The scribing project is all about helping elementary students develop their composition skills through enactive audiation tasks that lead to iconic and then symbolic creative tasks in music. In other words, the students engage in singing, clapping, and note reading experiences to develop familiarity with basic pitch and rhythm patterns (enactive), so that they are able to draw simple representations of the music they create (iconic), so that they can ultimately be more confident in their ability to compose music using standard notation (symbolic).
“Scribing” is a technique in which a child develops an original musical idea (e.g., a 4-beat melody) by drawing iconic images to represent the child’s imagined sounds. A primary goal of this project is to develop an elementary student’s ability to compose simple musical patterns in real time as quickly as a student can imagine musical patterns.
Early results: By the end of the fourth 30-minute music class, all participating 5th graders were able to compose an original 2-note melody in real time for at least 16 beats of music.