On Saturday at OMEA I attended a session that really blew my mind. I think it is something that could absolutely be applied to all of our community music practices. The session was titled: Exploring Sociocultural Differences Through Soundscapes. The session was given by a woman named Kelly Bylica who is currently completing her PhD at Western.

In this session, she talked about soundcapes and using them to bring students awareness to their own lived experiences. She used the prompting questions:

• How do I hear home?
• How do I hear my community?
• How do I make meaning from my sonic environment?

With these questions, (and a lot more preamble about what soundscapes are and how to create/organize/present them), she assigned her students to go out, collect (record) sounds from their environments, and organize them into a digital composition.

Where things got interesting is that during the composition process, she had each student share about a 15-45 seconds clip of their work. Once the class/group listened to the clip, they were asked to discuss with a partner what they were hearing in the soundscape. Next, they were asked to share with the group what they though. Finally, after all groups had shared, the composer shared what his/her intention had been with the soundscape.

We did a version of this, listening to a 45 second clip from a 15 year old girl. The soundscape clip started with the sound of crickets and a background ‘wah wah wah’ voice that sounded to me like a tv. In the middle of the composition, there was what sounded like an Imam calling to prayer, followed by a male speaking about rebellion against parents. The clip ended the way it started, with the crickets and muffled voice.

The discussions and interpretations of this clip in the session were absolutely fascinating. One group focused very carefully on the male speaker in the middle and supposed that the girl was struggling with her religious identity and trying to find her own identity against her parents’ expectations. Another noted that all three of the voices included in the soundscape were male, and talked about perhaps a feeling of male oppression. There was speculation about the muffled voice, and whether it was maybe a tv in the background at home in the evenings when she felt safe, or something else.

Kelly shared that in her classroom, following this clip, the discussion went for 45 minutes and brought up an incredibly wide range of topics including;

• Gender roles and patriarchy
• Religion
• Finding yourself
• Struggling with parents’ expectations
• Interracial dating (one Muslim boy said, following the discussions, that he felt like no one would ever want to bring him home to their parents based on views that were expressed)
• Immigration
• Cultural identity

What really was completely incredible is that after all of this discussion and, frankly, over-analysis of the composition fragment, the girl explained that the sounds were much more innocuous than the group’s interpretation. The crickets and muffled voice represented her long journey to school each day on the subway, both going and leaving in the dark. The call to prayer was representative of her faith and her pride in her faith. The speech about rebellion was a recording of her English teacher, with whom she had a meaningful relationship, reading a passage from Romeo and Juliet, which she hadn’t even noticed!

This entire activity serves as a reminder that everyone has their own interpretation of music, and life in general. Each person’s identity can be shared through sounds, but the interpretation will almost never be what is intended. But, is the listener’s interpretation being different than intended a good thing? Maybe each person takes away what they need to at the time.

Some other prompts Kelly includes in her handout about soundscapes are:

• What does it mean to listen?
• When do you feel listened to? (students resoundingly responded not at school)
• How do you feel when someone always has a ‘better’ tale to tell?
• How do we (and how can others help us) reflect on our own work while composing?
• Why did you make this choice?
• Why do you find this meaningful?
• What questions do you hope this will prompt?
• How is this helping you think about how you see the world?
• How do we reflect as we experience the compositions of others?
• What do you notice?
• What do you wonder?
• How might someone else see it differently?
• Are there ethical/moral/wider social issues that this brings up?

Her handout can be found here:Kelly Bylica Soundscape handout-1r01ir4

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This workshop connects very well with a TEDtalk that I just watched this morning. The speaker, Taiya Salisi, speaks about her identity. She talks about the strange practice of asking where people are from. As someone with a multi-national heritage, she struggles to answer this question. Instead, she proposes we ask where someone is a local instead.

To establish this, she has three R’s:

Rituals. Relationships. Restrictions.

Rituals: Where do shopkeepers know you? What do you do every day, and where?

Relationships: People that are important to you, where are they? Who are they?

Restrictions: How we experience our locality. Where are you able to live? Civil war, racism, passport restrictions, economic inflation, etc. Instead of where are you now? it’s about Why aren’t you there and why?

Shift our focus to where real life occurs.

Culture exists in community. Community exists in context. Geography, tradition, collective memory, these things are important.

What are we really seeking when we ask where someone comes from? And what are we really seeing when we hear an answer?

Countries represent power:

• Mexico, Poland, Bangladesh. Less power.
• America, Germany, Japan. More power.

It’s possible that without even knowing it, we are playing a power game. As any recent immigrant knows, the question “Where are you from?” or, “Where are you really from?” is often code for “why are you here?”

Another fantastic TEDtalk about challenging our perceptions/preconceived notions of each other: