Tracks for Strategies Sound Makers

Sound-makers experience music in a sensory way. It is likely that their capacity to engage with sound will still be developing, and that they will have an emerging ability to perceive an increasing range of sounds, to make sounds deliberately and consciously to interact with others using sound. These forms of engagement may well occur as part of wider, multisensory experiences.

Although sound-makers do not yet consistently have a sense of pattern, predictability or imitation, they may well have preferences for one type of sound or another and prefer one genre or piece of music to another. This is not because of its structure or meaning as a narrative in sound, but because of the particular sensory nature of the auditory world generated by a given musical style.

Sound-makers may well respond emotionally to certain sounds that they hear, and they may make sounds to express their feelings, vocally or through striking or shaking or scratching musical instruments or everyday objects.

Sound may be an important factor, too, in their emerging sense of ‘self’ and ‘other’, as they make sounds in an effort to attract other people’s attention and respond in turn to the sounds that they make. Hence sound may well be an indispensable element in the ‘intensive interactions’ that often characterise the approach that teachers and carers adopt in seeking to engage with those who have profound and multiple learning difficulties (‘PMLD’).