillness where sand collects, and of maximal motion where sand is missing. German physicist and experimenter Ernst Chladni extended the demonstration of these figures instrumentally and descriptively in the late eighteenth century.
Workshop participants had already produced these behaviors while exploring sugar sprinkles on the cookie tin agitated by a tuning fork or the whirly tube (Gallery Walk). After the reading discussion, Elizabeth brought out instruments that put the Chladni effect into greater visibility.
Workshop participants had already produced these behaviors while exploring sugar sprinkles on the cookie tin agitated by a tuning fork or the whirly tube (Gallery Walk). After the reading discussion, Elizabeth brought out instruments that put the Chladni effect into greater visibility.
 Lucinda scatters sugar sprinkles over the circular glass disc fixed at its center.  Sara vibrates the glass plate with a sounding tuning fork. |  She sets the disc into vibration by stroking against its edge with a violin bow, while watching the sugar jump.  Amanda applies a tuning fork to a wine glass. |
Elizabeth’s homemade instrument consists of a glass disc, drilled with a central hole, by which a screw, cushioned between two rubber washers, affixes it to an upright wood dowel. Having scattered colored sugar over the glass disc, Lucinda stroked a violin bow against its edge, trying to set the disc into vibration. The disc’s wood support being unstable, Lucinda compensated by gripping its base with her hand.
The Technical Services Group (TSG) at MIT's Department of Physics loaned the workshop an apparatus for demonstrating Chladni figures: http://tsgphysics.mit.edu/front/?page=demo.php&letnum=C%2038&show=0
The vibrating surface of this apparatus is a black metal disc which can be interchanged among several differing shapes - during the workshop, only the square shape was used. As with the glass disc, the metal plate is supported at its center by a post. However, in contrast to the disc, the post support itself is vibrating, at a rate that the user determines by turning a dial on the accompanying frequency generator.
The Technical Services Group (TSG) at MIT's Department of Physics loaned the workshop an apparatus for demonstrating Chladni figures: http://tsgphysics.mit.edu/front/?page=demo.php&letnum=C%2038&show=0
The vibrating surface of this apparatus is a black metal disc which can be interchanged among several differing shapes - during the workshop, only the square shape was used. As with the glass disc, the metal plate is supported at its center by a post. However, in contrast to the disc, the post support itself is vibrating, at a rate that the user determines by turning a dial on the accompanying frequency generator.
 Cindy watches closely as the black metal Chladni plate undergoes vibrations from a centrally connected loudspeaker. |  Striking patterns appear in the arrangements of sand on the black plate. |
Workshop participants were awed and enthralled by the patterns arising in the sand together with the agitating tones, and the visual changes accompanying changes in pitch. On increasing the vibration intensity, the sand leapt into swirling clouds, resembling the description in Mayer’s book, p 69
| These powders will behave in the most extraordinary manner when the disk vibrates, forming little heaps and whirlwinds that seem to smoke and boil furiously. |
Experimenting with Bows, Strings, Glasses…
Workshop participants put violin bows to other uses, including ringing a wine glass containing water, and bowing a balloon! After the workshop ended, a teen who was doing activities in an adjacent lab became intrigued by the violin bow, to which he had fervently applied resin - a treatment not sufficiently applied during the workshop. The boy then produced stunning violin-like tones while bowing a metal string stretched over our homemade wood frame.
 Lucinda bowing a wine glass.  Ringing wine glasses, partly filled with water, by finger while listening for its tones. |  Kate bowing a balloon.  Giovanne ringing a glass “singing bowl” by rubbing a finger around its edge. |
Accompanying Galileo’s Fable with Original Sounds
The whole group reconvened, to read aloud Galileo’s 1623 Fable on the Cicada, a story of discovery of the unending ways by which sound comes to be. Yvonne had earlier given each person (or pair) a copy of the text, marked with the one line that they were to read aloud. Alongside reading their line from the fable aloud to the whole group, each participant/pair produced an original sound. Some pairs rehearsed their sounds in advance of the group reading/sharing.
A selection follows:
A selection follows:
- Thumb flute, blowing into balloon to make a squeak, blowing over bottles
- Blowing over a bottle.
- Ringing a bowl, fingering the thumb flute, clattering a cup and stick together.
- Violin bowing over wound guitar string stretched over a homemade wood frame.
- Creaking of the room door hinges.
- Finger rubbed around rim of wine glass.
- Whirly tube flung in a circle overhead.
- Metal file scraping.
- Popsicle stick rubbed on a metal file
- Balloons squealing on release and balloon blown over a bottle, singing bowl set ringing, water dropping down a tube, the sound of air releasing from a balloon
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Reflections on the Gathering
The day after the gathering, we posted photos and video clips in our closed Facebook group page. Participant comments follow:
| “This was such a wonderful experience - I was reflecting on it this morning - already recognizing how this gathering will impact my current practices on exploring sound with children. One point being - I will focus on exploring sounds rather than creating instruments, promoting the exploration of sound and creating a more open-ended exploration. I also am trying to figure out how to write a story with the class that will invite the children to create their own sound effects.” - Amanda |
| “I’ve been thinking about adult play of this nature, and how important it still is. I wonder about the idea of pop-up public play spaces. Places to create mental and emotional health, community, and peace.” - Sara |
| “This experience of truly playing, uninhibitedly, with sound, made me realize that even though I learned to play an instrument (the piano) as a child, I never really played it. It was about reading sheet music and then pressing the right key in the right way; it was music as a discipline, and as a result, I stopped taking lessons in middle school. I wonder what it would be like to go back to the piano and really play it? Would my prior knowledge limit my exploration, or open possibilities?” - Yvonne |
| “I think I enjoyed watching (and hearing the sounds of) the joy during this particular gathering--more than others. The offered materials and the human reactions to the sounds created got pretty “noisy” at times. I had to actually plug my ears a number of times. I was mildly embarrassed doing this. Again and again, I think about our expectations of children in the field of early learning. How do we offer each child the space and respect to react when sound (or other elements in the environment) becomes uncomfortable?” - Laura |
Thanks
MIT Edgerton Center: Jim Bales, Sandi Lipnoski, Amy Fitzgerald, Ed Moriarty
MIT Department of Physics Technical Services Group (TSP)
Alva Couch, Edvin Ostergaard
Memory Yan Yang
MIT Department of Physics Technical Services Group (TSP)
Alva Couch, Edvin Ostergaard
Memory Yan Yang
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