Graphic Scores
📋 What it is
A graphic score writes music as lines, dots and shapes that players turn into sound.
🗣️ Coach says
Music doesn't have to be written in notes. In a GRAPHIC SCORE a rising line means a rising pitch, a fat blob a big sound, a row of dots short taps. Composers like Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and Cathy Berberian drew whole pieces, and each group of players reads the picture in its own way, so no two performances match.
🧠 Memory hook
Graphic score = music as a drawing: up = higher · big = louder · dots = short sounds.
😂 Giggle
Why did the FFT go to the art gallery?
It wanted to see the spectrum!
😲 Whoa!
Daphne Oram built a machine in the 1960s that played her drawings: she drew on strips of film and light shining through them became sound.
✅ Quick check: On a graphic score, what does a line climbing up the page usually mean?
Say your answer out loud first — then reveal.
The sound rises in pitch, the same way higher notes sit higher on a staff.
Graphic scores usually map up on the page to higher pitch.
🧪 Try it! (2 minutes)
Draw ten seconds of a rainstorm as a graphic score, then perform it with your voice or a pencil tapping.