In Sound and Silence: Classroom Projects in Creative Music, Paynter and Aston (1970) unfold a creative approach to music education based on the interplay of sound and silence that draws on a variety of sound sources, including both ‘purely musical materials’ and ‘sounds from the natural world’. These sound-sources are to be made available for investigation by groups of children and by individuals in a method Paynter and Aston term ‘empirical composition’, which they explain ‘means going directly to our materials’ (p.12) in an approach ‘alive to the excitement of discovery’ (p.3), applicable to all children and accessible to all teachers, which shifted the balance around ‘re-creative’ teaching and learning methods based in techniques of professional music education delivered by teachers versed in musical technique. Paynter and Ashton see ‘the biggest problem for classroom projects in music’ as ‘the noise creative musical activities make and the number of work spaces needed’ (p.15); but they re-assure the teacher-practitioner that ‘certainly up to the age of about twelve, children can often work at this kind of thing in groups around a hall without distracting one another’ (p.16). The presentation will explore how Paynter and Aston’s problematisation of sound-noise-space (Goddard et al, 2012; Hegarty, 2007) makes visible shifts in historical and cultural understandings (Attali, 1985) of the dynamic and vibrant soundscapes of schooling (Burke and Grosvenor, 2011) and in the play of emotional and social registers that comprise schooling’s acoustic horizons (LaBelle, 2007). The presentation will use Paynter and Aston’s projects in conjunction with historical and contemporary images of schooling to examine ways the inter-weaving of sound-noise-silence as sonorous material, acoustic event(s) and conceptual structure(s), textures auditory geographies of spaces and territories (LaBelle, 2007) in flows of power and desire that constitute the rhythms (Lefebvre, 1992) of schooling. The presentation will follow the sonorities and spatializations that Paynter and Aston’s problematisation makes visible, in order to interrogate how notions of hearing-listening (Gouk, 2004) and the framing of acoustic horizons in schooling form elements in the production of auditory selves (Connor, 2002, 2004) embedded in sonorous relations of schooling. It will argue that acoustic histories of education, acoustic cartographies of education, and the philosophical terrain of acoustical thinking, provide approaches amenable to illuminating how the ever-present mesh of sonorous events contour the spatial geographies, acoustic ecologies, and ethical relations of schooling.

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