Social and Artistic Aims

According to Amaryta Sen’s Capabilities theory, for children to fully function in society and to flourish, they need the ‘ability to pursue what one has reason to value’[i]. For that freedom of opportunity, a person has to first learn what the choices are before they can be expected to make them. In other words, children from deprived backgrounds lack opportunity rather than money and the lack of opportunity, and by extension knowledge of what and where those opportunities are, causes the poverty trap. Therefore opportunity lies in educating children to the options available to them.

We use sonic art for the purposes of;

·         Introducing sound art to new audiences in hard to reach communities in the UK’s 10% most deprived areas

·         Building an audience for sound art in Bradford through creative outreach programmes and workshop engagement

·         Creating a scene for sound art in Bradford through community outreach engagement, by getting more people from diverse backgrounds creating sound art in Bradford and by wider extent, the North

·         Developing existing audiences for sound art in Bradford and by wider extent, the North.

·         Promoting learning through experimentation, participants start with a hands on approach, recording sounds on first session

·         Teaching young people using sound art as a catalyst, to harness vital basic transferable employment skills such as maths, literacy, physics, IT, presentation and communication skills.

·         Providing schools and community groups with affordable workshop tariffs topped up by funding

·         Offering project support from concept to completion, producing work for podcast, broadcast and in some cases exhibition, or for collaboration with performance troupes.

·         Introducing young people to all aspects of sound production, opening up career paths in technical sound production and fields in the creative industry

·         Encouraging learning under the Education for Everyone scheme

·         Providing a platform for creating sound art for exhibition and broadcast

·         Challenging preconceptions of sound art and audiences for sound art under an ‘Art for Everyone’ scheme

·         Reaching new audiences by broadcasting produced work produced with a 30 minute monthly Sound Art programme


[i] In Inequality Re-examined, Amartya Sen writes: A person’s capability to achieve functioning’s that he or she has reason to value provides a general approach to the evaluation of social arrangements, and this yields a particular way of viewing the assessment of equality and inequality