Soundson
News
- September 2010
Andrea Cohen and Wiska Radkiewicz were invited to present the Soundson project at the conference “Electronics Meets the Challenges of the 21st Century” which took place within a new music convention “ArtMusFair” in Warsaw, Poland in September 2010.
www.artmusfair.pl/conferences/The article “The Soundson Programme: New Tools for New Musical Education” issued from the presentation given at the conference will be posted on the website artmusfair.pl.
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May 2010
The radio piece "A deux voix, moments" by Andrea Cohen and Wiska Radkiewicz was included in the Radio Art Complation series "Deep Wireless 7" produced by New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) in 2010 as part of the annual Deep Wireless festival in May, a month-long celebration of radio art. NAISA is a non-profit organization that produces performances and installations spanning the entire spectrum of electroacoustic and experimental sound art.
- BBC Radio Leicester feature on Soundson May 20th 2009.
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A new edition will take place betwwen two schools: Le collège de la Petite Camargue, à Lansargues, France and The Lancaster School in Leicester, England.
A real time sound exchange will take place in May the 19th using the interactive page
The Radiophonic Creation Day 2009 will take place on the 23rd of May 2009. See www.shakerattleroll.org - Andrea Cohen and Wiska Radkiewicz are invited to feature their newest radio work "A deux voix, moments"
- A paper about Soundson has been accepted at EMS 09 in Buenos Aires.
About Soundson
The Soundson Project is a web-based environment in which composers or amateurs-students living in different countries create a common sound composition through an ongoing exchange of sounds. This project was created as experimental approach to audio sharing and collaborative composition. The exchange of sounds does not take place in real time, but allows the composition to develop in a building process over a period of time. The resulting composition varies depending on the age and background of the participants. With students with little musical training the final piece may be closer to a sound collage than to a musical composition. The educational benefits of the project are threefold: musical, technological, and cultural.
In a pedagogical context the goal of the Soundson Project research is to explore the educational potential of shared composition through sound exchanges between groups living in different countries and having different cultural backgrounds. Students communicate through the medium of sounds, rather than language. The cultural/musical interaction takes place in all the stages of the project and in each one of them the students are confronted with the ideas provided by their partners. During the course of the project we will be studying the effects of learning through interaction with groups outside the classroom and outside the students’ cultural context. It is possible to distinguish two stages in the process of exchange. Each of these stages has different aims.
Exploration of Sound Environment:
In the early stages of sound collection, students often become aware of their own sound environment ‘as sound’ for the first time. Students learn ‘how to listen’, while also listening to the environment of others. By exploring their own sound world students discover the representative and expressive qualities of sound and become aware of its multidimensional aspects: signal, clue, indication, musical object.
Process of Sound Composition:
The students weave their own collected sounds and edited fragments together with those of others in their shared compositions. In the process of exchanging composed fragments, the student share musical ideas and become aware of the variety of different ways in which the same sounds can be organized or composed. They discover, too, the possibilities of montage, not only as a technique of editing, but also as an artistic tool. Students are encouraged to experiment as poetry and imagination become apparent through new sound combinations.
In short, our program is an initiation to sound environment, sound recording, sound editing and mixing, and to music composition, through the process of exchange of recorded sounds between the participants.
European Week in School
The SOUNSON project was chosen to participate in "Une saison culturelle européene" or European Cultural Season (http://www.culturesfrance.com) <http://www.culturesfrance.com/> , an important cultural event hosted by France that took place in all European countries during six months of France’s presidency of the EU, from July till December 2008. The SOUNDSON project was conducted during an event called "La semaine de l´Europe à l'école" (European week in school),which took place from the 20th to the 24th of October, 2008.
The students from eight schools in five countries (Bulgaria, France, Italy, Poland and UK) worked over the course of two months on recording sounds from their respective environments, exchanging them via internet and building together musical collages which were presented during a live “virtual concert” on October 24th, 2008. No prior musical training was required from the students. The participants brought to this exchange a great variety of musical backgrounds. During this preparation period, we conducted in each school training sessions, some in person, others through Skype. We encouraged more than one teacher to be involved in this training because we consider our project as a multidisciplinary exploration of the idea of teaching through exchange. Starting in the beginning of September, we asked the students to record sounds, to download them to the computer and to select them. Students recorded two types of sounds:
- sounds of their respective environments which were not to be generic but representative of the specificity of each school´s environment.
- vocal sounds in which each language appeared in a form of a poem, song, single word, message, etc.
The “European Week in School” took place from the 20th to the 24th of October, 2008. From the first day of the event we started exchanging sounds among all the schools and we worked on editing them, transforming them, and combining them into short fragments. Out of various environments and various languages the students created a truly international sound mosaic.
The last day of the event, on October 24th, we have organized a live "concert" with participation of all the schools. This event was hosted by the French middle school, College du Centre, 68 rue Guy Moquet in Villejuif, France.
UNDERWAY
We are projecting in the future to expand the scope of the Soundson project by creating a new section with a creative profile which will become an international forum for sound artists and composers to experiment various forms of collective composition.
We would offer several ways of engaging the artists in creating different collective sound works.
There are a few examples of such propositions:
- CONSTELLATION - A series of sounds put on line will constitute a starting point for each participant to imagine a different sound composition
- METAMORPHOSIS - Participants will been asked to transform an original sound or group of sound
- MUSICAL TITLE - Each participant will contribute with a piece inspired by a musical term such as Lento, Agitato etc
- SILENCE AND BEYOND - Participants will been asked to add fragments having a few sounds and many silences...
Dr Andrea Cohen
Email: andrea.cohen [at] orange.fr
Dr Wiska Radkiewicz
Email: wradkiewicz [at] yahoo.com