1.2 Consonance and dissonance activities  (Page 2/3)

Procedure

1. Give your explanation and examples.
2. If at all possible, let the children take turns playing combinations of any two or three notes. If you cannot let the students play the instrument, you play different combinations for them.
3. Let them vote on what sounds consonant or dissonant. If they can't decide, play the same combination several times. The entire class may agree in most cases, but allow disagreement for personal taste.
4. Students who are older or more musically experienced may want to turn this into an experiment of sorts; if notes are right next to each other, do they sound dissonant? What if there is one note in between them? Two in between them? And so on. What if they are very far apart?
5. Musically experienced students may also be encouraged to find a satisfying resolution to a dissonance. Discuss and demonstrate resolutions on the instrument.

Activity 2: hearing consonance and dissonance in recorded music

Goals and standards

• Goals - The student will practice identifying aural musical examples as "consonant" or "dissonant".
• Objectives - After an introduction to the concepts, the students will listen to a variety of recorded examples of music. The students will identify which pieces have more or less dissonance and will discuss the effects of the dissonance on the music.
• Music Standards Addressed - National Standards for Music Education standard 6 (listening to, analyzing, and describing music).
• Grade Level - K-12 (adaptable)
• Student Prerequisites - Preceding this activity with Activity 1, above, or some introduction to consonance and dissonance , is strongly recommended.
• Teacher Expertise - Training as a music teacher is not necessary to present this activity. The teacher must be able to easily identify dissonance in recorded music.
• Time Requirements - Depends on number and length of recorded examples.
• Evaluation - Assess student learning by evaluating participation in the class discussion or by orally quizzing each student on whether a short recorded excerpt contains dissonance.
• Follow-up - Help commit this lesson to long-term memory, by continuing to ask, throughout the rest of the school year, questions about the consonance or dissonance of music that they are listening to or learning.
• Extensions - For advanced music students, discuss whether music from particular eras, cultures, or genres, tends to sound consonant or dissonant. Ask them to identify unknown recordings as belonging to a particular era, culture, or genre, based at least partly on the consonance or dissonance of the music. With this extension, National Standards for Music Education standard 9 (understanding music in relation to history and culture) is addressed.

Materials and preparation

• You'll need a CD or audio tape player.
• Gather some examples of music from different periods (Classical, Modern, Baroque...) and/or different styles (Modern art music, jazz, folk, pop...) or cultures (European, Indian, Indonesian...). Try to have at least a few pieces with quite a bit of dissonance. (Twentieth-century art music, modern jazz, and movie music are probably the easiest places to find this; try Igor Stravinsky, Charles Ives, Thelonious Monk, or Charles Mingus, for example, or the sound tracks from scary or dramatic movies.)
• Have the recordings ready to play at appropriate places in the music, or know the track numbers for the pieces you intend to play.