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Machine Music from Musical Contexts provides a range of fun and exciting music activities and learning opportunities combining singing, performing, composing and listening and appraising with all of the resources you’ll need in one place!  Ideal for non-specialist music teachers (with a wealth of supporting media files to model tasks and a detailed scheme of work and lesson plans) and a wealth of fresh inspiration for music specialists.  This unit has cross-curricular links with a number of popular primary topics including machines, engines, trains and transport, factories, space, clocks, electronics and video games.

​This unit takes the starting point of machines as the basis for an exploration into graphic scores and repeating cyclic patterns.  Pupils begin exploring the sounds created by steam engines and trains, listening to “train-inspired” pieces and exploring how short, repeated vocal and rhythmic and melodic patterns are used to describe the perpetual motion of a trains’ movement.  Pupils them move onto explore the cyclic sounds created by factory machines using a selection of vocal and body sounds to recreate cyclic sound patterns.  After a brief exploration into space machine sounds, where pupils’ learning on graphic scores are developed, the unit ends with an exploration into video game sounds where pupils create their own sound effects (a good ICT opportunity) for a video game, recording their ideas using graphic notation.