The Sonic Garden: Inspiration for a pilot DIY instrument building and sound exploration project for SEN secondary school pupils

I co-founded Lifesize in late 2019 with other community arts practitioners based in Hastings, East Sussex. Our mission is to implement and facilitate high quality arts projects in the harder to reach areas of our local community and beyond. We aim to give marginalised people access to a unique and contemporary arts for wellbeing provision. As well as working with several different community groups we specialise in working with people with Learning disabilities and Special Education Needs.

Earlier this year we received funding from Hastings Opportunity Area, a local authority funder, to provide a music for wellbeing engagement programme for Saxon Mount SEN secondary school. The programme was planned to be fun and re-engage the pupils in learning and positive relationships with peers and adults

The Sonic Garden project was devised as an exploration into sound through the use of unconventional sound making items and the DIY instrument building culture that has been a part of my own musical background. In my formative years as a teenager exploring music myself my friends and I had begun to latch on to the fun of finding less ordinary ways of creating sounds as it felt like exciting unchartered territory for us as young musicians. We would attach contact microphones to household items, retune, modify and rewire our guitars into new configurations, finding new ways of making sounds.

The concept of the Sonic Garden was to try and shine a light on the sound making possibilities of less ordinary sound sources. To make and use homemade instruments to create an accessible soundscape that was not so much dependent on the participants ability to play an instrument but rooted in harnessing the curiosity of the players to make an unusual sound piece.

In 1998 aged 22 on a road trip with some musician friends in America, I had designed and built a bass Zither resembling a set of stairs, that I called The Sonic Stairway (pictured); it ended up twenty odd years later being the inspiration for this project.

In 2019 as the house band producer for carousel.org.uk (a learning disability arts organisation in Brighton) I supported a group of young learning disabled musicians to design and build a multiplayer instrument called the Sonic Tree, it was showcased through a performance at a local experimental music event and well received by the audience.

The Sonic Tree (pictured) and Sonic Stairway finally found a home in the new Sonic Garden project along with new creations made by the pupils. After a successful ten week pilot with Saxon Mount SEN school The Sonic Garden will hopefully be making its way to other SEN schools and community groups. This next set of blogs will showcase some highlights of this project.

lifesize.org.uk