Today, Siobh�n and I were in Hospital E, based in the playroom. Unlike the work done from my studio, in the hospital setting I could concentrate on engaging the children to be creative musically and I�m happy to say with a wide variety of outcomes and lots done.

Early in the morning, we had a group of 4 children, ranging in age from 4 to 8. To engage them in making music, I led a musical warm-up session with them where they spoke and clapped the rhythm �Ka-da ka boom�. Text is useful way to get anyone to learn a rhythm as we tend to remember words and sentences quite easily and it was great to see the children diving straight in and picking up the rhythm so quickly. Once they had learned the rhythm, I asked them to select an instrument from a box of musical instruments supplied by the hospital.  The choices varied from a keyboard (nice and noisy!) to cymbals to bells. We then resumed the musical exercise and the children were asked to play the rhythm with their instrument. Next I asked the children if they would perform on their own i.e. do a solo with their instrument during the piece, which they did. The exercise has a number of layers which gradually allowed us to build up the musical possibilities and dynamics of the piece. These different techniques are very useful for group performance and fundamental music education. Also, I had expected that some of the children would be quite shy and unwilling to perform a solo but all of them took part. There is something about �hiding behind� the instrument that allows us to drop our inhibitions. This performance was first done as a rehearsal and then performed for parents and staff. Also, I had managed to convince one of the teenagers to come in and record the performance for me on my Zoom audio recorder, his responsbility being to make sure the volume levels on the audio recording were not too loud or too quiet. It was interesting to see that he didn�t want to take part in the musical performance but was very keen to be a sound engineer! It would seem that technology is a considerable lure for teenagers! I had hoped that we would have time to edit this performance in time for the planned 11:30 link-up with the other hospitals but before we knew it, it was time for the link-up. The link-up happened with Anna, who was working from home and had created a beautiful puppet situated in the desert.  Our puppets danced along and children sang using the exercise rhythm and played their chosen instruments to make a rain song for Anna�s puppet. The earlier activity served to motivate and focus the group on the performance as it really helped the group to collaborate.

In the afternoon, Siobh�n and I worked with a little girl who created a puppet �Jasmine�. The little girl�s story was based on the idea that Jasmine lived in South America wanted to sing a song. I used a drum loop in Garageband that was a Brazilian drumbeat. Siobh�n improvised a song about Jasmine over the drumbeat and I joined in with her, playing on the melodica. This worked very well and shows the importance of audio sequencers that contain pre-recorded drumbeats, found sounds and sound effects to make a performance more fun and interesting for the children.

After that, I worked with a little boy who was confined to his bed because he had a fractured leg. The bed was brought into the playroom so he was able to be involved in the morning performance and stay with us for most of the day. He and I worked on constructing a soundscape around a scary story, using sounds from Garageband, including a number of �scary� screams. During this seesion, I recorded myself saying typical �scary movie� quotes � �I�m coming to get you!� - and used effects in Garageband to process the sound and make the recorded audio sound different i.e. dropping the pitch to make my voice sound like a man, all of which was very amusing to the little boy. Then once we had the soundscape created, we set about creating ghosts for a �Haunted House� story. This was a lot of fun and using sampled audio meant it was quite easy to create something impressive for the children. Also, the fact that the little boy had to stay in bed, meant that he couldn�t fully take part in creating the sounds using instruments but the experience of selecting appropriate sounds was very fulfilling and fun.

So, all in all, the day went quite well and we managed to explore a number of ways to incorporate music and sound into the project. The musical warm-up worked really well as a motivational exercise and consolidates the group to work together. Also, I was impressed that technology, in the form of sound editing and mixing, proved to be an interesting lure for teenagers and will certainly be intending to use more techniques to engage this age-group. The playroom in Hospital E is very busy and it is challenging to engage children, who would like to play with the multitude of games and toys in there. However, I think the pairing of artist and musician/composer proved a good recipe to engage children in a variety of actitivies during the day.