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[MUSIC PLAYING] JULIA BRENNAN: In part seven, we're looking at graphic notation and how that can be used in visual arts and how they work together and what their relationship is. So we start by exploring the history of notation and where that came from. Now, if you think back to the history of civilization, we've had drawings on caves and other ways that people communicating for years.

And the earliest notation that we know about is from the 2nd century BC. It's an ancient Greek version of notation. We then saw, in 1,000 AD, that that moved by the monks across to a set of lines. We then moved onto four lines, and then what we have today which is the five lines in the musical notation staff.

So you'll see all the links in the resource to guide you through talking to the students about that. There's also of great pictures and images and some things that are very thought provoking and teach us a lot about the history of notation. From there, the idea of this unit is to look at how art can support music through creating a graphic notation score. Now, we've got a great example created by a student called Alex [INAUDIBLE] when he was only 12 years old, and it's a clock face. And he uses that as a way of creating a musical score that follows along on the clock face, and the link to see that is in the resource.

So what we'd like the students to do is think about notation and the role of notation. And let's also be aware that in our syllabus we're expected to be teaching the sound to symbol relationship right from stage one and using shapes and those sort of things that we've been learning about thus far to create a score. So the students could perhaps set up a grid, and then use that to put different shapes in and different sizes and all of those sort of things. Or use a different symbol system altogether, and use that to represent sound. So we're getting across that idea that music follows a symbol system, and we're also using our visual art skills to create a score that we can follow along with our music.

It's also interesting in part as this process of looking at graphic notation to look at scores by people such as John Cage. Now, John Cage is really famous for his graphic notation scores, and he uses timings in a lot of cases rather than bars or traditional measures and also uses pictures to depict what sound should be heard and at what time. So that's just a different slant to think about as well as part of this process. It's important for the students to create a legend or a key to go with their graphic notation scores, so that whoever is playing it will understand what each symbol or each shape or each color means for their playing.

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