In Week 1, the students improvise by interpreting images of layered things into music. Initially I freaked out because all the layered food started to look like it would give the same result as lasagna (even layers of two/three different textures) so I had to actually think a little bit about food whose layers were all different (dessert slice) and layers where one is vastly thicker than the others but stays out of the way (pavlova).
When I got to thinking about the mountains, I decided that I wanted to have both the cross section and an actual visual of the mountain. Both Liam and Gabby's works drew on natural inspiration, so I felt there would be better results than if I threw the students highly technical geographical information in isolation. In my head I had actually envisioned the mountain activity just taking into account the top contour of the mountain range, as I had once taken a sine curve for my HSC. When I actually found cross sections of mountains, they were far more interesting than what I had anticipated as they all showed the different layers of rock and earth that made up the mountain! I think it gives the students more to work with and there's definitely much more "stuff" to play around with with that dimension. Mt St Helens was especially cool as I found one with diagrams of four different stages of the mountain as it collapsed in the 80's.
When I first found my images, I kind of threw together my images at the bottom of my plan without very much thought, taking about half a page per image. Upon reflecting I realised that I needed all the images to be much larger so that they can be actually printed or annotated and used properly as a score. There needed to be enough room for the students to mark out time markings for a 1-2 minute compositions along the base of the image and it would have been too cramped if it were smaller.
