Musicians and artists often can see colors when they hear sounds.
Which is why art teacher Angela Spreter and music teacher Ryan Shevlin brought their classes together to listen to music and make art.
Students in Karen Merille and Samantha Saumell’s classes sat at tables in the art room at the ready with supplies: markers, crayons, paint sticks. And one large blank piece of paper divided into quarters. As they waited for the music to start, they closed their eyes.
“Close your eyes, listen and think of lines, shapes and the different elements in art,” said Spreter.
Shevlin stood at an electric keyboard and played the first notes which sounded like a trumpet.
As he played, students made red spirals, orange polka dots, and blue mountains.
The exercise began again and Shevlin played piano notes up and down the scale, a glockenspiel and a tuba tune and students got to work on the second, third and fourth quadrants of their paper: purple and pink waves, bold red and blue stairs, yellow stars, rainbows.
For the second half of the lesson, the class learned about the artist Wassily Kandinsky, who created abstract paintings inspired by music. Students then worked on a Kandinsky app that allowed them to draw shapes and lines which are then converted into musical sounds. Each student then created a song.
The lesson got students to think about art and sound together as if for the first time.
“I never thought a trumpet sound could make me think of golden french fry shapes,” said one student.
At the end, students got to publish their inspired and unexpected works for an art and music show.
