This week we took the importance of music a step further. Although, it was not directly linked to our evocative objects, the task was to think of two contrasting songs and discuss your choice of songs to the rest of the class. We then created a game in the class ‘ delve or share’. The class listened to my choice of songs and then they had to delve and think of why I chose the songs I did. If we did not want the class to delve we could share the information to them.

My choice of songs was a song I liked and a song I disliked. I chose ‘Believe’ by Cher and ‘A little Respect’ by Erasure. My favourite song is ‘Believe’ so that is why I chose that song, it is also a song that I want played at my funeral so has some positive and negative emotions. ‘A little respect’ is a song I have never enjoyed listening to, mainly as it reminds me of a certain person who is no longer part of my life.

I enjoyed listening to my peers choice of songs, as it was interesting to see their body language change when listening to their contrasting songs. Most of the class, when listening to a song they disliked they became tense and wanted the song off quickly in comparison to a song they liked most of the class seemed to justify or apologise for their song choice.

The next part of the module consisted of watching videos relating to why music is important in movies and tv programmes. The part I found the most interesting was that it is not the scene that causes emotions of sadness, happiness or fear it is the music choice that helps create the desired emotion.  Pixar are extremely good at this and the video below explains how well they do this.

We were then asked to create our own movie soundtrack – to change the feeling of the scene. Below are the two soundtracks I chose to show how music can change a scene of a movie.

This weeks task revolved around our evocative object but in another way. Rather than expressing our feelings and emotions through words, we were to create our own piece of music relating to our evocative object.

As previously mentioned, my evocative object was my granny’s weddings rings. As the rings are symbolic of love I wanted to have some church chimes throughout the song. My granny and grandpa were married in a church so I felt this represented the rings well. I used the emotions I felt to try and think of other musical instruments that I could hear when I looked at the wedding rings.

Although, the rings have some sad elements I wanted my piece of music to sound happy and upbeat. We used an app called Garage Band to compose our piece of music.

Below is the piece of music I created.

This would interesting to do with children, often children would struggle to express their emotions in words so to do this through composing music is another way of using arts through-out the curriculum. Music is beneficial to children in a number of ways;  it can  help sharpen student attentiveness, strengthen perseverance, equip students to be creative and support better study habits and self esteem. It has been found that pupils who are interested in music and play a musical instrumental are the most likely group to be admitted to a medical school (Arts Education Partnership, 2011).

Furthermore, children would be developing many skills as well as being able to communicate their feelings in another way.

In the first week of our Expressive Arts and Culture module we were thinking about evocative objects. An evocative object is “an everyday object becoming part of our inner life: how we use them to extend the reach of our sympathies by bringing the world within” according to Turkle (2011).

I had never thought that an object could be evocative until now but since this workshop I have had a think about other every day objects I know are special to me but had never thought about the emotions that I feel.

The object I brought to class was my Granny’s weddings rings I was given after she passed away. It evoked a lot of emotion as it was a year since she passed this week so I was thinking a lot about her. The rings are not something I wear everyday but I see them everyday when I look in my jewellery box. Whenever I see them I think about how special she was to me and I reminisce of the memories I have. ,

Although, I was anxious and felt a little upset when I had to speak to my peers about my evocative object in hindsight it was an interesting task to do and also to hear about my peers objects and what their objects meant to them. Although, some people had similar objects they all had a different meaning and were special in different ways.

This would be an interesting activity to do with children during circle time. I would allow each child in the class a minute to speak about their evocative object, this may be too long for early level children, but would be interesting to do with children in middle-upper primary.

Our task for next was to think of sixty-two words that links to our evocative object which will then be created into a concrete poem. I felt this task was challenging to think of words to describe an object that was very personal to me. Below is a video of my saying the sixty-two words I chose to describe my evocative object.

Reference:

Turkle, S. (2011). Evocative objects. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press.

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