University Helps School Represent Uk in Virtual Euro Concert
17th October 2008
Students at a Leicester school are linking up with colleges across Europe to create a virtual music concert as part of European Culture Season next week with the help of De Montfort University.
A virtual concert which will take the form of an ‘ongoing exchange of sounds’ will be held over two hours on Friday 24 October, and will see a domino effect of sounds recorded at each college being passed to the next country online and added to as it arrives in each new destination.
Students from eight schools in five countries; Bulgaria, France, Italy, Poland and UK will take part with Leicester’s Ash Field special school representing the UK.
Ash Field School, on Broad Avenue, Leicester, has been recoding sounds for the event in collaboration with the De Montfort University’s Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT).
Seven Ash Field students between 11 and 14 years old have recorded sounds in school including cricket games and wheelchair lifts, talking, singing and rhymes.
Cherie Evans, from the IOCT, said: “Using sounds which we’ve recorded with the students both from the environment around them and their voices, we’ll be creating a truly international sound mosaic.
“It’s a very exciting sonic art project and when each college’s sound recordings are remixed and transformed with those at the other schools a sort of domino effect will be created as the composition gets passed on to each school.”
Kate Helm, teacher at Ash Field School, said: “The students have been really interested in this project. They have learned some new sound editing skills and have enjoyed linking with sounds from other countries. We wanted to be part of the project because we have sounds around our school that we don’t think other schools will have and we wanted to share them. We are always looking for opportunities to be part of international projects.”
The project is part of the Sound.Son web-based environment, coordinated by Dr Andrea Cohen, a visiting Research Fellow, at the IOCT.
For more information about the Sound.Son project see the IOCT website: www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/projects/soundson.html
The European Cultural Season is being run to mark France’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union. It is a ground-breaking initiative and sees the 26 EU partners to showcase the best of their heritage and creative talent during the second half of 2008. See (www.culturesfrance.com)
For further information or to be kept informed about IOCT activities, please contact:The Director, Institute of Creative Technologies,
De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH
Tel: (+44) 0116 250 6146
Email: eedmonds [at] dmu.ac.uk
www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk