For a second consecutive year, Sonorium offers grade-schoolers from a local neighbourhood school ten exploratory sound workshop sessions. Led by artists Magali Babin and Stéphane Claude, with the help of cultural mediator Sylvaine Chassay, the workshop activities develop the students’ listening skills and heighten their awareness of the sound environment in which they live, as well as teach them to identify surprising sounds, qualities, and textures.
The activities are organized around five themes, through which children learn to recognize the architectural sounds of their school, the environmental sounds of the neighbourhood, sounds produced by voice, sounds performed live, as well as electronic sounds. The workshop familiarizes them with various techniques for creating sound, one of our art centre’s areas of expertise.
Once each theme has been explored, the recordings made by the students are added to a module, a sort of sound box. By the end of the workshop, five interrelated modules will make up the Sonorium, a dynamic habitat for storing sounds, listening to them, studying how they are affected by different transmission and listening conditions, as well as inhabiting a world of sound through playful means.
Sonorium will culminate in a closing party and small exhibition, presented by the participants at OBORO.
The project is supported by the Entente sur le développement culturel de Montréal, the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications, and Ville de Montréal.
> Read about Sonorium 2016 in the article published on the Ville de Montréal’s Médiation culturelle website. (Available in French only)