~ July 2016

The pilot of our new music composition project took to the road in Aberdeenshire in May and June with 50 children aged 9-11 and their enthusiastic teachers.

Commissioned by our friends and colleagues at sound and funded by Aberdeenshire Council through its Creative Scotland Youth Music Initiative fund, Road Trip is a fun and experimental step into a weird and wonderful world which uses binaural recording, sound walks and studio recording to create 3-minute music and sound compositions.

Focused listening, score writing, abstract sonic surprises, first steps into audio processing and remixing, a huge amount of team-work and time-keeping were the order of the day. There were lots of discoveries about the roles and responsibilities you’d expect to find in professional music making.

The Road Trip recording helmet is (and looks) awesome! Easy to use, and easy to understand, it was developed with and built by the exceptionally curious music inventor Yann Seznec who co-led the sessions in the schools. Technology and crazy music making are never far away from each other, but what seemed ultra clear is that children, if given a chance, have little prejudice about what music is, how it can be created, and how it can be performed; the simple premise being that music is a journey, from here to there, with some stuff that happens in the middle. Easy.

Although we spent just 6 x 2-hour sessions with each group we captured lots of great music and visuals. We hope to publish the results soon!

Road Trip Peterhead, we hope, will be the first of many Road Trip adventures, and like any journey we hope to keep learning.

Thanks to sound and all the schools for getting stuck in, even in the rain. My favourite moment was when one fantastically motivated teacher slid backwards down a metal slide on her knees after stabilising a precariously perched jenga-tower at the top of the slide. You can guess what happened next!

Stephen Deazley
Artistic Director

With thanks to Aberdeenshire Council and sound