Lesson Sequence

 

1. Play Scotland the Brave as students are finding their seats.

 

 

 

 

 

2. Introduce the term Drone and ask students to write the definition in their CNW.

 

Definition: A Drone is a pitch or set of pitches that are either sustained or repeated for a significant portion of the music. 

   

    The drone is almost always in the bass, and sometimes goes with the music above it and sometimes it does not.  Let's listen to an

    example of Drone now that you know the term.

 

 

 

 

 

3. For many people, a drone wouldn't even be called music. Instead, it is just an irritating noise, like the buzzing of a refrigerator or the

    sound of bees in a hive. For others, it is the quintessential sound of bagpipe music or the "OMMMM" sound to signify the universe in

    Hindu cosmology.

 

    While drones may not seem like much, they are used all the time in music to create Harmony and Polyphonic Texture.  Here are a

    couple examples...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Drones are also a staple in horror movies where they instantly evoke an atmosphere of brooding menace. An example of this can be  

    heard in these trailers from the movie Frozen.  The first is the original, and the second was created employing a Drone, which creates a

    much creepier effect!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5. Let's create our own Drone compositions.  Ask students to form groups of 5 people.  Hand out the following prompt:

 

A man returns home to find a light on at the back of the house and the front door wide open. That's strange, he thinks, nobody else is suppose to be home.  Slowly and cautiously he enters the house and begins to search each room for an intruder.  Walking quietly, his eyes dart back and forth trying to detect any suspicious movement. While he can find nothing out of the ordinary, he still feels something is not normal. With sweat running down his forehead and his heart beating a little too fast, he cautiously makes his way to the only room he hasn't checked - the one at the back of the house. He inches his way closer... and closer... and closer... until he reaches the doorway.  Just as he thinks maybe the coast is clear, his family and friends jump out from behind the furniture and yell "Surprise"!

 

Directions:

* Each group is in charge of creating a soundtrack to the prompt

* One person will play a Drone

* Three people will play auxiliary percussion instruments or use other sound sources that help create the tension

of the prompt.

* One person will read the prompt as the rest of the group plays the soundtrack

* Play the compositions for each other.

 

 

6. Drone Fun Fact! A press release from NASA dated Sept. 9, 2003 announced:

 

"NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory detected sound waves, for the first time, from a supermassive black hole. The "note" is the deepest ever detected from any object in our Universe. ... The black hole resides in the Perseus cluster of galaxies located 250 million light years from Earth. In 2002, astronomers obtained a deep Chandra observation that shows ripples in the gas filling the cluster. These ripples are evidence for sound waves that have traveled hundreds of thousands of light years away from the cluster's central black hole ... In musical terms, the pitch of the sound generated by the black hole translates into the note of B flat. But, a human would have no chance of hearing this cosmic performance because the note is 57 octaves lower than middle-C ... At a frequency over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing, this is the deepest note ever detected from an object in the Universe."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7. To end our discussion, let's listen to one more piece of music that uses a Drone to create Harmony and Polyphonic

Texture (and fits nicely with the NASA press release). Listen to the drone that begins the piece (see soundwave diagram).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           Drone