Rhythm
Even though senza tempo in Italian can refer beautifully as “timeless”, in music, we can barely go without tempo, at least for beginners. Especially among children, building sense of rhythm is quite hard to tackle. It is important to consistently practice this sense of rhythm for different types of music even though for the genres that are not bound by time, for instance the swinging Jazz or more improvised impressionist pieces. As learners, we should probably follow the prescribed time and tempo of music to pick up a new piece or to make a new one for others.
This module focuses on strengthening sense of rhythm with hands-on percussive exercises that should be fun and engaging for all ages.
The first part of this exercise focus on active listening for beats in a series of chosen pieces of music. We have built a repertoire for this exercise but feel free to choose your own songs. When listening for the beats, focus on which beats are heavier or lighter, and how much time each beat takes. Do not miss out the background beats that are often lighter if it is a popular song that you are listening to. You may need a good headphone and a quiet room for this part to focus your listening.
Listening for Beats
Identifying pitches, time signature and combination of notes
The next part in this exercise first should identify the pitches in the musical composition, and match those lines of pitches with different percussive instruments you have. For popular songs with male and female singers, the vocal part of female singer is usually the highest pitch, so we can use a Xylophone to represent the singing of female singer in the song. If you are running short of percussive instruments, you could try making good use of any hollowed surface you can find in your surroundings. The different combination of percussive instruments can create sound of various pitches.
The next step would be to identify the time signature and commonly used combination of notes in the song. There are some usual ones in the photos illustrated above for your selection.
After finding out the pitch lines and beat combination of your choice of song, this part of the exercise is simply to recreate your song with the percussive instruments and surfaces.
Tapping beats
After all the above steps, how about rewriting and transforming your selected song. Try to write down the combination of each percussive instruments or physical surfaces, independently or guided by your music teacher.
Transforming the song
Extension to Climate Education
Soundscape of Cities and Urban Heat Effects
After listening to songs and tapping their beats, how about we go out to different cities to listen to their own beats. Try to visit different cities in your vicinity (for example London and its suburbs, Birmingham, Newcastle and Sunderland) and stand in a mega city centre and listen to the traffic, the chatters, and any sound effects. What is the rhythm of these sound sources? Is that more intense than rural areas?
Living with the effects of climate change, city centres may suffer heavier temperature rising due to the urban island heat effect. The tarmac road with heavier traffics in cities can also create more intense sound level.
A number of sound engineers around the world have transformed sound mixes and field recordings of their cities into music. How about giving this approach a go too?
Released on 30 April 2025
Updated 2 May 2025
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