"...but I can't READ music..."

In the summer of 2024 I devised and ran an Arts Council England funded project in Wakefield Libraries, creating soundscapes and music from scratch with mostly non-musicians. I collaborated on this project with the Wakefield based artist Tony Wade. The project was an experimental contemporary music making project, encouraging participants, often with no musical experience at all, that in the same way that anyone who starts with a blank piece of paper can use different techniques to create something beautiful on the page, anyone can (in this case working collaboratively as a group) start with silence, and create something beautiful and meaningful to fill that silence.

We used a hairdryer and an empty paper bag to create a random series of notes, and discarded old musical scores to create an actual landscape - we experimented with a range of instruments and sound effects (including musical fruit) to build a soundscape, and then, using the narrative arc we'd made with the landscape, and the random notes we'd each generated, we built a soundscape, which told an audio version of the story we'd created.

Feedback from participants, both children and adults, was overwhelmingly positive.