RESONANT TAILS 2019-2020: IMPROVE AND EMBED
On this page, you’ll find a few highlights of our learning from our work in 2019-20. Our goals were:
To launch an improved Resonant Tails in three more schools
To develop a support package of skills transfer to help schools make the most of it, supporting vocal intensive interaction
To further test and refine its coding
To do everything we can to involve and reach our users as sophisticated, co-making artists
If you haven’t seen it yet, a good introduction to Resonant Tails and its new video trailer is here.
You might also begin by listening to the playlist of brief, anonymised sound files that show some of the incredibly interesting soundscapes our users created.
WHAT WE DID
With support from the National Foundation for Youth Music and Postcode Community Trust, alongside our University supporters, we built three new, improved Resonant Tails artworks for three further schools to add to the one already in situ at Rosewood Free School. We then trialled and developed a programme of support to teachers and other staff at the schools to help embed use of Resonant Tails in these schools. We evaluated the results. Our new partner schools included Children’s Trust School, Tadworth; Victoria School and Arts College, Birmingham; and Linden Lodge School, Wandsworth. We undertook ongoing evaluation of our support to schools and improved it throughout the project. You can listen to short sound files that document the work of our users in the playlist above.
You can see a video that explains Resonant Tails and general information here.
DID WE SUCCEED?
According to our independent evaluator, Resonant Tails strongly met all our targets to engage young people in creative, vocal soundscape-making, to introduce our way of working to staff so that they could support RT without us, and to enhance communication skill for the learners. Most importantly, we found ways to adapt the Resonant Tails project in order to suit the cultures and environments of our partner schools. Still, there is much to learn and verify, and much more we can do to improve the experience and its efficacy. For a copy of our independent evaluation, please email us.
Key learning: values statement
We found it very important to call the sounds of the children ‘sound art’ or ‘vocal landscapes’. This helped remove the pressure from the staff to think that they had to work toward the children making ‘normal music’. While we love… ‘normal’ music, normal music is loaded with a lot of expectations. It is supposed to have a fixed beat; a pulse; be regularly rhythmic, and when it comes to the voice, it’s supposed to be sung ‘beautifully’. We think of what our users do with Resonant Tails as 'theatres of the voice’, or as ‘soundscapes’, so that we can work with the unique talents and strengths of children, teens and young adults with PMLD and other complex disability.
Realising our approach was very different, we launched Resonant Tails accompanied by a Value Statement to each school, to help them understand its intentions. The text is below. The Statement made much more sense to the schools after 10 or so weeks of intervention on our part.
Values of Resonant Tails and its Learning Framework
We help children invent landscapes of playful, inventive vocal sound; we don’t need them to make pretty singing or perfect speech.
We aim to help the child to develop a creative relationship with their vocal sound.
We value these landscapes of creative vocal sound as sophisticated artwork.
We believe the children’s unusual and playful sounds are beautiful, and that Resonant Tails amplifies this beauty.
We aim to help the child feel ever more in control of what they do with their sounds, while remaining playful.
We often play with, echo, and duet with the children, to encourage vocal sound.
We, as adults, value our own vocal sounds, and our ability to echo and interact with children, as a way to invite them to make their sound.
We aim to eventually have the child lead vocal sound-making more and more.
We value the unique pace at which the children work. We let them take their time, and have patience, with Resonant Tails.
Resonant Tails’ echoing system, visual and tactile feedback, and the fun effects are tools for enticing the child to make and shape vocal sounds.
KEY LEARNING: PLANNING AND RUNNING SESSIONS, AND THE SKILLS OF THE MUSIC LEADER
Working in these schools and with these young people, our approach had to be improvisatory and hyper-adaptable. Our core learning from this is that:
The Music Leader’s ability to focus on vocal engagement no matter what else is happening is the core skill. The very high levels of need of the children mean that much else may be going on in the room during the work.
The improvisatory capacity required for the voice work has to be mirrored relationally – the Music Leader has to be able to improvise and not get distracted by the many changes in format, environment, and approach around them.
The Music Leader must be able to model this focus-no-matter-what to the staff, yet be friendly, approachable, and continually invite the staff to participate in the vocal relationship.
The Music Leader must simultaneously ‘give up control’ in the sense that it is the staff that know the extremely subtle, and also unique and idiosyncratic, cues that learners emit, and who can read whether a learner is having pleasure, is curious, is enchanted, is listening, or is developing a feeling of distress (from, for examples, sounds that are too loud). So, the Music Leader must not take intervention from the staff at the school on any level as personal criticism of her/his practice.
The range of types of encouragement needed for learners and staff to engage are equally large, and must be explored and adapted to on the spot.
Sessions for the learners and staff must have an unusual degree of flexibility to them; planning and evaluation must be completely contingent on what happens on the day; yet, there must be some way of charting progress.
KEY LEARNING: NON-PUNCTATE TIME - THERE IS NO PUNK, PUNK, PUNK… THERE IS ONLY FLOW
During the project, Artistic Director Yvon Bonenfant met the musicologist and neuroscientist Dr Alexander Khalil, who was studying the perception of time (from a rhythmic perspective) in people on the Autistic Spectrum. He communicated that he uses the term non-punctate time to describe the alternative relationships to time that many people with disability can engage with, often more freely than neuro-typical people. This is time without a regular beat that repeats – time where ‘regular pulse’ does not matter. This term finally gave us vocabulary for the key concept that staff needed to understand about the soundscapes they make.
We could now say to staff – don’t worry, the children can work in non-punctate time! Punctate time is where there’s a beat – punk, punk, punk – but if you pull out the punk, punk, punk you don’t have to worry about the beat! Think of it as drawing pictures with sound, instead of measuring out time with sound.
KEY LEARNING: ALL THE SENSES ARE VOCAL
A critical factor in the positive success and reception of Resonant Tails in the schools has been its use of voice-responsive light, and more importantly, its tactile echoing and embodiment of the voices of the users. This inter-sensory nature of the voice seems to have been the channel into voicing, listening and engagement for a good proportion of the learners.
We can do further work to experiment with how we might make vibration and tactile feedback ever richer.
THE NOSE AND THE LUNGS ARE VOICES TOO
In all of our schools, selected children begin using Resonant Tails only by listening to their own or other’s amplified breathing patterns or nasal sounds (breath in the nose, sometimes congested, or snorts). We need to pay particular attention to helping staff echo and value these sounds. Our goals is to always lead these sounds into vocality, but some children may not be capable of this, or it may take many weeks for them to get there. Training all intervenors to value these sounds is critical.
AESTHETIC ANALYSIS OF THE SOUNDS PRODUCED
Other than open vowel utterances, below are a list of sonic characteristics that you may find threaded at different points through the sound recordings. We have worked to classify them into descriptive categories that attempt to measure ‘sophistication’ on the users’ own terms.
1. Joking: working with elements of surprise – suddenly loud or soft sounds - or sudden shifts, or laughing sounds, with the Music Leader, teacher, or instrument.
2. Durational transformations: making longer sounds, or repeated sounds, whose characteristics shift over a short or longer time. For example, changing the shape of a vowel like sound to form a dipthong on a long ‘o’-like utterance; making repeated lingual sounds that shift from one consonant to another; creating short pulse sequences with the voice that occur and then disappear, slow down or speed up. All of these use longer time-palette frameworks to shift and change.
3. Introjections: brief sounds that appear in, and contrast with, the surrounding sonic material, and that may not recur. These are often consonantal or vowels made with some form of diaphragmatic thrust. They may or may not be surprising and therefore there might not be crossover with (1).
4. Variations in play with time: This is where any sort of variation or surprise either: takes on a temporary pulse quality OR varies more and more so that it is clear a child is exploring the ways that s/he can shape the sound’s places in time.
5. Variations in timbre and texture (voice quality): These may be durational or brief and passing. ‘Voice quality’ is the term used in medical science and musicology to describe all the characteristics of the voice that are not related to either pitch or linguistic phonetics. The ‘timbre’ of the vocal sound, is thus its texture, or its ‘feel’. In English, we use terms like shrill, reedy, rumbling, mellow, relaxing, gravelly, etc. to describe vocal timbre… when we describe it at all. *(We could go into the hard science about timbre – but we don’t have time here. What is interesting is that psycholinguists think that the processing of vocal timbre in the brain is so complex that it takes almost as much mental effort as processing language! So, in the voice, timbre really matters, and the ability to control it and to respond to it are extremely subtle and attuned processes). In the voice, ‘timbre’ is a product of complex interactions between the body and its genetics, breathing style, anatomical positioning, and the movements of the vocal folds and vocal tract – everything above the vocal folds that help the sound become its final sound. One of the most exciting qualities of many of the children’s voices is that they start out making utterances in timbral spectrums that in Western culture, are rare in the spoken voice. Making small changes to these qualities requires fine movements of the elements of the vocal tract: small reconfigurations. Some learners may only have enough command of their anatomies to make these micro-changes; others may hear and play with them in a particularly focused manner.
6. Imitating the ambient, room, instrument, or other learner sounds. Some young people listen intently to sounds that are not their own and are either stimulated by them or imitate them. This was particularly the case in schools like Victoria where some teachers blended the use of Resonant Tails with instrumental musical activities. This is distinct from echoing their own utterances.
7. Play between consonants and vowels that is rapid. Some moments involve moving between open vowel-like sounds and interruptions to the airflow (consonants) in both pattern-like and open-ended fashions.
8. New/novel consonants and vowels. Not all vowel-type sounds made by the learners can be accounted for in typical phonics, and sometimes children seem to invent new ones or blends of ones we would recognize, and utter them.
9. Pitch play. Some children play with higher/lower pitched utterances.
10. Echo play, including inter-sensory echo play. Resonant Tails is built around the principle of the voice-expanding mirror, so the ability to hear the echo of oneself and respond to it is a critical aesthetic parameter of the experience. Number of echoes and duration of their tails make a huge difference to how their productions sound; and some children enjoy further variation in these within or across sessions.
12. Motifs that recur. Recurrent sonic utterance motifs may indicate purposeful play with the compositional dynamics related to structure, memory, and other things.
13. Enhanced interactivity – responding to, rather than imitating sounds and stimuli from teachers, other learners, and instruments: While we save this criterion for last, it is actually the most common, recurrent and the most important. The value system we have developed, which emphasises improvisational skill, is based on call and response, whether with self, or with someone else before composing with the self. The willingness to, readiness to, frequency of, and general attention paid to this phenomenon are characteristics of increasing sophistication of the sound product.
While we can do a specialist vocal analysis of the sound productions using vocal anatomy and locations of phonation, this would be good to develop in the next stages of a project with speech and language therapist support.
MORE
For a full copy of our reflexive report, KEY LEARNING, or our independent evaluation, please state what you wish to use the document(s) for and request these here.
