Yesterday, we went to the National Music Centre in Studio Bell. The first thing we did was listen to one of the guides, Cam, play the Kimball Theater Organ. The organ had different instruments like drums, flutes, and more! When he played the organ, he played the Star Wars song, the 20th Century Fox intro, and demonstrated other sounds it could make.
After Cam played the organ, he gave us a sheet that said it was a scavenger hunt to see how many points we could collect. We had time to explore the galleries. We got to play instruments like a piano, acoustic, bass and electric guitars, drums, a tuning rod, a violin, a stand-up bass, and an accordion. One room had a whiteboard where you could make up a futuristic instrument. We could also listen to instruments being played and you could listen to something you created. Lots of people wanted to try the sound box where you could sing along into a microphone.
We did a program where we had to make a song. One of the songs we made was where we had to say our pets' names. At first, it was just "Snoopy....Snoopy...Snoopy..." Then, we said more names until he sounded like a crazy mess of noises. Cam was trying to teach us about patterns and that our brains like patterns. That is consonance in music, when things fit into a pattern or when sounds are the same pitch or in tune. Dissonance in music sounds "annoying" to us. It sounds like too much of a mess for our brains to predict what's going to come next.Cam played us a song. We had to make sentences that rhymed in the same pattern as the song: ABCB. Three of the sentences needed to have 7 syllables. The last one needed to have 8. Having 8 syllables in the last sentence makes people want to listen more because it makes it interesting. The pattern has dissonance so that will make people's brains want to listen more because the 8 doesn't belong there.
An interesting side note is that from the National Music Centre window, we could see three people's public art projects: I's walking animated figures, Sophia's upside-down church, and Charlotte's bloom structure. On the ride home, we passed more: Isla's giant head (Wonderland), Abby's Famous Five, D's BUMP mural, other BUMP murals, and we saw the Mustard Seed.
