Active Listening

Active Listen (Escuta Ativa) is a project of the Modern Orchestra, an orchestra aimed at the popularization of classical music. In partnership with the Derdic High School for the Deaf in São Paulo, linked to PUC-SP, it is a project that takes music to young deaf people. In semester modules, deaf young people have contact with music in unconventional ways. The modules are concluded with a presentation by the deaf youth with the orchestra, conducted and conducted by Leonard Evers.

from the program

In this third module of the Escuta Ativa project, a transdisciplinary challenge was posed, involving introductory training activities in the areas of physical computing, data visualization, as well as body expression. The activities fueled the development, in parallel, of an audiovisual instrument that, from data generated by movement and collected with an accelerometer and gyroscope attached to it, simultaneously generates images and sounds, as well as changes the light patterns of a coupled LED ring. at the end of the instrument.

We started from an object that was familiar to them: the same sound tube used in the first module of the project, for body percussion. During the often confusing simultaneity of activities, the question was continually asked: how to make and enjoy music for the eyes, for the hands, for the whole body?

Replicated for collaborative use, the instrument served as a basis for incorporating the creative fragments generated from the meetings with the students, formalized in the four movements inserted in the concert of the Modern Orchestra. In these, we worked unpretentiously with an expanded and diffuse notion of the musical concepts of rhythm, melody and harmony.