The Soundpainting language is accessible to all students, from preschoolers to collegians to those with special needs. By engaging multiple learning styles (verbal, visual, aural, and kinesthetic) for exploring creativity, Soundpainting breaks through boundaries, tapping into reservoirs of skills and expression that help students better understand themselves and the world in which they live.

Developing the creative mind

Soundpainting is an essential method for engaging students of all ages, ability levels, and art forms in the creative process. Unlike learning to create within a single style, Soundpainting develops the creative voices of students through an array of structural parameters allowing individual choice and stylistic parameters. Using the composer, or “Soundpainter,” as teacher, the innate creativity of students is drawn out and developed constructively by way of the gestural choices of the Soundpainter, enabling each individual, each group, to express their own character in an experiential learning format.

Walter Thompson and other Certified Soundpainters teach Soundpainting nationally and internationally. Soundpainting has been taught in public and private schools (grades K-12) in many countries around the world, and has reached special needs populations, including disabled citizens and at-risk youth, through organizations such as the Ulster-Greene Association for Disabled Citizens in Kingston, NY, and Bellevue Hospital in New York City. With the success of, and demand for, Soundpainting education programs, the Soundpainting Workbooks and Soundpainting Teacher Certification have been created.

Thompson presents Soundpainting at music education conferences that include the International Society for Music Education, the International Association of Schools of Jazz, the Artists and Teachers Institute at Rutgers University, the Michigan Collegiate Music Education Conference: Diversity in the New Millennium, ISIM (International Society for Improvising Musicians) and several state conferences affiliated with MENC: The National Association for Music Education (formerly Music Educators National Conference).