International Songwriter, the beginnings of a long distance collaboration

The Carousel House band consists of learning disabled musicians and music facilitators. We started this long distance collaboration with a group of musician with complex support needs in Finland by agreeing a process by which we would attempt to create a piece of music together. We began the project by creating some profiles of the band members to include a photo and a bit of background info of what they do in the band and a little about their interests. The group of musicians from Resonaari responded with profiles in the same format which really helped ground the project as a start point. Everyone could get an idea of who each other was and the long distance between us all in this collaboration started to feel less

We then decided we would share creativity by each taking turns to add parts to a piece to the composition. The Carousel House Band started by identifying some themes / working titles for chord progressions that we would then try and realise as a band. The band came up with the following titles for the chord progressions:

Romantic

Calm Sea

Reggae

Sci-fi

We used a variety of techniques to get musical ideas underway. Using figurenotes we explored using the random generation of chords using a figurenotes dice as well as making up the chords from a variety of keys to enable the band members to choose which chords they wanted to use as starting points. We explored repetition, question and answer formats etc. The idea was not to develop the ideas beyond a simple chord progression so we could look to our collaborator to choose the chord progression they liked the best as a verse partand respond with a chord progression that could be a chorus part The pictures show how these first stage chord progressions looked in basic figurenotes notation when we sent them to Resonaari group.