About
Welcome to thesongrooms.org.
thesongrooms.org is a new web 2.0 online music composition, recording and archiving site that has been constructed by the arts charity Rosetta Life as a ground-breaking online music-making project. thesongrooms.org enables marginalised young people with terminal illness to make music and upload it to a website where others can share the pool of sounds and add to it.
Musical workshops lead by top professional musicians are taking place at children’s hospices in South Africa, Zimbabwe and the UK. The resulting songs are being uploaded to thesongrooms where children visiting the site after it goes live on 12th December, can listen to them as their composers intended, or to each component instrumental or vocal stem in isolation. They can then mix the component tracks from all the different songs together to make unique pieces of their own, adding their own lyrics and vocals using simple recording devices that enable them to upload directly to the site.
Favourite tracks will be highlighted in a ‘listeners’ chart’ on the site and the most popular will be released as digital releases available for download and purchase on www.u-myx.com. Leading musicians including Sandi Thom, Karine Polwart and Ricky Rankin have agreed to lend their skills to making the top tracks as successful as possible.
By July 2008, thesongrooms.org aims to reach more than 6,000 children and young people in hospices and hospitals, as well as involving 12,000 online users from a wider public audience including primary and secondary schools.
The project is an initiative of Rosetta Life – the first and only organisation worldwide to use new digital arts technologies to enable people with life threatening illnesses to tell their stories. It is a direct response to the shortage of opportunities for children and young people with terminal illnesses to communicate with their peer group outside the hospice/hospital setting.
In England, the project will feature a series of live events where children can showcase the music of their online community, including a major concert to take place on World Hospice and Palliative Care Day in October 2007. Concerts will be filme and the project documented by BBC volunteers so that all children will have be able to see and hear the material made and performed around the world.
Professional musician and hip hop producer Theo Gordon, who works with Roots Manuva, is acting as music director of the new website, offering feedback on tracks made and advice to children. He is also running workshops in participating hospices and hospitals to create tracks with children, while music therapists and teachers are conducting regular monthly workshops.
thesongrooms.org is supported by Children’s Workforce Development Council, a charity that is committed to providing training opportunities for people working with children. It is training the professional musicians and giving them the skills to maximise the potential of the children, and also offering training opportunities to the website designers, music therapists and showing hospice staff, families and children how to participate in the project and co-ordinate a cyber jam. It will offer ongoing education programmes in hospices as the project progresses.
thesongrooms.org website has been designed by i-DAT [Institute of Digital Art and Technology] at the University of Plymouth. The first phase of the design provides the children in thesongrooms hospices with an online community to share and play with the tracks, video and images they have made. By March 2007 the site will be fully operational with the online mixing and publishing tools in place.
The project builds on the success of a 2005 children’s song project when children from a Lambeth primary school, the Great Ormond Street Hospital and St Nicholas hospice, South Africa, were brought together to make music.
One of the most successful songs was made by 15 year old Geospin, who had meningitis and was in a coma for three weeks at Great Ormond street Children’s Hospital. Together with top hip hop artist Roots Manuva he wrote “Life'”, a rap about not giving up even when you feel at your worst.
For more information, please contact:
Jo Pratt, Help the Hospices Press Office: 020 8699 6566 / jopratt@jopratt.com
Clare Ross, Rosetta Life: 020 7520 8270 / clare.ross@rosettalife.org