Spring Term - 2
The second half of the spring term concentrated on sound and it’s relation to movement. Sound artist Max Eastley, has worked with Siobhan Davies Dance previously creating the sound score for the production Plants and Ghosts. His inspiring approach to creating music included using everyday materials to make making sound tools, finding how many sounds can be made using our bodies (clapping, clicking, hitting), and listening and recording the sounds around us. Max gave us a wealth of material to play with and encouraged all of us to listen to the sounds around us with a fresh mind.
Rachel Attfield – Creative Projects Manager
Max Eastley, Sound Artist, gives his account of working on the Primary Bank project with pupils from Charlotte Sharman School
Tuesday 26th February - Monday 31st March
The fascinating discovery that there is an inherent facility in humans to use sound creatively -in ways other than with language - was confirmed to me throughout these sessions. Children have the ability to organise themselves and to use sound and movement in space quite naturally. I think it is important for us to recognise this as part of the human heritage that we all share. Narrative and image can be expressed through the simplest means: hands, feet, voice, and sound tools. We can speculate and almost travel back in time and re-live and re-discover what our ancestors knew because we all start from the same point of evolution, but each individual has a unique way of using these basic abilities. What is also important to consider is that we now live in an environment where sound reproduction is everywhere and we are able to bring the past to the present through recording. To provide the means to perceive how the sound images are changed from real time to recorded time is to me essential for us to begin to understand our present environment and important for today’s young people to understand.. I felt that by the end of these workshops, the students had become aware of some of the ways in which their sound environment is both created and manipulated and were better equipped to understand some of the workings of the world around them.
