SoundHoppers is an active-listening and sound exploration workshop designed for children aged 5–11 and their parents, guardians or carers. Created by sound artist Wajid Yaseen and delivered by Modus Arts (an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation), the workshop encourages young participants to engage with sound outside the conventions of traditional music education.

Through a series of gamified listening exercises, children are introduced to key sonic concepts such as proximity (how near or far a sound is), timbre (its texture or quality), and volume (loudness and softness). The aim is to help them tune into their acoustic environment with care and curiosity.

Alongside listening activities, participants use bespoke soundboxes, transducers and tactile sound-making devices that allow them to feel, manipulate and shape sound physically. These hands-on tools reveal how sound moves through different objects and materials, turning the invisible into something children can explore directly.

By removing the expectation to create ‘music’, SoundHoppers creates space for intuitive experimentation and attentive listening. It’s an open-ended and non-competitive experience that gives children permission to listen differently, to play with sound freely, and to develop their own creative relationship to it.

What We Do

At the heart of the project lies the conviction that developing attentive listening skills and allowing an uninhibited approach to exploring sounds provides significant benefits including:

● Enhancing concentration and attention skills, providing benefits to broader education and learning.

● Cultivating a heightened awareness of the external and internal sonic environment and promoting experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, playfulness, and other creative skills vital to personal and community growth.

● Creating the confidence to explore pre-musical learning and ‘proto-music’ using non-traditional musical instruments.

They are developed through delivering a high-quality arts-based learning programme via public-facing workshops that aim to explore and question the fundamental nature of sound and the act of listening. To do this, a modular series of gamified exercises have been designed to allow children to carefully advance from passive listening to complex and advanced active-listening practice. Closely tied to these exercises are a series of open sound-generation techniques using specially constructed soundboxes and other ‘proto-music’ sound-generating devices and technologies.

How We Do It

The SoundHoppers approach emphasises learning through hands-on discovery, allowing workshop participants to use all their senses to express their thoughts, understandings, and creativity. The programme was developed to challenge the primacy of visual culture, especially within the so-called ‘digital native’ context, in which parents are rightly concerned about the impact of children’s excessive smartphone and mobile device use. Whilst, at the same time, counterbalancing the side-lining and disregard of sound and listening culture within broader primary education. We believe that instilling deep-listening acts can be included as a strategy for countering visual hyper-stimulation in the digital age. The exercises developed as part of the SoundHoppers programme provide parents, carers, and children with the tools and techniques to embolden a deeper appreciation of their environment. Notably, the project is categorically not ‘anti-technology’ and incorporates digital devices developed to specifically explore sound-based/sound-oriented learning.

The SoundHoppers software and physical interfaces were developed to enable children to play sounds and ‘proto-musical’ phrases through movement and gestures, allowing them to explore sounds ranging from pitches to noises rather than learning set pieces. This open approach encourages anyone to explore and express a range of effects, both by themselves and in response to or in conversation with others. Additionally, it opens up the possibility of learning more about the relations between ability, the body, creativity, and improvisation. Of course, this is also beneficial to caregivers, so whilst the program is tailored for children, the project attempts to make improvisation and collaboration accessible to the broadest possible range of individuals.