Newcomer Creative Voices Project

This project aimed to provide three young newcomers in the GTA with an opportunity to collaborate on songwriting projects. Using qualitative interview material and collaborative storytelling, lyric-writing, and music-creation, each of the three young people who participated co-composed and recorded one song based on a topic of their choosing. This research was conducted in partnership with a not-for-profit newcomer settlement agency in Ontario that delivered a musical program for children and youth. Through fun and educational music activities in diverse languages, the young participants in that music program were provided free, weekly tailored musical activities, as well as other forms of art education. Three members of the program—Suhana, Kagami, and Amisha (all pseudonyms), ages 7, 9, and 11 years old, respectively—took part in The Creative Voices Project.

This project took place mostly virtually during the pandemic. Over 15 online sessions with 3 individual children and the songs were recorded. Then, in a music studio in Toronto, each child sang the lead vocals for their own song, and they collaborated with several local studio musicians to add instrumentation to their songs such as violin, flute, bass, piano, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, percussion, and background vocals. 

The significance of this project lies in its collaborative and child-centered impetus to better understand the lived experiences and social worlds of newcomer and refugee children, and to open up possibilities for them to engage in embodied creative decision-making and agentic self-expression through the processes of songwriting, recording, and digital storytelling.