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GOING PLACES GROWING PLACES
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City as a Soundscape
This was a two-year project facilitated by artists Dan Wheatley and Catherine Clements from The Architecture School for Children (TASC) that used the urban built environment as a ‘canvas’ for developing sensory attunement. The project consisted of a collaboration with 8 early years children and staff and parents from an inner-city nursery school to explore the environment in and around their school and compared it with the sensory environment of the city itself with an emphasis on the conceptual and abstract nature of sound. We sought to promote a culture of engagement through sound and practices of listening in which children were conceived as co-curators of spaces rather than passive users. We were interested in learning more on how children perceive, interpret and record sound.
For this, the children worked on a series of process-led workshops that sought to enhance sensory awareness, emotions and embodied ideas connected to the experiences of spaces and buildings. We started with a concrete story, moved through different modes of expression provoked by engagements with spaces.
The workshops
Sound walks/Soundscapes: Each child made a sound recording in their locale which they translated into drawings/mark making
Sound mapping: exploring perspectives in listening, drawing, photo collage, cartography.
Sound Score: Drawing whilst listening to their soundscapes on different types of surfaces and various scales for large gestural drawing
Immersive environment: The children were mesmerised seeing a film animation of their drawings, sound-scores and photos projected on a large scale over the surfaces of the building and screens, another dimension was added by the children drawing in real time with overhead projectors
For this visual essay we will focus on the exploration of two sound walks and related drawings and images.
Concertina of Sounds: the children explored the shape and form of a concertina instrument which led to making paper concertina books, mark making from the sound scores and gestural playing of the book form
Playing the Bridge, using the bridge as a musical instrument the children explored the spatial, structural and sensory qualities, making soundscapes, sculptures and drawings.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
PLAYING THE BRIDGE
Figure 6
Nursary Fence
Figure 7
Figure 8
Figure 9
Figure 10
Creating an Immersive environment
Figure 11
Figure 12
Gallery window of exhibition
a co-collaborative response to the children’s work in a gallery space. Projected images, drawings, models, audio visual sounds and screens
Figure 13
100 languages
NO WAY. THE HUNDRED IS THERE
The child
is made of one hundred.
The child has
a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking.
A hundred always a hundred
ways of listening
of marveling of loving
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding
a hundred worlds
to discover
a hundred worlds
to invent
a hundred worlds
to dream.
The child has
a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine.
The school and the culture
separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands
to do without head
to listen and not to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and Christmas.
They tell the child:
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine.
They tell the child:
that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together.
And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there.
Loris Malaguzzi (translated by Lella Gandini)