DRINNN! What does my school sound like?
This march we launched the third edition of the project DRINNN! What does my school sound like?, a series of workshops dedicated to raising awareness towards the sound environments that flourish in the classes of some of Florence’s primary schools. Desks, chairs, pencils, pencil cases, hands, feet….these elements all become the basic sound materials used in the composition of original scores born of the creativity of children.
What would happen if the classroom desks were to turn into percussion instruments? And what if the bell were an element of musical structure? And what if the children’s hands were able to produce sounds and noises of all kinds? And what if paper were the material used to create original sound scores?
Tempo Reale introduces a workshop aimed at raising sound awareness in primary schools. This initiative is part of the project LE CHIAVI DELLA CITTA’ 2014/2015, a series of educational activities conceived by the Florence’s Department of Education for primary and secondary schools.
Using new and surprising methods the children are engaged into a creative process that shines a new light onto all the sounds that inhabit the school space. The children are guided into a sonorous world where they discover new ways of using the tools that accompany their daily activities, starting with their own hands and then involving the objects of a typical school day.
This workshop offers an approach that fosters the development of a heightened awareness towards a well-known and familiar environment – the school, in this case – through active listening, the rediscovery of its value in sound and its unexpected potential. The process is characterized by an autonomous creative reorganization.
Offering a new artistic perspective on the sound elements of a space that is perceived on a daily basis allows us to see the school as an acoustic environment consisting of spaces, objects and resonant bodies. The resources that the school itself provides us with will be optimized in order to facilitate learning and creative processes and to reduce attention and listening deficits that are often the most recognizable symptoms of emotional discomfort in school.
