Some exciting (online) news from Sounds of Change
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to temporarily stop our physical training sessions in the Middle East and we have missed this work a great deal. But we are looking forward to continuing as soon as possible and see the progress of our trainees who work with children and young people in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, the Westbank and Northern Iraq/Kurdistan.
We adapted to the current situation quite fast, facilitating online training sessions with 'Sounds of Change' trainees in Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt. Some of these trainings sessions happened on Zoom, focussing on expression, playful interactions (yes, this is possible via Zoom!) and creating a music piece online. Our trainees are living in refugee camps or marginalised areas, and they are already quite isolated from society. Unfortunately COVID-19 has made them even more isolated. Therefore, being part of our online training sessions gave them the possibility to reconnect with others. Some of our partner organisations were able to bring our trainees together into one space, enabling us to facilitate a collaborative musical process that was partly online and partly offline. This generated a lot of positive energy and created the opportunity for our trainees to discuss and speak up for what they think is important in life after Corona. You can see and hear the musical result on our website.
The New Dakota Museum in Amsterdam hosted their performance the whole summer in their Corona Archives Exposition, meaning their voices reached a much wider audience than their own environment.
Something we’re extremely excited about, is the launch of the Sounds of Change Academy in the Netherlands, early-2021. We will train eight musicians, each with a different background, to become Community Builders. They will be trained by our own Sounds of Change team and during their training period of 6 months they will assist our team in social projects in the Netherlands and work on developing their own projects. More information about the Academy will follow later.
At the moment we are also developing instruction videos for a new online training programme which we will pilot in Lebanon this month. This programme will hopefully enable us to reach out to places with poor internet because the programme doesn't require a continuous connection as with online resources such as Zoom. Our trainees can even use these videos to directly instruct the children and young people they work with.
We developed Instruments for Change in collaboration with MassiveMusic and Deep House Amsterdam earlier this year. For 'Instruments for Change', musicians from all over the world were invited to the studio to record a variety of instruments which are unique to their home country. The recordings gave life to a virtual software instrument (VST) and a sample pack which captures the unique qualities of the instruments and their traditional sound. Thanks to its richness and versatility, DJ’s, producers, and musicians are now able to make their creations even more distinctive. And as buying the software results in a donation, use of the 'Instruments for Change' VST also supports the work of Sounds of Change, furthering our work in refugees camps and marginalised communities.
Many artists started to use our software during the COVID-19 lockdown; visit the Instruments for Change website to hear their tracks and to find more information about the VST and sample pack.