Elemental Music

A New Direction

Coloma Primary School has a highly established presence courtesy of its musical accomplishments. They have a further specialism in Science. Aligning with Croydon Borough's theme of cross-curricular learning, they used their position as a Creative Partnerships Enquiry School as a way of linking the two disciplines.

The school wanted to explore what links could be made between chemistry and music. The purpose was to open up the breadth of chemistry in everyday life through music by drawing on the unseen music which exists in chemical properties and reactions.

To start with chemical processes were explored in depth and with regard to activities and emotions. From their initial research, students drew two or three lines of enquiry which they felt should form the foundation of their project.

These selective lines of enquiry were developed and their chemistry firmly understood. The students then, through the creative means of music and drama, artistically expressed what they had learned. During this process, music was created following the New York-based Dr Kumar’s findings in relation to the finding of chemical processes.

The project also considered and compared the emotional experience between imagined music for a process and the scientifically inherent music of that same process. Looking mainly at the atomic specra of each element to discern its inherent pitch/note in accordance with the published findings of Dr Kumar.

The project culminated in a sharing of their findings and performance.

The teachers were pleased with the experience of learning for the young people and discussed what they saw as the realities of introducing new ways of learning:

"When you have a project like this where the learning is very different from their usual style it can take time to accommodate that style of learning. The whole nature of this project was investigative ... I think it was hugely beneficial for them to experience that learning doesn't just happen, that you have to learn to learn in a different way and that learning needs structuring in order for them to get to know how to do that".