Germán Vega, a member of the group Hacelo Sonar, plays a handmade violin assembled from recycled materials.
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA – Children and adults form a large circle at Tecnópolis, a free science, art and technology exhibition in the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires.
Some rub their heads. Others twist their mouths and emit strange sounds. Some hit their own bottoms. A handful of participants clap to their own rhythm, while others stamp their feet over and over.
In the middle of the circle stand four men wearing blue coveralls. Moments ago, they asked the audience to make music with their bodies, and now they cheer the audience’s creative responses.
The four men are teachers and musicians who make up a group called Hacelo Sonar – which means “Make It Sound” in English. Together, they travel the country to teach people how to create music with whatever is within reach.
They start with the body, the instrument they emphasize that we have with us at all times. From there, they teach their students how to make a range of musical instruments from recycled materials, which would otherwise end up in the trash. They use flowerpots, pieces of wood and pipes, dog food bags, bottle caps and fishing line.
“We are interested in everyone discovering that music is within everyone’s reach,” says Luis Miraldi, a member of Hacelo Sonar.
Hacelo Sonar puts on free presentations for adults and children in public plazas, schools, low-income neighborhoods, beaches and cultural centers.
From now through November, Hacelo Sonar is holding workshops at Tecnópolis Wednesdays through Sundays. An agency under the Office of the President of the Nation organizes the free mega exhibition.
A group of friends dedicated to both music and teaching founded Hacelo Sonar in 2007 in Buenos Aires to bring music to the far reaches of the country, especially places where people might be too poor to buy instruments.
“We wanted to disseminate music as a form of expression,” Miraldi says. “But it seemed to us to be in very poor taste to arrive at a slum with our instruments and then go away without leaving them anything.”
After figuring out the primary sound-maker of each instrument, Miraldi and two of his friends, Germán Vega and Sebastián Casado Tasca, began looking for ways to replace the elements that constitute instruments with common objects. Julián Vega, Germán Vega’s brother, eventually joined the group, along with various volunteers.
Soon after Hacelo Sonar’s creation, it signed a contract with Argentina’s Secretariat of Culture, which finances the group’s presentations and trips throughout the country. The group also receives donations of materials from private businesses.
Hacelo Sonar has since worked in 15 of the country’s 23 provinces. More than 25,000 people have attended its more than 500 workshops, according to its records.
Hacelo Sonar’s four members, who are all in their 30s, collaborate to create their instruments.
“We complement one another in the creation,” Miraldi says. “One tosses out an idea about how to make an instrument, and another reworks that idea and so on and so forth until we arrive at the best way to make a drum, or whatever it might be.”
Hacelo Sonar’s method of collective creation also applies to the audiences. The group brings a range of recycled materials to its workshops and leads the audience through the process of making an instrument step by step. They ask the audience to decide which materials they should use to make each element of an instrument, such as the strings and a resonant box.
The group creates one model instrument. The audience members later repeat the method individually, making their own instruments under the guidance of the group’s leaders.
In this way, people feel ownership of the instruments and learn to value them as products of their own creation, which is empowering, Miraldi says.
“The instrument is the medium,” Miraldi says. “The point is that they create spaces where they are the protagonists.”
The instrument is a product of the maker’s personal development, he says.
“If tomorrow it gets broken, they are going to know how to fix it, and they are going to value it,” he says.
Ivonne Maldonado, 16, took part in one of Hacelo Sonar’s workshops at Tecnópolis in which she learned to make a drum from a paint can, a dog food bag, bottle caps and cords.
“One time it had occurred to me that you could make a drum with a paint can, but I did not know how to do it, and now I learned,” she says. “It is good to build it myself. It is the first time that I am making something like this.”
Another workshop attendee is Roberto González, a member of a musical theater group called Urraka. The group uses household objects such as boxes, shoes and bottles to compose music for plays that do not have dialogue.
González says he admires Hacelo Sonar’s work because when its members investigate how to make an instrument, they are always thinking of the people. They try to make things that members of the public can construct with their own hands.
“They are true luthiers,” González says.
Urraka invents instruments for its performances but does not consider whether the public could easily reproduce them, as Hacelo Sonar does, he says.
“In contrast, they look to create something so that the general public can make it, that is easily accessible,” González says.
Lucas Rivarola, another member of Urraka, also attended an Hacelo Sonar workshop at Tecnópolis. Workshop participants go home with real instruments that they made themselves, he says.
“Hacelo Sonar’s instruments are not toys,” he says. “They are real instruments. It is wonderful that there is a workshop where the people can learn to make their own instrument and take it with them.”
Miraldi recounts how happy he was to once find out that one of the children who had taken part in a workshop two years earlier continued using the guitar he had made and played it at school events.
“For us,” he says, “it is also an enormous reward to leave, for example, a slum and see as we walk around that the kids are still making sounds with the guitars they made. With that, it is enough – we already have our pay.”
Yamila Verón, a guide employed by Argentina’s Ministry of Education, works with school groups that visit Tecnópolis. She selects the activities the students will partake in and accompanies them during their field trips.
She always includes in her itinerary an Hacelo Sonar workshop that shows students how to make musical instruments with recycled materials, she says. She values the educational experience and the populism of the project, which uses materials that are easily accessible.
“Hacelo Sonar is not limited to one area,” she says. “It combines music with recycling, teaching how to construct an instrument with materials that are within everyone’s reach, that everyone has in their houses.”
Hacelo Sonar’s four members want to continue seeking new horizons, they say. They are looking to soon bring their workshops to the elderly to show them how to make their own instruments. They also plan to conduct workshops in prisons and dream of organizing a drum orchestra among the inmates.
“Above all, we want this to be multiplied,” Miraldi says. “We do not want to own anything. We want someone who learned to make an instrument with us to teach others how to do it, and these to teach others, and, like that, time and time again.”
GPJ translated this article from Spanish.
