Tell Us A Story

Stand Up, Stand Out is presented by Pozible as part of Vivid Ideas and gives a handful of people the opportunity to pitch their project to an audience looking to crowdfund the next big thing. For Simon Jankelson – founder, director and facilitator of The Human Sound Project – it's an opportunity to launch his creation on home soil and a shot at finances that could aid his vision of taking it worldwide.

The Human Sound Project had humble beginnings, stemming from artistic differences and a frustration with a current musical project.

“I was in a band for about five years,” Jankelson explains, “and after the second year it just took so long to get our songs from the spontaneous moment when they were written to actually putting them out through a label and then performing them on stage. That whole process ended up taking a year-and-a-half, and out of that frustration I started searching again for what music meant to me.

“What I was craving was a really collaborative project that didn't necessarily have a leader, it was just a facilitation of the sounds that were already there or needed to come out.”

The method for facilitating these experiences is a process of mining participants for stories and themes that create lyrics and precedes a communal recording of claps, stomps, singing and yelling that is recorded, looped, played back and ultimately becomes a new musical work.

“The greatest evolution in the project so far has been the methods in drawing out the sounds from people. The facilitation process started with a group of my friends together sharing stories and just trying a bunch of different sounds from laughing and howling out to stomping, sounds that would capture the essence of the story; to now, working with up to 80 people and finding ways to engage that amount of people.”
Since its inception in 2012 the Human Sound Project has been developed into a musical method for storytelling and social exchange. Broadly outlining the ambitious next six months of the project, Jankelson explains “Now it's getting into serious territory where on the 22nd of May I'm bringing together 30 kids from Cronulla High and 30 Lebanese Muslim kids from Granville and we're going to attempt to come together through music and create a song that celebrates our cultural diversity.

“On the upcoming trip we'll be going to Cape Town to work with groups of different socioeconomic backgrounds and religious faiths coming together. We're going to Jerusalem to work with Palestinians and Israelis; we're going to Berlin to work with refugees.
“I don't pretend to have this huge amount of experience, but I believe that everyone has a story to tell and that people have an innate desire to get together and make music, even if they don't necessarily know it.”