Music Fundamentals
Here you can find an introduction to some of the fundamental principals of playing and reading music, along with some lessons and activities to engage your students.
An example introductory lesson: Sound waves
Making the connection between the shapes of different sound waves and how the sound comes out.
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What’s a wave? Get them to wave- what makes it a wave (repeated movement, side to side, oscillation)
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“Frequency”- how often do we wave our hands? Get them to wave really slow and really fast, explain low and high frequency
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“Amplitude”- how big are our waves? Show them small and fast, small and slow, big and slow, big and fast
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Draw these patterns on the whiteboard
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Fingers on throat- what do they feel? (buzzing)
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Big drum- strike once normally, then once placing student’s hand on the drum. Why is it different? What’s stopping the sound from coming out?
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Show them the difference between the big drums and the small drums, try to encourage differentiation between frequency and amplitude, as well as pitch and volume (higher frequency = higher pitch, higher amplitude = greater volume). It’s easy to get mixed up between the two, especially for young kids.
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Get them to experiment by arranging instruments in order of pitch or frequency
Below are a list of some music recordings that might come in handy. I have grouped them into Spotify/ YouTube, as well as by age. Nursery rhymes are appropriate for K-2 students (blue), whereas older students will respond better to more mature music like pop and classical. Students of most ages will probably like songs from TV shows they like, as well as viral songs.