Composing Music Through Art
Composing music is similar to painting a painting. You choose what colours or notes you want to create with and then you combine, mix and match different notes or colours to form your piece of art.
Kids love to draw and paint and are familiar with expression in this medium. I want to introduce composition to young children through mixing of colours. Once you get kids interested in experimenting with sound, the next step is to get them aware of their choices when creating. By introducing each note on a keyboard as a colour, they begin to recognize a single note as a unique sound, just like how colours have their own characteristics. You can then show them the effect of blending sounds together, similar to mixing two colours to get a new one. This develops their musical ear to recognize different kinds of sounds, whether it be a single note being played or a chord progression. They will be able to manipulate sounds to express their story or emotion.
After children understand these connections in composing music, you can slowly introduce other ways of writing down their ideas. I find that by initially exposing them to composition in this way, they easily grasp the concept of music being formed through different combinations of sounds.