Making Music Together

A generative sound journey in Hawai’i

By Edinson Castaño, Antoinette Klatzky and Antonio Moya-Latorre

With eyes closed, a group of 15 people (most of whom have just met) starts performing a piece of music that does not yet exist. Each of the players has just been equipped with an instrument chosen among the ones brought to the space for the occasion — an ukulele, a singing bowl, a violin, a guitar, a piano, maracas, a pair of bongos. The first sounds emerge with hesitance, as if no one wants to break the silence. As time goes by, the soundscape changes and starts painting different pictures in everyone’s imagination, navigating across variegated rhythms, harmonies and melodies, and defining distinct stages along the collective improvisation. There are two or three instances — it is hard to tell whether they last seconds or minutes — where the group feels empowered and aligned. 30 minutes after the beginning of this practice, people open their eyes, surprised they have indeed been capable of creating a musical score in collectivity.

On July 24, the three of us co-led a Generative Sound workshop with the community around the Hawai’i leadership forum, in Honolulu. This activity marked the end of a three-part social arts weekend including workshops on Visual Practice and Social Presencing Theater, facilitated by Reilly Fish and Arawana Hayashi. The Generative Sound workshop would become the first opportunity to experiment (in group and in person) with social music’s potential to cultivate deep listening individually and collectively. We were well aware that, unlike their older siblings among the social arts, whose theory and practices have been sharpened after years of thinking and experiences, Generative Sound was still a nascent universe. But we were equally convinced that music’s distinct quality — the concatenation of sounds as a form of non-verbal communication and expression — could open up new experiences and raise questions on how social arts can contribute to building teams and forging new leaderships.

I. THE WORKSHOP

The three facilitators had been exchanging ideas for weeks about what we expected to get out of our first co-led workshop on Generative Sound. While the conductive thread seemed to be straightforward — allowing participants to express themselves through the sound of an external instrument (or one’s voice) and to sharpen their listening capabilities — the details of the actual practice were hard to define. We wanted to ensure the practice allowed participants to experience and engage with all four levels of listening, moving through downloading, factual, empathic, and ultimately generative listening. To make that possible, there needed to be space for each of them to experiment with instruments individually, in pairs, and as part of a larger group, leading to the co-creation of a larger collective sound “sculpture” — to use the language of Social Presencing Theater — representing what wanted to emerge from the space.

Held at Ka WaiWai, the setting felt immediately in alignment with our project. Ka WaiWai provides work and event space, educational and cultural programming, entertainment, and a collaborative network of members who want to be a part of a movement for positive change for Hawaiʻi and beyond. The space itself consists of a round building with a circular turf in the middle. Cushions and low tables are spread around, and entrants are invited to remove their shoes. On the day of the workshop, the instruments were scattered throughout the space, making it easy for participants to connect with both the space and place as well as the movement of their bodies, letting themselves be drawn towards an instrument (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Among the instruments scattered across Ka WaiWai were several drums of Caribbean origin (Photo by Edinson Castaño)

The workshop was structured in four parts organized around different emotions in order to invite participants, some of whom had never touched an instrument, to get familiar with their instrument of choice, explore the sounds that it is supposed to make or that it has the potential to make, and engage in a collective artistic creation.

1. Curiosity. Participants were encouraged to open their minds to consider the relationship of the body to the instrument: “How does it feel in the eyes, in the hands, in the heart?” We suspected that, even if one had seen the instrument many times before, perhaps the practice of seeing with fresh eyes activated new possibilities to explore (Figure 2).
2. Exploration. After choosing the instrument, participants were invited to experiment with the sounds their instrument could enable and share those with a small group: “Where do sounds come from?” The very act of generating a sound is connected to something that transcends ourselves. Connecting via sound draws us out of the mind and has the potential to connect us to the heart. The journey during a piece of social change works from head to heart, and, together with the work of the hands, brings in the intelligences of the whole being. To generate sound requires an act of courage, moving from the thought of how it might sound to the action where the touch meets the frequency — an act of open will. With these premises, the small groups were invited to create short compositions.
3. Co-Creation. In the larger group, the small groups were asked to share the composition they had just created. The group then was led into a larger collective practice of feeling into the sound, rhythm, and experience of the whole: “How do we sound when playing in collectivity?” We set approximately 30 minutes to ensure there would be enough time to generate multiple soundscapes. As participants began to play and co-create together, the sound reverberated in each person’s body, extended through their instrumental body.
4. Reflection. Lastly, leaving the instruments aside, we reflected on what had just happened (Figure 3). We all agreed that several unique moments had taken place, yet it was hard to tell how we had reached those as a group: “Who or what sound had started one of the shifts in the soundscape? Who followed? What allowed certain shifts to prosper and reach emotional depth compared to those unfulfilled shifts? What did we feel — individually and as part of the collective — during the different musical turning points? What quality of relationship(s) were we cultivating by this instrumental interaction?” There were certain times when the music was organized on beats in a rhythmic fashion, and others when it was formed around chords in a more ethereal manner. Occasionally, some participants had started, perhaps consciously, a new harmony or beat seeking to receive traction among the other players. Some of these initiatives succeeded and drove certain momentum, some others vanished without being followed by the others. Overall, we all agreed that, on two or three instances, the group as a whole had felt magically aligned, as if everyone’s intuitions and sensations had momentarily found resonance within the whole collective.

Figure 2. One of the participants playing the ukulele during the curiosity phase (Photo by Edinson Castaño)

II. WHAT WE LEARNED

While still far from developing a theory of practice around the possibilities of social music and Generative Sound processes, with the above questions in mind and inspired by some of the reflections we shared after this first collective experience, here we pull out some initial lessons that speak to the potential of social music as an art form and Generative Sound as a social practice:

• Setting the tone: As in other social arts practices, nurturing participants’ predisposition to engage in this embodied practice influences directly on the outcome. The more willing participants are to experiment with and hear new sounds — many of which can be unpleasant — the more meaningful and insightful the collective experience will be. To maximize participants’ predisposition, the facilitation team must generate a welcoming environment that invites attendees to let go of old habits and explore new sensations through the language of music.
• Building trust: Engaging in a Generative Sound workshop can become an effective strategy to build trust among a group of people who may not necessarily feel comfortable verbalizing their ideas and emotions. By asking participants to fully focus on the sounds they can produce through their instruments and listen to what others are sharing, they quickly develop the feeling of belonging to a collective social body. There can be an intimate connection with their bigger Self based on what they experience.
• Presencing: In certain settings, a Generative Sound practice can be truly helpful to reach deep moments of presencing individually and within a team. A moment of reflection and collective debrief following each practice is necessary for team members to review the different emotions they experienced and compare different perceptions on the activity. For instance, social music can shed light on current leadership habits and group dynamics that may have been overlooked and need to be revisited.
• Exploring senses: Generative Sound adds many answers to the question of what lies beyond a verbal articulation of meaning. Participants utilize their senses from a different perspective, for example, in the ways they pay attention to the non-conventional sounds instruments they already know are able to produce — an analogy that could be extended to the way we listen to each other when engaging in a conversation. This sensorial way of unlearning and relearning old and current sounds — and behaviors — could allow us to co-shape society from a different place.
• Tuning/Toning with Resonance: In a group or individual experience, using an instrument, including and especially the voice, to make a sound in involvement with what is being heard can create coherence in a system. The practice of tuning and looking for resonance can highlight where there is mis-alignment and invite a subtle return to alignment. Encouraging participants to notice what they feel when they reflect on what was generated can open new organs of perception in the group and encourage new insights.
• Generating emotion-based memories: Collective musical practices can spark internal emotions among participants that, despite being hard to verbalize — and very likely because of this — will stick in their bodies for the rest of their lives. Even if the music itself or the conversation that takes place around it may not be remembered, the emotional response attached to that moment will be carried as a real memory, hence also marking a tipping point within the individual’s and team’s life stories.

Figure 3. Picture showing part of the larger group layout during the final debrief (Selfie by Antonio Moya-Latorre)

III. ON THE FUTURE OF GENERATIVE SOUND

Much like scribing and Social Presencing Theater, Generative Sound practices can be leveraged to reflect back and make visible what teams or collectives–and the individuals among them–are currently going through, along with what they are ready to let go of and let come into their personal and professional worlds. Social music can unleash new emotions, sensations, and intuitions that can hardly be verbalized through our regular languages, some of which may be similar to what visual and bodily practices also enable. Some of these sensations are distinct and unique to this artform — perhaps the most abstract among the social arts. Individuals, teams, and organizations are eager to experiment with different means of communication and expression, and music can and should be considered when enriching their organizational toolkits.

The exact future of social music and Generative Sound is yet to be defined, but it is a promising one. Encouraged by a collective improvisation following a score that does not exist, the three of us can sense how our co-facilitated workshop in Honolulu will soon be just the first one among many more to come. Even though the exact location, setting, and group of participants is unknown at this stage — as of now, everything indicates that there will be a Generative Sound workshop at a self-managed music school in the periphery of Oaxaca in summer 2023 — we will stick to the feeling of excitement that our next encounter will undoubtedly generate. Our commitment to sparking change through resonance is simply too strong a source of inspiration to keep us quiet. We are committed to exploring creative forms of collective action, and to do that well we welcome ideas and invitations to keep on writing the score of social music where it is most needed. Come play with us!

Thanks to Emma Paine for her comments on this post.