What do rights sound like?

We often use words and pictures to describe our world and our experiences in it. But sounds can affect us profoundly, they can express things that we find hard to put on paper or into words. 

At the Rights Studio we believe that we can explore, engage with and understand our world more fully if we use all our senses. However, apart from a small group of musicians, we rarely try to describe our world and experiences by creating sounds. 

We would like to change that. This pilot project will take one of the articles from the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) to explore its meaning through what it sounds like.

An interactive project

While exploring rights through sound, participants can get a different perspective of their rights, develop new skills and discover the power of sound and music by engaging with people from across the globe. 

The pilot phase we will look at article 28 from the UNCRC: the right to education. The guiding question is: “what does education sound like?” People are free to answer the question in any way they choose as long as it is sonic, and results in a recording, or a sound file. 

Given that this is an exploratory process we are very open to how individuals respond to the question, it could be a single sound, a recording of a soundscape, a montage of sounds, or a short composition.

How to take part

More information about how to record and submit your sounds is available here. But you are free to simply record a sound and email it to us at sound@rights-studio.org.

What will happen to the sounds? 

The sounds that are created will be joined by those made by young people across the globe. Workshops are currently planned in the UK, South Africa, Nigeria, India and Brazil. All these individual sounds will be used to create a sound-work which will be launched and ‘performed’ later in  2022. All participants will be able to attend digitally. 

If you would like to participate, contact us at sound@rights-studio.org