SOUND.SON is an experimental "art-in-education" music program that embraces concepts of technology and new music composition, and involves an international exchange over the internet between two schools.

An objective of this program is to intergrate multicultural elements in musical, environmental, and technological education within the same project. The program includes an exchange of sounds that take account of daily life beyond cultural barriers, and gives students the chance to acquire a more realistic vision of the other country despite linguistic barriers.

The students use the sounds like a common language to communicate with their partners in the other country. Besides the multicultural element, the program consitutes an introduction to the basic notions of musical composition, sound recording, editing and mixing.

Over the course of the program, the students from the two schools create an original musical composition based on the sounds that they have recorded locally and exchanged over the internet. These sounds take account of the respective environments of the two schools and may be considered as the acoustic equivalent of photographs. Once recorded and exchanged, the sound material is mounted in each school and short fragments are exchanged over the internet to be combined and constituted into longer sections. The final result is a collaborative composition made up of different movements, each one reflecting a stage of the activity.

Over the course of the program, the students not only acquire a new awareness of the acoustic aspects of their environment that often go unnoticed, but they also discover the sound world of another culture. In the process, the students refine their listening skills and heightened their sensitivity to sounds.

By responding to the same exercise with various ideas, the students discover a multitude of possible approaches one can take when working with sounds. The exchange revealed to them the inherent richness of sounds and the endless possibilities of invention in a domain of creating and composing sounds.

Finally, this program introduces the idea that technology (in this case, computers and their accessories) can function both in support and as an instrument of creative events. The use of sound editing software familiarizes the students with a graphical representation of sound, as well as with the basics of sound editing and mixing.