A creative alternative to music notation: Exploiting visual metaphors to encourage musical creativity in school aged children

In this paper we discuss the use of graphical alternatives to stave notation, which has become a hot topic of debate within the arena of children’s musical creativity. Here we focus upon such graphical alternatives through a program called SoundScape, designed as a collaborative, creative music composition environment developed for school children. SoundScape replaces traditional stave notation with cartoonlike ‘themes’ and ‘objects’ in order to provide a more meaningful and engaging learning experience for school children. The design of SoundScape has also been guided by models of the creative process, emphasising the importance of task preparation. We report the result of a pilot study conducted to examine the effects of including and excluding preparation through SoundScape. Preliminary findings from the pilot study indicate that children encouraged to prepare for the task, exhibited higher task motivation, and a higher preference for thinking creatively about their composition, setting their work in a story-like context. Where as when the requirement of preparation was removed, a lower level of task motivation was exhibited and students showed a lower level of creative thinking in their compositional work. We also discuss these features of SoundScape with regard to existing music compositional packages available on the market.