There is an habituality tendency both in designing urban shared places and experiencing the places as human beings. This program attempts to break this by creating a dialogical and musical setting for youth and engaging them into a more holistic spatial experience through sensing, performing and designing the musicality of the place.
The program is planned in a way that is guided by school teachers specialized in design and music. Youth who receive additional training in these fields can qualitatively contribute further to the outcomes of the process but this is not a must. Collaboration with local universities is also welcome.
The process design of the program includes five phases:
(i) choosing two urban open spaces with respect to their differing technical, contextual and emotional character; (ii) observing the selected places through individual sensorial experiences; (iii) searching for shared meaning in individual sensorial observations through dialogue; (iv) formulating the musical characters of two selected places [e.g., tonality, tempo, measure, nuance, key range, rhythm]; (v) composing one piece of music representing the shared musicality of each selected place and performing them on stage; (vi) designing the imagined urban open space and presenting it in a visually creative way.
This program is implemented only one time last year in April 2019 upon a collaboration between Middle East Technical University and Tevfik Fikret Schools in Ankara, Turkey. The experienced impact on youth and teachers has stimulated us to design a follow-up program that intends to create a creative work process backward this time from understanding and interpretation of music to place. This could not be implemented, however, due to Covid-19 pandemic prevention measures.
Having said that, a number of steps has been taken to diffuse the program since March 2020. We have issued an application to Erasmus+ in collaboration with universities and non-governmental organisations in Spain, Italy, Germany and Austria. We have also recently made contacts with the Ministry of Education of Turkey.
People can refer to our website for detailed instructions. Furthermore, they are also welcome to reach us via e-mail and social media, if needed. We would be happy to provide them with some practical tips and the kinds of methods/techniques that can be applied. The program can also be easily adopted to children from 8th years old to 14th.
