Music for Children



We're contributing to:

FOUND 27 May 2016 — 04 Sep 2016

The Foundling Museum 40 Brunswick Square London WC1N 1AZ

We found Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman’s 1958 vinyl record Music for Children in the personal record collection of architect Luis Barragán, whilst on an artists’ residency in Mexico City in 2012. The record works as a kind of audio source code for teaching music to children, in the mode of play.

Treating the found record as an artefact, as an object to be excavated, we detect, extract and separate sounds from the original vinyl record. Although the complete rights to the music remain in copyright until 2061, we free copyright-expired sounds by dissecting copyright-controlled elements to generate a 'public sonic inventory'. This inventory contains thousands of samples from Music for Children and is freely released into the public domain for reuse.

Xylophones, glockenspiels, drum hits, crashing cymbals and fragments of children’s voices echo in the copyleft licensed work, which is pressed onto a vinyl record and offered for free download to be found by its future audiences:

Listen and Download

Live event featuring Leafcutter John
Thursday 30 Jun 2016 Doors 18:00, event 18:30 Tickets £5

Eileen Simpson and Ben White will provide an audiovisual introduction to the project and the Open Music Archive. This will be followed by a live performance by Leafcutter John who has been invited by the artists to play an exclusive live set assembled from the collection sounds featuring xylophones, glockenspiels, drum hits, crashing cymbals and fragments of children’s voices ripped from the original record.

More info and tickets