The visual perception of the world in the modern western societies is offering just little sensuousness in everyday life: people circulate between short messages and facebook, legislative texts, e-mails and conventional correspondence with civil service institutions, youtube clips and tv images. For sure, people talk a lot, too: via the phone, in video chats, in the news. Even in the streets we are surrounded by sounds like music, babble of voices, traffic noise, and ring tones. Stimuli of human environment are multiplying with the variety of media we use. Though don’t they irritate our senses? Aren’t we inclined to distrust the single one, e.g. the sense of hearing? Or mustn’t we only believe in what can be seen? What role does language play in the way we perceive environmental influences?
The German-language radio play workshop “Audio environment Rousse” offered an opportunity for six young people to deal with these issues in a more creative approach. During three days of teamwork they created a short audio drama of almost seven minutes in length by themselves,they could practise their foreign language skills, and thereby created their very own, “audible” image of their hometown.
The first day, the participants listened beyond the surface of Rousse and strained their ears for the special sounds of the city. The 16 to 18 years old teenagers sorted those thereby recorded audio sequences into acoustic categories like ‘noise’, ‘tone’ etc., which helped to reflect on the following questions – what does noise mean, which tones do we estimate as being pleasant ones, isn’t language (besides its communicative function) merely a sound amongst others? Discussions on that theme inspired the participants to invent characters and settings, which should be embedded in the radio play, on the following day. On the basis of those ideas they designed two sceneries and entirely independantly worked on it. In the end, the typical sounds of Rousse do not take a back seat to some small dialogues but account for the centre of this radio play.
The result of the young people’s creative cooperation will finally be broadcasted via ‘Arena Radio’, the local digital radio station that was visited by them on the last day. The project was supported by Arena Media and funded with the help of Robert Bosch Foundation.