DIY Musical Textures
3 exercises of introducing Vision and Touch in Music Education
Concept, Design & Workshop Leadership | Social Design Lab introduced by Caroline Hermans | Conservatory of Amsterdam 2024
As a classical vocalist, I create my secret tools to connect with my feelings when singing. The variety of the repertoire and all the musical aspects may cause something like mental chaos during someone's practice. Gradually, I developed my way of “coding” my pieces and translated them into simpler forms in my mind, such as emotion, color, and texture. This kind of categorization, creating meaningful, personal tags, helps you train your musical instrument, and fortify your musicality while thinking of approachable “nonmusical” parameters that evoke other senses than hearing and activate imagination and associations.
The DIY Multimodal Execises on Musical Textures is an educative package that involves the senses of Touch and Vision. They can be used as explorative, play-fool tools by students of various levels and teachers, collectively in a group, or solely as a personal practice. The design is based on the principle of DIY, meaning “Do It Yourself”. Everyday materials, such as old clothes or cartons that can be found in our houses, are used to make visual and textural, tangible objects.
The 3 exercises suggest to create your:
a) Musical Texture Diary
This could be a log or a book of textures, a personal or collective diary with images and materials that refer to the musical practice. For instance, I created one page with three different textural choices, soft cotton, rough plastic, and a thin cloth that represents 3 different emotional states of my aria.
b) Visual & Textural Score
This could be a tool to approach a score differently, through a visual and textural path and connect sounds with images and textures, focusing on your own score. For example, I created digitally (which could also be done physically) a collage of visual textures (such as rain and flowers) on my score of Dido’s Lament by Henry Purcell.
c) Musical Object
This could be something that you wear on your body, for example, a Musical Scarf, which is a patchwork of all the textures of your songs. You can use in your practice room or perform with it. Moreover, it could be a visual sculpture representing your music or whatever serves you best to picture your music making. As an example, we collectively created in the workshop a visual sculpture, listening to ‘La mer’ by Debussy.