I THINK IT'S IMPORTANT to archive the music that represents the soundtrack of your life and that's what I'm doing with five-year-old Mia. We produced 25 minutes of what she considers worthy of remembering as essential snippets of her first five years.
Mia arrived the same year as the iPhone and she is growing up accustomed to combining words, images and music to express what she feels. With the ease of Audioboo, she is also learning to produce her own autobiography, weaving snippets of songs she's heard on holiday, while commuting or after school in Busy Bees of Clonmel. Every two months, I show her photos we've snapped and record what she remembers from those shots. Recently, she has started recommending music that represents what was looping in her head during those events.
I think this kind of thought process could be a lovely project for her primary school or a compelling after-school project where young people work together to craft a story complete with music. In my experience, it's not until college years that young people pull together written expression, drawings, photos and music. In my day, that meant writing a letter to accompany a mixtape and a strip of photos that marked significant emotional events.
By the time she's a teen, I expect Mia will have authored her unique take on "It's My Life: Mia's Multimodal Autobiography." I'll share it on my blog.
[Bernie Goldbach teaches reflective audio journaling in the creative multimedia degree at the Limerick School of Art & Design.]
