Grade 7 hear the 1665 plague week by week, sonified from the London Bills of Mortality.

Year 8 are studying the Great Plague of 1665 and how Londoners lived through it. The teacher has typed the weekly plague deaths from the Bills of Mortality into a short Sonic Pi program that plays one bar per week, with a quiet click for every hundred deaths and a low bell to mark the start of each month. The class listens once with eyes closed: near silence through May, when weekly plague deaths were well under a hundred, the first clicks in June, a thickening through July and August, a dense rattle in mid-September, when a single week recorded over 7,000 plague deaths, then a thinning through the winter. On the second playing the teacher shows the month names on the board as they pass, and students mark on a timeline in their books where the sound changed fastest. They finish by reading three entries from Samuel Pepys's diary, from June, August and September, and placing each on their timeline with a sentence on what Pepys knew at that moment and what he could not yet know.

Tools: Sonic Pi Nine ideas for your own version in Generate