A workshop for people with little to no musical experience!
Sounds Like Music is a workshop for people with every musical experience, including none. It is an inclusive music-making platform that values participation, creativity and interaction over technical skills. We strongly believe that everybody is musical and can take part in music-making regardless of their skills.
Every participant brings an object or an instrument that makes a sound with a special meaning to them. We explore those sounds in new and fun ways and make music using improvisation, interaction strategies, games and verbal and graphic scores.
The workshop series aims at increasing access to musical participation for people who would be otherwise excluded from making music. It challenges established concepts and practices around music and musicality and promotes social innovation by initiating new ways of relating with the others and the environment through sound. We believe that unlinking music-production abilities from specialised instrumental training enables everybody to make music without
requiring mastery of an instrument, or specific musical idioms and techniques, and lead to the emergence of new types of musicality.
Here are some quotes by participants in the workshop:
“Well that’s the first time I’ve played with another group of people. It just dawned on me afterwards. It took me a minute to realise I had actually started playing.”
“there was more of an element of listening to others, almost a coming together of each individual person. And then I was a little more aware that everybody was exploring something new; that there wasn’t really a starting point, a common inspiration, but everybody had their own path that then intersected with the others.”
“I’m playing and I don’t feel inept. That already means a lot. […] It literally opened up a world to me because I didn’t think, in the first place, that I could do it myself.”
“A very simple approach but at the same time direct, creative.”
Phase 1 of the workshop took place every Sunday 15.00-16.30, from November 5 to December 3 at The Glad Cafe – 1006A Pollockshaws Road, Glasgow. You can read the call for participants at this link
Phase 2 is ongoing with the name LoMus Lab at the Universtity of Calabria and focuses on the use of traditional sounding objects from Calabria.
Phase 3 is ongoing with the name Suono Libera Tutt* at Ex Convento in Belmonte Calabro and explores new ways of making music with traditional sounding objects from Calabria.
SLM is part of the EU-funded research project LoMus – Local Sound for a New Musicality that explores the musicality of non-musicians through sounding objects and contemporary music. LoMus is a research project that aims to develop a method for broadening the musical participation of amateurs and non-trained individuals through a special combination of sounding objects and contemporary music techniques. LoMus challenges established concepts and practices around music and musicality, promotes social innovation by initiating new ways of relating with others and the environment through sound, and extends music-making’s personal and social benefits to everybody
Christian Ferlaino is an Italian musician and ethnomusicologist. He is a saxophonist, a surdulina bagpipe player, a composer, and a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at Università della Calabria.
Raymond MacDonald is a Music Psychology and Improvisation Professor at the University of Edinburgh. He is an internationally acclaimed saxophone player and composer.