Surround Sound in the Park

 The Week of August 30th-September 3rd is GCE orientation, and one of the fun things we have been able to do, is go to the Pritzker Pavilion (in Millenium Park), for an FE. There, we listened to two pieces of music that were a part of the Sonic Pavilion Festival. It was an interesting expereience because it was much different than a more typical form of listning to music. For example, this soundscape sounded and felt as though all of the pieces, instraments, sounds, etc. were physically surrounding all around you. It reminded me of surround sound, except that it was outside, in a park. This contrasts to listening to music through headphones, where instead, it feels like the sound is being distributed directily into your ear. 

The purpose of this FE was to gain perspective on different forms and spaces of learning and how broad the definition of a classroom can be. Part of our Internal Investigation, which we did before leaving for the FE, was the class looking at different images of classrooms from ancient times to now. We then observed the similarites and differences that they held to today, as well as noticible aspectes that caught our eye. After discussing our thoughts and observations, we each drew our own versions of an 'ideal' classroom and what we would personally add to them. This was setting us up for the park expereince, where we would later think about how a traditional classroom compares to an outside expereince, and why those are important. Now having been to the FE, I can say that learning expereicnes that are outside of our typical classroom and school environment are very important because it helps us to obsorb the information so much more because it is something we are not used to. 

Additionally, we all did individual research about the Festival aswell as looked into some questions we had about the music. The questions I had were, who was the creator of the Festival?, how was the distance between each speaker calculated?, and where did the inspiration for the soundscape come from?. Since there was not a lot of time to research and not a lot of information on the festival, only bits of my questions could be answered. The creator of the Festival is Stephan Moore, 

-What did you learn from it?
-What did you connect with? Why?
-What did you uncover in your independent investigation?
-What did you learn from your peers?
-What are you still curious about?
-As we wrap up our "external investigation", where do we go from here?