Our Basic Philosophy

  • Nothing engages and focuses children more than making sound because sound making enables children to control their environment

  • Working with sound should always be fun and play-based

  • If one is engaged and focused when making an intentional sound in a deliberate way, there are no mistakes

  • Everyone has their own style and way of making sound, which needs to be encouraged, celebrated, and reinforced

Preparing Children for School

Pre-Kindergarten marks a child’s first encounter with classroom routines and expectations that will follow them for many years to come.  With Creative Sound Play Pre-K learning standards are focused on developing each child’s self-regulation and engagement skills to enable them to successfully adjust to classroom norms.  Kindergarten readiness includes the following skills:

  • Children can focus, listen, and follow instructions

  • Children can ask questions, share ideas, feelings, and be reflective

  • Children can solve problems, make responsible decisions, be mindful, respectful, empathetic, and collaborate easily with each other

As children build these skills, Pre-K teachers are tasked with managing their students’ diverse cognitive and social emotional needs.  Our goal with Creative Sound Play is to provide teachers with easy to use, flexible techniques that create opportunities for their students’ to be successful, engaged, calm, and fall in love with learning.

Hayes Greenfield

Hayes Greenfield is the founder of Creative Sound Play, an interconnected, play-based, generative learning system for Pre-K educators, as well as an award-winning Electro-Acoustic looping artist and jazz musician, notable film composer, and innovative educator. With over 30 years of experience working with students, teachers, and education professionals, Hayes thrives on continually challenging boundaries and expectations for the classroom. His book, Creative Sound Play for Young Learners: A Teacher’s Guide to Enhancing Transition Times, Classroom Communities, SEL, and Executive Function Skill (Routledge, Eye on Education Series, 2024), is a fun and engaging guide that invites educators to use sound-making as a collaborative, play-based practice in early childhood classrooms.

As someone with dyslexia growing up in the 60s and 70s when few people knew much about it, Hayes struggled in formal educational settings. Fortunately, he found music and the saxophone at age 16, and after finishing high school, abandoned formal education for private studies with master musicians and pursued his own path. During those years Hayes did everything he could to get by– drove a cab, limousine, cleaned houses, did construction, waited tables, and busked on the streets until he could begin to make a living as a full-time musician and composer.     

As a teaching artist, Hayes began working in public and private K-12 schools and after-school programs in the early 90s where he created and implemented curricula for K-12 students, headed the music program and built a rehearsal/recording studio at The Door, and created professional development workshops for special needs District 75 teachers. Notably, from 2009-2012 Hayes created a successful Pre-K pilot program for Detroit Public Schools as part of the PNC Bank “Grow Up Great Initiative.” Beginning in 2012, Hayes devoted five years to codifying CSP at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House’s award-winning Early Childhood Center’s Head Start program, and from 2015 to 2017 consulted at Bank Street Head Start. In 2021 he created “Effective Transitions Essentials for Classrooms,” one of the first courses offered on the National Head Start Association’s professional development online teaching portal, The Academy.

As the founder and lead educator for Creative Sound Play, Hayes guides Pre-K teachers in his sound-based pedagogy and offers in-person and remote coaching sessions to accompany his self-paced video curriculum and in-class reference sheets. Internationally acclaimed developmental neuroscientists that have helped Hayes realize his innovative vision for Creative Sound Play include Clancy Blair, Adele Diamond, C. Cybele Raver, Ellen Galinsky, and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek.

Hayes is an exceptional speaker that has presented at events and conferences for the National Association for the Education of Young Children, the National Head Start Association, A Joyous Celebration of Ideas, The Next Wave Center for Artistry and Scholarship, the New Jersey Music Educators Association, the Minnesota Music Educators Association, the International Association of Jazz Educators, and was the Elsevier Keynote Speaker at their 2012 annual meeting.

As an Electro-Acoustic, looping, spatial and immersive jazz musician, Hayes creates personal, emotionally rich journeys that draw from his expansive musical history. Prior to Covid-19, he performed with multiple speakers surrounding his audience which enabled him total control to move his layers of music 360 degrees around the room in surround sound. Since then, Hayes has discovered the next level of cutting-edge technology, which enables all listeners worldwide to simply wear everyday headphones or earbuds to hear and enjoy all of the motion of his spatial and immersive music. Hayes is both proud and grateful to be endorsed by Yamaha, Vandoren, and Eventide.

“Greenfield, with his alto saxophone and a host of effects at the ready can redecorate a room in a sonic rainbow of musical colors…If touch points of the jazz tradition abound, so do traces of countless other disparate genres and forms; unpredictability is assured.”

Steve Futterman, – The New Yorker

Hayes has released 10 critically acclaimed CDs under his own name since 1988, and traveled throughout the US, Canada, and Europe performing at international festivals, concerts, and clubs with his own bands. Hayes’ two family jazz CDs “Music for a Green Planet” and “Jazz-A-Ma-Tazz” have both received several awards, and his school assembly program titled Jazz-A-Ma-Tazz, has reached over 300,000 young people. His music has been beautifully received and reviewed by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Billboard, Child Magazine, Publishers Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, Downbeat, Jazz Times and more.

Notable Jazz artists Hayes has worked with include Jaki Byard, Rashied Ali, Paul Bley, Richie Havens, Danny “Big Black” Rey, Adam Nussbaum, Jay Anderson, Hiram Bullock, Barry Altschul, Bob Cranshaw, Dave Liebman, Bob Stewart, Mike Clark, Billy Byers, Tony Scott, Joe Lee Wilson, Dean Johnson, David Berkman, Victor Jones, Tom Harrell, Ray Drummond, Roger Rosenberg, Norman Simmons, Reggie Workman, Paul Socolow, Leroy Williams, Amiri Baraka, Frank Lacy, Leonard Gaskin, Rick Danko, Denis Charles, Bill Ware, Uri Caine, Dean Johnson, and many others

As film composer, Hayes has scored more than 70 films, documentaries, commercials, animations, and TV specials, many of which have received awards, including the prestigious Emmy (George Marshall and the American Century) and two Tellys (The Nature of Modernism: E. Stewart Williams, Architect and William Krisel, Architect). More notable films Hayes has scored include the PBS film America Rebuilds: A Year at Ground Zero (2002), American Rebuilds II: Return to Ground Zero (2006), Building Alaska (2012), and Alaska, the World & Wally Hickel (2013), The American Nurse (2014), In Search of Resolution (2023), as well as films about such luminary artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Grace Hartigan, James Rosenquist, Milton Glaser; architects Philip Johnson, Donald Wexler; the United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins; photographer Jan Groover; and writer George Plimpton.

You can learn more about Creative Sound Play at CreativeSoundPlay.com and connect with Hayes at HayesGreenfield.com and on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.