A Place for Sound: Raising Children's Awareness of their Sonic Environment

This paper reports on an experiential project that involved a group of children aged four to five years and their teachers in an investigation of sounds in their local environment. It describes the key elements of an eight-week teaching and learning program that encouraged children to experience and re-experience their surrounding sound environments through a variety of listening tasks, ‘sound walks’ and reflective art-making. Informed by diverse disciplines such as acoustic ecology (Schafer, 1992), music education (Dilkes, 1998) and environmental education (Palmer, 1998), this project aimed to make the ‘sounds of place’ explicit, to illuminate children's understandings of sound and to document these early experiences. The key questions asked were, ‘Are young children motivated to investigate sounds in their local environment and, if so, how can the teacher support this process?’ Data was collected in the form of digital audio recordings, written ‘listening lists’, child interviews, a project booklet, photographs and children's artworks. This study provides guidance for early childhood educators who wish to incorporate the ‘sounds of place’ within a multi-sensory program, so as to assist children to make a deeper connection with their surrounding environment.