How we work
This can be called “a social audio experiment” conduced as a collective endeavor by people in local communities, joined by the internet.
Please note: we love listening to what is called “music” but are not creating or publishing it on this site. There are many others doing this. Our focus is on audio storytelling in short format; we are making is not “music” but expresses “musicality” (use of pulse, rhythm, tonality, clang, voice, sounds). We encourage people to explore all aspects and forms of audio expression and are not rigorous with our categories. Original recordings of mouth percussion, chants, lullabies, singing games, rap, rimes, clapping, stomp, idioms, proverbs, sayings, dialects, jokes and the like are encouraged. For us “musicality” involves tuning in to the sound of your kitchen utensils and composing a sound picture with them. We are not purist documentarians. We interpret our audio culture, use loops and samples, mix and remix snippets of sound recordings which have a personal meaning for us.
Our basic strategy is to use the net to broaden interest in audio culture, and increase the listener base for sound pictures, through outreach in local communities (demographical entities, townships or districts with populations of between 10.000 and 70.000).
This is a grass roots enterprise. We have two main target groups when working locally: the young and the old. The young, 9 – 25 years, and the old, above 60. The young are to be reached through their schools and their social media. The elderly through their social activity centers, libraries, cultural centers and local press.
The young have their rich and dynamic audio culture, with rap, mouth percussion, jokes. The elderly have their “sound memories” of the old days – recollections of daily living in the 30ies and forward. Like the sound of a typewriter, the washboard and tub, the steam locomotive. The elderly also have their rich oral culture which we do not hear so much anymore: nursery rimes, lullabies, sayings, idioms, jokes, etc.
We are, as a public service, adding the value of audio culture, the joy of listening to the sounds and voices around us, as a new means of defining identity and as an entertaining pastime. We are increasing listing awareness, collecting sounds and audio memories from specific demographic entities. We work with institutions and individual volunteers in the municipality on their own premises: museums, cultural institutions, schools, historical societies, associations and the local press.
This outreach approach has been developed and used for 20 years with success by Danish radio´s Tape Workshop in the 70ies, analog, face to face. Then, we rented boutique space on “Main Street” in towns and set up local audio workshops that provided professional recording and editing equipment as well as professional guidance to anyone who wanted to try to make their own audio story for broadcast. We want now to go online, providing the methodology and tools for users to generate audio content for distribution on the project website and elsewhere.
The site we propose is not another YouTube, where just about anything gets posted, regardless of its quality. Indeed, we believe that people can tune in to, appreciate and produce quality sound pictures with the recording and editing equipment they have or can get access to: their mobile phones, cheap recording devices, disc recorders, free downloads that are designed user friendly. Not all sounds recorded by, for example, a 9th grade class get posted. The school class doing sound pictures from their town will evaluate their work in the classroom. Our intention is to generate discussion and refine the sense of quality.
As in the Tape Workshop, there is an editorial review board composed of professionals and users that oversee all production quality. The editorial board works online. We do not rely on user ratings, nor will we use them. We are looking for expressions of audio cultural diversity, sounds from people´s daily living, at home, in transport, at work, in free time. We are collecting: Sounds of Denmark, as recorded by individuals in specific places at specific times. We call these “captured sound moments”.