Binaural Nodar develops a permanent educational program that expands across the territory and its different educational communities, whether children and young people, senior citizens or students and professionals in the arts and social sciences areas. Our educational approach aims, in the first place, to cover a formative “territory” unexplored by most cultural organizations: the deep knowledge of places, their economic, cultural, religious and social dynamics, promoting the deepening of “new senses of place”. It is our understanding that there is a tendency in workshops developed all over the world to focus on the goals of developing personal expression, based on the teaching of techniques arising from the visual arts, theater or dance that often are separated from geographical and community-specific contexts.
In 2008, Binaural Nodar launched its first educational project entitled “Sound villages”, a project that consisted of recording, editing and mapping the acoustic heritage of rural villages in parallel with its geographical, historical and socio-cultural mapping. The project involved primary and secondary schools in rural areas, having started in the academic year 2008-2009 at the Secondary School of S. Pedro do Sul and passed through other municipalities such as Arouca and Vila Nova de Paiva. “Sound villages” encourages students from rural areas to “open their ears” to the acoustic world that surrounds them, involving them in an analytical and collaborative process of capturing, editing and publishing on the internet specific sound environments of each village or rural landscape. During the multiple field sessions carried out with rural children and youth, more than a hundred sound recordings were captured, currently included in the Binaural Nodar Digital Archive.
Taking into account the results of that first educational project, in the following years Binaural Nodar deepened its educational methodologies, in growing articulation with municipalities such as São Pedro do Sul, Vouzela, Castro Daire and Viseu and their respective school directions and more than two dozen new workshops were developed, involving aspects related to the perception of both natural and cultural heritage and the expressiveness potential that it includes. Examples are: “Human field recordings”, “Discovering the rural phonosphere”, “Vouzela Sonora”, “I hear, I remember, I feel”, “Children on the loose at the ethnographic museum”, “Sketch & Sound”, “Cage / Objects”, “Sonic vegetable garden”, “Talking books”, “Imaginary sounds”, “Nature orchestra”, “Noise Lab – experimenting with John Cage” and many others.
