Sound Sculpture: Musicians with learning disabilities perform an Outer Space themed soundscape with homemade instruments at an experimental music event
Sound Sculpture: A new project exploring homemade instruments with a group of musicians with learning disabilities. The Carousel House Band is an integrated group from Brighton consisting of learning disabled musicians and music facilitators.
We explore creative music making through a variety of project work designed to give the group interesting and rewarding challenges and provide collaboration opportunities with the wider community. In this project we are looking at homemade instruments; exploring how they work and in what ways we can have fun playing them.
All the work on this project to date came together in a spectacular performance at ‘Splitting the Atom’, an established regular experimental music event in Brighton. The band took to the stage and wowed onlookers with their unique musical offerings. I was particularly proud of the band on this occasion as they brought to life a quite abstract piece in front of a completely new audience. The event promoter provided us with some wonderful feedback:
The Carousel House Band's performance at Splitting the Atom all-dayer went very well and was met with a lot of enthusiasm from our audience. We are fans of self-built instruments and the 'Sonic Tree' they built for this show and played on stage was one of the best things we've seen since we started putting on these shows and made for a very visually rewarding experience.
The learning disabled musicians made some great sounds - one of them keeping a steady rhythm on percussion while the others explored all the noises they could extract from the instruments they had built. It suited our experimental aesthetic well in that it is usual for musicians at STA to take an exploratory approach and to not worry about making the 'right' sounds. The Carousel team looked after the whole thing very well - offering help when needed but also giving them space to make their own music. We'd be very happy to do it again sometime
Splitting The Atom promoter
It has been a fantastic journey working with the Carousel House Band to explore all these ideas. I think there is a lot of scope to create engaging project work around these themes and I am excited to explore these ideas further.
