Traject

The ticking of bicycle spokes, rustling keys, footsteps, a bouncing basketball, the rushing sound of arms on a winter coat, purring cats, whistling birds ...

These are some of the sounds that children recorded after we asked them: How do you experience the way from home to school? And how could you capture that experience in sound?

With these questions and a recorder at the ready, children from different schools set off, attentive to everything they could hear along the way. With all their recordings, the children made a composition.

It was 2003 and the TRAJEcT project was the seedbed of what would later become aifoon.

"What was fantastically moving about the project was that everyone was able to express the invisible in a very personal and intuitive way. Through sound, listening took shape. Through listening, the unspoken became sound, a highly personal voice." (Stijn Dickel, artistic co-ordinator of aifoon)

TRAJEcT was an initiative of Kong vzw in which primary school classes worked on the theme 'the way from home to school'. Such a collaboration took 15 weeks. Once a week, we visited the class to teach the pupils step by step how to express their experiences through sound recording and composition.

At the end of the project, each child added an image to their personal soundscape. On our website, visitors could not only listen to all fragments, but also mix one child's soundscape with another child's image. The results were surprising.

"It was a lot of fun! I am very, very sorry that the project is over. I would like to do it all the time. But that is not possible. I really enjoyed working with aifoon and getting to know you. Many greetings, Shana" (2005, De Notelaar - Aalst)

What was special about the project was that every child found its place through the long duration of the project. Some shot like an arrow from a bow. One was attracted by the theme and the creativity. The other was seduced by the equipment they were allowed to use.

Some of the more analytical children sometimes felt a bit of resistance. Looking for something to hold on to, we often got the question "Is this a good sound...?". Due to the long duration of the project and the in-depth way of working, we managed to make them trust themselves.

Another pedagogical advantage of working with sound is that there are no genres or codes to which the children have to conform Sound compositions are therefore very personal testimonies that tell a lot in a non-verbal way.

"Listening is one of our survival mechanisms that is gradually being taken away from us. Children are very strong at it: they can do it better than adults. Whoever starts from sound can take the children along. It is a world of experience that they know very well. " Martine Huvenne (Kong vzw)

"Recently I saw the film 'Five Senses' by Jeremy Podeswa in which one of the characters plans to make a library of 'sounds'. This reminded me of the conference we organised in September 2004 in Ghent on the subject of multilingualism, where various speakers argued more attention should be paid to many forms of literacy or media that receive little or no attention in education. One of those neglected aspects is undoubtedly sound or anything to do with audio. And this despite the fact that we live in an audio-visual culture. We only see or hear what is obvious, when we learn to look and listen differently. TRAJECT seems to me such an attempt to make children actively aware of the sound story we live in. And to save all that in a 'digital sound library'. " (Ronald Soetaert, 2005)

On January 14th 2005 the organization TRAJECT was founded. That same year we were recognized by the Flemish Community as an art educational organization. A year after the start, we changed the name to aifoon (April 5, 2006) to avoid confusion with the project. aifoon is a contraction of "ai" which means love in Japanese, and "foon" which is ancient Greek for sound. The iphone hadn't been born yet ...