Object-based Learning.

Is Sound an Object?

For my micro-teach, I was looking around my office for an object that I could do my Micro teach on.

Thinking back to the session on Object-based learning, where they showed how they had created detailed online representations of the objects to help people get a feel for the object during the pandemic.

I was really impressed with how they had tried to overcome the issues around not being physically present with the object, however, I kept thinking that I would love to be able to touch/hold the object. I really felt the lack of the physical made it very difficult to think of the items as objects and I felt that they were just a bit too abstract.

So when I started to think about what object I should use, I kept coming back to the online objects we saw in the session the week before. I wondered then about what an object is and can it be something that doesn’t have physical presents at all? (Much easier to carry to college!!) and I did some reading about sounds being an object.

Music, in particular, is something that is created, gives pleasure, meaning and there is value in music, all of these things you can attribute to many different objects.

I then wondered if visuals make a difference to how we perceive the music, a bit like when you watch the movie before reading the book it was based on,  I find that it limits my imagination when reading the book, I see the actors from the movie playing the parts, rather than using my imagination to interpret the words.

I decided on a Radiohead track from their last album, the main reason for using this was that I find that a number of people always say the same thing about Radiohead, that they are depressing. I wanted to see if anyone would say something along those lines.

I played the song, then asked the participants questions about how it made them feel, I then played the clip again and asked the same questions to see if they felt any different about it once they had seen the video.

To finish off we were to have a discussion about whether or not the song or sound was an object? With reference to the journal, Towards a more sonically inclusive museum practice: a new definition of the “sound object.” Where they discuss the merits of sounds as an object.

I then discussed the learning objectives. After the session as I wanted to see if the participants could guess the learning objectives. When is a good time to discuss lesson objectives? While I agree with sharing the lesson objectives with the class, the timing of the sharing is an interesting discussion, I wanted to have the discussion at the end of the session, as I wanted the participant to focus on each part of the session rather than knowing the objectives at the beginning.

References

Kannenberg, J. (2019). Towards a more sonically inclusive museum practice: a new definition of the “sound object.” Science Museum Group Journal, 8(8).

my (2017). The Learning Scientists. [online] The Learning Scientists. Available at: https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2017/10/4-1 [Accessed 2 Jan. 2020].

‌OBJECTS OF SOUND. (2017). First (in)definition: sound is an object. [online] Available at: https://objectsofsound.com/2017/03/18/first-indefinition-sound-is-an-object/#:~:text=First%20(in)definition%3A%20sound [Accessed 21 Mar. 2022].