Gem Institute and Music Museum Field Trips

Since we were going to be in Carlsbad for the Flower Fields, we set up field trips at the Gem Institute and the Museum of Making Music while we were there. Both places take homeschool group tours, but you have to schedule in advance. At the Gem Institute you have to go past the guard booth and show your ID, which makes you feel kind of important. The tower on the front of the building has this beautiful sparkling crystal in the top.

It's not a huge museum, and none of my pictures are very good, but we loved seeing all the beautiful minerals and gems! This crystal pendant was hanging in the front window, and what you can't tell from the picture is that it's HUGE—probably as tall as Daisy. There are beautiful colored inclusions in the quartz, and when the sun comes through, it makes rainbow patterns on the walls and floor.

They did have some things the kids were allowed to touch. Hooray!

There were some interesting works of art made from gemstones—carved pieces like these, and others.

One of my favorite things was this display of orchestral instruments, all carved from precious stones.

I loved this. It's called Ametrine, and it's only found in one area of the world, where the minerals amethyst (the purple one) and citrine (the yellow one) occur naturally together. The sign said that at first, gemologists usually cut and faceted the stones with yellow on one side and purple on the other, but now they've found ways to cut them where the two colors join and blend, to give a more modern, free-form look. Aren't they all beautiful?

We always love malachite!

The display of opals was really beautiful. The museum had a birthstone exhibit that these were part of.

A rainbow of gemstones! I'll take one of each, please.

Our next stop, the Museum of Making Music, was great too. We had a whole tour and class, led by Mr. Bill (or Mr. Bob? or something like that) who was such a nice, friendly man. (He seemed greatly disappointed in us when none of the kids had heard of Elvis Presley, though.) First he had us sit in a drum circle and let the kids take turns conducting us. Adam LOVED that, as you can see.

So did Ben.

So did Daisy!

And at the end of the museum tour, there was a room with a whole bunch of different instruments the kids could try out! It was a little nerve-racking for Allison and me, keeping track of all ten of them and making sure no one dropped or broke anything, but the kids loved it!

Note Teddy in background, waving a zither or some such thing around

This was a great culmination of our Sound and Percussion Unit!

Field Trip to Rosewood Recording Studio

Because I am lucky and I have the most awesome friends, we were able to take a field trip to Rosewood Recording Studio during this unit. I've known the Randles since high school (they were part of my inspiration to homeschool our children, in fact) and they are the nicest, most interesting people you could hope to meet. Guy gave us a great introduction to sound basics and then showed us how he mixes and captures sound in his studio. He even recorded the children singing and then showed them how he could isolate individual voices, slow down and speed up different tracks, add customized reverb profiles, etc. They LOVED it!

The dogs were very friendly too.

It's such a cool studio, full of so many cords and microphones and instruments!

Doesn't it make you want to play some music?

And Kristen even took us to visit her horses afterwards. Such a fun day!

Percussion

Ever since I was in high school, playing in a percussion ensemble of my own, I have loved going to the BYU Percussion concerts, and I've always wanted to take my children to one! The college has added a group specializing in Eastern music since I was there, and that is really strange and interesting (though the regular Percussion Ensemble is still my favorite). The steel drums group, Panoramic Steel, is always really fun too.

So, we made sure to schedule a field trip to the "Evening of Percussion" concert during this unit. We loved it! And the children were using my mallets and drumsticks to drum on everything for the next few weeks…but that was inevitable, of course. :)

A few other percussion-related resources:

This is an interesting video about a day in the life of a symphonic percussionist

Demonstrations of how to play African log drums.

We looked up videos of pretty much every percussion instrument on YouTube, just so we could hear what each one sounded like. It's interesting to hear the difference between a marimba and a xylophone, for example, or glockenspiel and celesta.

Here's a sample of a piece written for water percussion

You've probably heard of this percussion group called "Stomp." They create percussion music with all kinds of "junk" like garbage cans and brooms, and with their bodies too. We watched a couple videos of this and the children liked it. (I played a percussion piece in high school where we just clapped, drummed on our knees, stomped, pounded on our stomachs, etc. to create the music, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever!)

Have you heard this piece by John Cage for prepared piano? So weird and cool. I've always wanted to play something for prepared piano.

And of course, there's also Cage's famous piece 4'33", which consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of just…silence. Or rather, all the ambient sounds—people coughing, programs rustling, etc—ARE the music. It's one of those avant-garde concepts that cause lots of arguments about "what is music"—but you can't argue that the idea is interesting! I've always thought it would be fun to hear this one performed live.

Carl Nielsen's 5th Symphony has a really cool snare drum part—the snare drummer is basically directed to "fight against" the conductor of the piece in one section. The drum part calls for wild, ad-libbed drumming, even playing in a different time signature than the rest of the orchestra, and without regard to what the rest of the musicians are doing. It's a symbol of war and chaos. Eventually the drummer is "defeated" by the rest of the music and goes offstage, still playing. You can read descriptions of the piece here and here. And you can listen to it here (for that crazy snare drum part, start at about 15:40)

And here is a video of the children drumming on the couch and other things. They really love doing this and they love watching videos of themselves doing it. :)

Sound and Percussion Homeschool Unit and Lesson Plan

We did a unit on Light last year, so it seemed like we ought to do a unit on Sound too! I love our physics-related units, though every time they make me wish my dad were still alive so he could be our guest lecturer (and help explain everything to me!). Dad helped me do a science fair project when I was in elementary school where I got to use an oscilloscope from his office, and I loved it. I felt so important. :)

I considered, briefly, making this into a Music Unit as well, but I quickly realized that would be too much. Sound and Music are so entertwined, though, that it made sense to at least cover the percussion instruments, especially since those are so fundamentally about sound and vibration. I consider myself a percussionist too, even though my main instrument has always been the piano and that's what I majored in—because I played in the drumline and percussion section in high school, and I also played percussion with one of the university orchestras during my first year of college. I've always loved percussion ensembles! In all their forms. 

One book I read on my own to prepare for this unit was called The Sound Book, and I LOVED it. It's by an acoustic engineer—or maybe he's a physicist?—who went around the world seeking "sonic wonders of the world."  Here is an interesting article about it, and here is the author's website with links to recordings of some of these sites (and other sounds, like birds). It is an awesome site and I recommend it. The recording of the lyrebird is one of my favorites! But the comparisons of a balloon popping in different sites (like in an anechoic chamber vs. a mausoleum) are pretty cool too.

A documentary we watched and  really liked was called Note by Note, and showed the making of a Steinway 9-foot grand piano over the course of a year. Everything is done by hand, and there are so many interesting details! You can see how each piano has its own distinct sonic character.

We also really enjoyed Organworks, a documentary showing different pipe organs around the world and talking about how they were made, changes to the pipe organ over the years, etc. The host of the show was quite entertaining and it was just generally a lot more absorbing than you might think, reading the description. Although I admit we tend to like stuff like this anyway. :)

Some previous activities we've done in our homeschool that are music and sound-related are:

Making a glass armonica

Making rubber-band "lutes"

Making homemade drums and mallets

Listening to examples of birdsong in music

And here's my Pinterest Board for this Unit, with other links and ideas for activities.