Five combination sound/activity shapes play fun sounds when you move them: Press the circle, roll the bar, twist the star, slide the triangle, and rock the music note to hear music.

Through his organization Wild Sanctuary, Bernie Krause has traveled the globe to hear and record the sounds of diverse natural habitats. Wild Soundscapes, first published in 2002, inspires readers to follow in Krause’s footsteps. The book enchantingly shows how to find creature symphonies (or, as Krause calls them, “biophonies”); use simple microphones to hear more; and record, mix, and create new expressions with the gathered sounds. After reading this book, readers will feel compelled to investigate a wide range of habitats and animal sounds, from the conversations of birds and howling sand dunes to singing anthills. This rewritten and updated edition explains the newest technological advances and research, encouraging readers to understand the earth’s soundscapes in ways previously unimaginable. With links to the sounds that are discussed in the text, this accessible and engaging guide to natural soundscapes will captivate amateur naturalists, field recordists, musicians, and anyone else who wants to fully appreciate the sounds of our natural world.

We’re all familiar with sounds—quiet sounds, loud sounds, high sounds, and low sounds. But how do those sounds reach our ears? Readers explore the science behind sounds in this delightful illustrated guide. The bright and bold illustrations are paired with simple text that breaks down complicated science curriculum concepts and provides readers with relatable examples of the science of sound at work in the real world. These important lessons are further explained in clearly labeled diagrams and useful infographics that present a visual approach to STEM topics that’s both educational and entertaining.

Improvisation is a boundless and exciting way to experience music, especially for students. Teachers increasingly agree that improvisation is an essential skill for students to learn - however, many are unsure how to productively incorporate it in the classroom. Furthermore, most improvisational practices are centered around jazz, with very little to help even classical and vocal ensembles let alone the general music classroom. Now, in this new book, Daniel Healy and Kimberly Lansinger Ankney offer a practical volume aimed at busy music teachers. Recognizing educators' desire to balance the standard curriculum with improvisational activities, the authors provide 36 activities to incorporate into their everyday music classes and ensemble practices. All activities are flexibly designed in styles ranging from modern classical to pop. Teachers can spend anywhere from 5 minutes to an entire term on a single activity, in a variety of environments and ensembles - concert bands, orchestras, choirs, jazz ensembles, and music technology classes alike can benefit from the practices of improvisation. Aligning improvisation practices with the constraints of the classroom, the lessons focus on key music learning principles (melody, harmony, rhythm, texture/timbre, articulation, and dynamics), allowing students' basic performance skills to develop in conjunction with their improvisational ones. The book also comes with a companion website which provides helpful resources for teachers, including recordings of actual K-12 ensembles performing the improvisation activities. Designed for a wide range of ages and experience levels, Music Discovery: Improvisation for the Large Ensemble and Music Classroom is the first practical guide of its kind, and gives teachers a long-awaited jumping-off point to introduce this playful, thrilling, and vital musical practice to their students.

Making Music with Sounds offers a creative introduction to the art of making sound-based music. It introduces the elements of making compositions with sounds and facilitates creativity in school age children, with the activities primarily for 11-14 year old students. It can also be used by people of all ages becoming acquainted with this music for the first time. Sound-based music is defined as the art form in which the sound, rather than the musical note, is the basic unit and is closely related to electronic music and the sonic arts. The art of sound organisation can be found in a number of forms of music--in film, television, theatre, dance, and new media. Despite this, there are few materials available currently for young people to discover how to make sound-based music. This book offers a programme of development starting from aural awareness, through the discovery and organisation of potential sounds, to the means of generating and manipulating sounds to create sequences and entire works. The book’s holistic pedagogical approach to composition also involves aspects related to musical understanding and appreciation, reinforced by the author’s online pedagogical ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS II).

This anthology brings together scholars from literature, the natural sciences, and the philosophy of science, to present new perspectives on the relations between literary and scientific communities. Drawing on literature spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as Europe and the Americas, the authors explore how science has been portrayed from the perspective of literature at different times and in different places - as challenge or opportunity, promise or scandal. The disturbance of science emanates perhaps from its association with a frightening future or its ability to change the appearance of the past; the scandal occurs as it recalls us to thresholds and hybrids: human and non-human, animal and machine. Science, however, also emerges as a source of metaphor and imaginative modelling, of encodings and decodings, representations and discoveries. Less prominent in the collection, though no less important, is the view on how scientific cultures portray literature or the literary academic, and how science reflects on itself.