Teaching Sequence

Part A: Tone Colour
Part B: Instruments and Tone Colour
Part C: Composing Motifs

You will need percussion and classroom instruments for this lesson. You can also share the Colour Wheels Worksheet with your students.

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

Part A: Tone Colour

Step 1.

Discuss with students the fact that moods and feelings are often associated with colours. Colour has even entered our vocabulary to help us describe our emotions. You can be ‘red’ with rage or ‘green’ with envy.

Invite your students to think of and share any more examples.

Step 2.

Using the colour wheel as stimulus, ask students to describe which moods they associate with specific colours. Record their responses on the board.

Step 3.

Explain to students that timbre describes the particular tone, colour or quality that distinguishes a sound or combinations of sounds.

Step 4.

Play the video below which highlights how past participant, Hamish Ander, used tone colour to create emotion in his fanfare composition.

Fanfare Competition - Tone Colour Inspired Music (https://youtu.be/b9tpQP2a9jA)

To complement the colour wheel, share Hevner's Mood Wheel with your students. Explain to students that it was originally designed to illustrate the mood responses of humans to musical themes.

Part B: Instruments and Tone Colour

Step 1.

Begin this activity by discussing the effects that instruments can have on tone colour:

Sound Register – whether the instrument it playing in it’s upper or lower register will impact the tone colour
Sound Source – what instrument or combination of Instruments are being used in the piece.
Sound Production – many instruments have multiple techniques of playing them. For example (this table could be re-created on the whiteboard):

Instrument

Sound Production Technique

Tone Colour Description

Trumpet

Played normally

Played with mute

Bright, brassy, energetic

Thinner, less resonant sound

Violin

Legato blowing

Pizzicato

Warm, golden

Light, fragile

Flute

Blowing

Flutter tonguing

Mellow, brilliant,

Exuberant, exciting

Bassoon

Low notes

High notes

Buzzy, rich

Eery, thin sound quality

Step 2.

Organise your learning space so your students are sitting in a circle. Pass around one percussion instrument at a time, and challenge each student to create a different tone colour (or timbre) by playing it in an unusual way. For instance, maracas might be shaken, tapped together, tapped on a shoe, or rolled on the floor. How far around the circle can you get before changing to a new percussion instrument?

Step 3.

Draw students’ attention to the subtle changes in tone colour (or timbre) when one instrument is played slightly differently. For more information about tone colour you can show your students this clip.

Part C: Composing Motifs

Step 1.

Invite students to form small groups and work together to compose or improvise a motif (short melody or rhythm). Write it down as music notation or graphic notation.

Step 2.

Encourage students to teach the motif to the whole group on one instrument. Invite students to then select another instrument on which to play the motif.

Step 3.

Ask students to write a sentence in their notebooks about how the tone colour/timbre changes between instruments. In this sentence invite students identify a feeling to each different tone. Repeat the process on many different instruments.

Step 4.

Finally, organise each person in the group to play the motif on a different instrument, one person after the other, to demonstrate the differences in tone colour.

Differentiated activities

Provisions for Learning Support - Many activities are in pairs or small groups, so try to group lower ability students with higher ability students. When composing, guide lower ability students towards untuned percussion or body percussion (e.g. claves, bongo drums, clapping, maracas). Instead of music notation on the staff, encourage lower ability students to record their ideas as wriggly lines or graphic notation.

Homework and extension opportunities

Ask your students to listen to instrumental music this week, and take note of unusual combinations of instrument timbres (e.g. metallophone and saxophone in unison, or harp and solo soprano creating harmonies). Some students may enjoy researching composers’ views on colours and key changes using the internet.

Furthermore, ask students to study the details of the Fanfare Competition. Explain to students that they will be encouraged to write their own 30 second piece of attention grabbing music to enter Fanfare (https://artology.org.au/fanfare/).

Fanfare Competition - Tone Colour Inspired Composition

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