by Author sam dook

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The Carousel House Band, a new project by learning disabled led arts charity Carousel

The Carousel House Band is an integrated band of learning disabled musicians and music facilitators. We are undertaking collaborations and commissions to explore music making in different settings and to test the flexibility of Figurenotes. 

For the last two years we have explored implementing figurenotes in our music projects. Figurenotes is a musical notation system that harnesses colours and shapes to aid the learning of instruments and musical notation. It has proven to be very successful, perfect for supporting artists with learning disabilities to create and notate original music as well as learning to play instruments. We have found Figurenotes to be incredibly inclusive, it enables people of varying abilities to participate in group musical activity.

 

A new project called ‘The Carousel House Band’ aims to further explore figurenotes. The band is embarking on a variety of commissions, collaborations and challenges to test the flexibility of the system. Our first commission was to create original musical themes for Carousel’s radio show and film channel. We worked to briefs set by the film and Radio team, which are led by learning disabled artists. One of the briefs was to create a theme for a quiz segment called ‘Fact or Fib’. The radio team wanted a piece of music that was thirty seconds long that would act as background music whilst contestants are answering quiz questions. Using the popular television programme ‘Countdown’ as inspiration the band explored the composition of the famous theme tune and then embarked on making their own.

You can hear the Fact or Fib theme and others created by the band here:

https://soundcloud.com/carouselartuk/fact-or-fib-theme-tune

You can find out more about the figurenotes system here:

http://www.figurenotes.org

Find out more about Carousel here:

http://www.carousel.org.uk