Vivienne:
After coming down with a bit of an illness, I was unable to attend today’s Soundscaping workshop. However, I’d love to speak a little about our first two days at our CFE, although my fellow TCs have already done an incredible job!
Having not gardened since I was a child, I was a little worried that all the weeding skills my mom and grandparents imbued on me would have been totally lost over the years. However, they quickly came back under the guidance of the Garden Guardian, Chris. Both Monday and Tuesday opened with Susan’s accordion stylings, paired with (what I would call at least!) mini history lessons on Old English farming practices and songs. These little musical moments helped us both to start our day and created a bit of an instant-bond when most of us (barring the ever-musical Gio) were challenged to sing-along to a completely unfamiliar tune with a group of people we might not know all too well yet. To me, this brought me back to the lighthearted and silly joy of singing as a class in elementary school. I can completely see how this might be a playful strategy to break the ice in the first opening days of class, whether that be when we have classrooms of our own or when we return to our UBC courses in June!
On our second day in the Orchard Garden, Jo took over and led us on an eco-poetry workshop. Under her instruction, we connected with the different parts of the garden that called to us and tried to call back to them. I was particularly struck by the Princess tree and wrote an ode to this beautiful, if distant, globulous entity. In writing this ode, and in talking with the rest of the group, I was brought back to my unit covering Pablo Neruda’s Odes to Common Things during my practicum. As someone who deeply resisted any sort of tactile/physical learning as a highschool student, my time with Jo and the rest of the group challenged these hesitations. During my practicum, I saw just how valuable this kind of learning is as so many of my students responded to the ability to get up and moving. Being with Jo and the rest of the Orchard group further cemented the value of this learning for me as I saw myself making deeper connections with what surrounded me as a result of interacting with it directly. It’s my hope that should I be able to use my Neruda unit again that I will be able to take students out into the world, or even on a field trip, to facilitate their own creation of odes to what is common.
Leo:
Today, we had some fun playing with (technological, human-made, natural) sounds under the direction of Diana Ihnatovych. The weather channel’d predicted rain but, alas, we were blessed with a pleasantly-cloudy continuation of this curiously cold May. And so we ventured out into the great urban yonder, armed with not but a mighty writing utensil, a sheet of paper, and our ears - and we listened.
The world seems quiet when we do not listen. Only when we lend the world our ears do we realise how loud it truly is, everywhere and all the time. Two plane engines. Chickadees, sparrows, crows. Text alerts. A water fountain. Footsteps. Skateboarders. Wind. Someone calling their friend sexy. All part of a symphony to rival Beethoven’s 9th.
And so, we visualised these sounds. How? This we all did differently. I drew pictures, literal signifiers of the sources of all those noises - a tree, a bird, water, shoes. Others represented through shapes and linework, like the peaks and valleys of an ECG rhythm strip, or the chaotic results of a lie detector test.
When we were all finished with our individual observations, we separated into two groups and created soundscapes, shapes and colours on chart paper to trace the path of all the noise of Point Grey Campus. The groups went in very different directions, both equally rewarding, equally evocative.
The first (my group) drew somewhat of a more literal sort of landscape, albeit with an abstractedly metaphorical twist: we visually “rewilded” this gloriously grey campus of ours (it is, after all, Point Grey) by turning all the sounds we heard (jet engines, phone notifications, footsteps, oddly flirtatious cross-avenue greetings) into natural beings (thunder, a songbird, deer steps, tall grass). We invited our audience to touch any section of the landscape, and we recreated the respective sound: a choir of five come to turn the deserted front hall of Scarfe into a cacophonous amalgam of the great outdoors.
The other group created, essentially, sheet music: arrows, waves, loops, spikes, stars, lines, dots all came together to build a score for voice and body. They used markers, crinkling paper, whistling, whooshing, and tapping all at once to weave a tapestry of nature, technology, and humanity.
I’m a musician myself, and fascinating it was to think about noise as music - the hum of air ventilation, the roar of an airplane - a John Cage-ian dismantling of preconceived understandings of what, and what doesn’t, constitute(s) music. I considered the possible crosscurricular applications of this sort of activity: the poetic, literary, scientific, ecocritical, biological, artistic, linguistic, and musical. I would be curious to see how students of all ages would take to this sort of undertaking.
After lunch, we gardened. The sun came out to help us along in our great endeavor to transplant some tomato plants from greenhouse to ground. We harvested some kale, ate some kale, discovered that yellow kale buds taste oddly like broccoli, found some slugs, saved them from death-by-shoveling, and homed some soon-to-be tomatoes in the dark, rich soil. Being in the garden has been a wonderful break from the go-go-go of practicum, the endless observations and planning and extreme lack of a work/life balance. The garden is patient, and it requires of us all a patience found little elsewhere in this chaotic world.
Group soundscape 1:
Ground soundscape 2:
Caelan and Lauren's soundscapes:
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