Teatre L'Artesá 2023

do not work yet on mobile devices, try accessing it from a computer to play loops with the keyboard... 😬

This workshop belongs to the proyect: El Prat Laboratory

Complex, but very, very attractive, that was our first impression of the challenge that Cristina Alonso from Teatre L'Artesà proposed to us: to think of a project to work with 5 secondary schools, almost all the students of 1st ESO of Prat del Llobregat! We asked the students to think of an important song for them, associated with the transition from school to high school, so they could then make a collective remix piece at La Capsa with the loops they created from their songs.

The laboratory was part of the program Camins Vius of Teatre L'Artesà, and the following schools participated: Institut Escola del Prat, Institut El Prat de Llobregat, Institut Escola Pepa Colomer, Institut Ribera Baixa and Institut Baldiri Guilera.

creating loops at the capsa

Workshop development

The objective of the 2023 laboratory was to generate a sound archive and the device to put it into use. An archive located on the role of music in the experiences of students in their transition from primary to secondary school. At a time of vital change and transit, we will explore the construction of a group portrait, showing what unites and differentiates them.

For a week, in the cultural center La Capsa, we worked with the students of 1st ESO of different public centers of El Prat, to collect emotions, stories and experiences through their music. In the sessions, developed from Monday to Friday, we worked for 1 hour with each class group (270 students in total), the idea was to select an important song in this last period of your life, extract a loops of them and a representative image of you and place it all in a multitrack device. At the end of the session we were exploring the collective musical remix through the body and movement.

Esperanza Moreno has created this visualization that allows you to explore the songs they chose and see the distribution of musical genres, as well as to switch between their general distribution and by Institutes. In spite of the predominance of urban and Latin music, we were surprised by the existing diversity in contrast to the usual prejudices that exist from the adult point of view, almost no songs were repeated among the almost 300 chosen.

Although we do not believe much in labels for music, in this case we found it interesting as a tool to characterize the musical landscape of the students' interests. We would like to point out that we did not want to identify many musical subgenres such as Reggaeton or Trap, grouping many of the songs into broader popular genres such as Hip hop, Urban, Latin Music or Pop Music. There are a multitude of musical styles in constant evolution to such an extent that nowadays musical styles are so many and so varied, and the boundaries so blurred, that it is difficult to know when one is defining one and when another. The musical genre data has been extracted automatically using the Shazam API.

remixing at the capsa

Device musical

After the creation of loops in the previous sessions, the weekend in the concert hall of La Capsa, we wanted to share the resulting file so that the students and their families could remix and put to use the work done, for this we placed all the sound and visual file in a multitrack device with 6 computers using play.antropoloops (48 tracks in total) and we used 6 midi controllers to improvise with the 270 loops created by the students. To visualize live this musical improvisation process we generated a landscape of Prat and the 5 participating IES where to place these musical loops created by the students. The device was almost like a "radio station" where to listen, remix and experiment with the soundscape created by the students of the 1st ESO of Prat.

+ photos

Workshop development

students musical slections

Device musical