The City Rings is an international project where children are encouraged to share experiences about the place they live in through sound.
In 2022, we collaborated for The City Rings with the Canadian sound art organisation Audiotopie and McGill University (Ville Sonore). Children from Ghent recorded sounds in their school and neighbourhood to send to children in Montreal and vice versa. Those recordings were replayed and recorded (= 're-recorded') on the spot in the new environment to then send those new recordings back.
In school year 22-23, children from Ghent primary school De Triangel will exchange sounds with children from the school SKSN near Jodhpur, a large city in north-west India.
Children from Belgium and India exchange audio recordings of their cities with each other. Both sides were brimming with questions and wonder. Listening is more than sound and vibrations, listening is contact! (in collaboration with Maghenta, primary school De Triangel (Ghent) and Indiability Foundation (Jodhpur) with Lisa Derudder, Ayla Joncheere & Sneh Gupta).
The physical and spatial approach to sound allows children to think intuitively about questions such as: how do we relate to sound? How do we identify our environment through sound? How can we live together aurally? How do we want to shape the city aurally?
The City Rings (TCR) was originally developed as an international sound pedagogy project initiated by aifoon, MTG/Sons de Barcelona and Sound&Music, developed in the frame of Sounds of Europe.