workshops and residencies
exploring the basis of listening

 

FOUND SOUND introduces hands-on workshops designed specifically for educators, university students of education, elementary students and high school arts students. Focusing on music making and storytelling the workshops offer techniques to access the creative process and heighten student achievement.

• Educators workshop: Specifically designed to introduce simple usable ideas for classroom use that will open up possibilities of music making and storytelling. The workshop is also useful for educators who have no music training.
  
  Using combinations of drones, voice, bottles, spoons, and cardboard drums, the workshops focus on specific projects that teachers and parents can employ to introduce music making into the classroom without being a specialist in music.
  
  Introducing the musical saw and the theremin (the latest instrument of the Minden orchestra) opens up a discussion of the overshadowing of the natural acoustic soundscape and the overwhelming electronic universe of sound which informs all our lives at the beginning of the 21st century.

• Elementary school workshops:
  workshops organized around specific themes
  
  Some examples:
  Making a cardboard tube drum & learning how to play the spoons to discover rhythm and keep a beat, using found sound objects to play musical games to demonstrate the depiction of mood and feeling through sound, introducing bottle playing, learning how to explore the voice as an instrument, a discussion of the way we live with sound and the idea of “soundscape”, introducing the musical saw and the theremin (the world’s first electric instrument). The workshops are designed to offer students possibilities that enrich listening and sharpen perception.

• Workshops for university students in education faculties
  
  A Brief Course Description: To explore sound and listening. The DUO presents their elementary school performance "Found Sound", a unique form of music and storytelling theatre, using found object instruments including: spoons, bottles, turkey basters, cardboard tubes, carpenter hand saws, and plumbing pipe.The ideas and concepts of the performance are then broken down into a series of workshops which focus on how to use music making and storytelling as tools of discovery in the classroom.
  
  Workshop Objectives: To offer an approach for education students to increase their knowledge and skills in the arts and acquire techniques that use the arts as a teaching and learning strategy for improving students’ basic skills. By engaging in participation workshops, education students are offered an experience in the arts to enhance instructional applications and teaching strategies, a hands-on learning experience in storytelling and music making offering strategies that will increase student participation and achievement.
  
  Workshop Content : Workshops are structured to follow the DUO’s 45 min. elementary school performance, so that participants can first see the ideas and concepts of the workshop in a finished artistic form before breaking down its’ elements.

Each workshop requires 45 minutes - 1 hour

• Meet the Artists: lecture/demonstrations. After the performance the audience is invited to question the artists about what they have just seen and begin a dialogue on the creative process of storytelling and composition. This session introduces and demonstrates the ideas of the performance using volunteers to demonstrate various “instruments” of the DUO’s collection.

• Sound Travels: participation workshop. To heighten one’s sense of hearing and engage in the art of listening , participants will explore “silence” in an indoor setting and an outdoor setting. Students will collect sound impressions and record them in a sound journal. Participants will experience one of the most accessible acoustic wonders, the internal sound of an oven rack.

• Explore the Creative Use of the Voice: participation workshop. By imitating the sound of found objects with the voice, students will begin using their voices in an easy and dramatic way. The workshop will demonstrate how to create a vocal sound collage.

• Make a “Bottle Orchestra": participation workshop. How to use bottles as a musical instrument and the various techniques involved to produce different sounds .The process of creating a “bottle orchestra” will be workshopped.

• Communicating with Drums: participation workshop. Participants will make drums out of packing tubes using different lengths and diameters and engage in various exercises which explore dialogue and expression of feeling through the language of rhythm.

• Structured Improvisation: participation workshop. Students will explore the creative process by using a short narrative as the story structure, scoring it with an “orchestra” comprised of voice, cardboard tube drums, bottle band and miscellaneous found objects to create a storytelling theatre in the manner of the Robert Minden Ensemble.