Our Story
Making Waves has been developed by a partnership of educators, musicians, and business professionals dedicated to creating educational programs that blur the lines between STEM and music to bring out the best in students’ abilities to experiment and create, analyze and explore.
Our story began in 2013 when Grammy-winning musicians Third Coast Percussion began a residency at the University of Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center and started a collaboration with computer engineering professor Jay Brockman and other faculty to explore the common ground between engineers, scientists, and musicians. They developed a program called WAVES that lets the audience perform with Third Coast Percussion on custom-designed musical instruments produced by South Bend Woodworks while learning about the properties of sound by visualizing sound waves on projected oscilloscope and spectrogram apps. Thousands of audience members have enjoyed WAVES at places ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and at many schools, museums, and concert halls in between.
In 2014, the team joined forces with modern classical composer and Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche on the production of Wild Sound, a work written by Kotche for Third Coast Percussion to explore the “distinctions that exist between music and noise, instrument and everyday object, performance and daily life.” The piece features a set of custom acoustic and electronic musical instruments, designed with a team of ND undergrads, that are constructed and played on stage, where the sounds of the construction are part of the musical score.
The process of developing Wild Sound was an intense and deeply rewarding experience: artists and engineers working together creating music for instruments that are still being invented. We learned first hand that no matter your professional specialty, everyone needs the intellectual tools to be able to experiment and create, analyze and explore. From Wild Sound, a new idea was born:
How can we share the experience of artists and engineers working and learning together with grade school students?
Instead of having the audience play music we wrote on instruments that we gave them, why not have students create the instruments and write the music?
With instructors from The Music Village of South Bend, we started a small after school program to explore this idea in 2017 at Roosevelt STEAM Academy in Elkhart. With new partner Riverbend Community Math Center, we’re constantly improving our programming for students of all ages. Schools and community organizations we’ve worked with include:
Roosevelt STEAM Academy (Elkhart)
Pierre Moran Middle School (Elkhart)
Goshen Boys & Girls Clubs
Perley Elementary School (South Bend)
Madison STEAM Academy (South Bend)
GE Girls STEM Camp at Notre Dame
Chaos Math Camp at Notre Dame
If you are interested in a Making Waves program at your school or organization, please contact us.