Summary: Beat Making Lab is a project and video series started by producer Steven Levitin (a.k.a. Apple Juice Kid) and University of North Carolina professor Pierce Freelon. They travel the world with a music studio that fits in a backpack to teach budding musicians how to create positive social impact through their art. From Chapel Hill to Fiji and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Beat Making Lab is creating a community of "artivists" who mix their beats with socially conscious messages. Freelon and Levitin talk with Soundcheck host John Schaefer about the project and to define artivism for us. Interview Highlights Pierce Freelon, on the meaning behind "artivism": It's merging the worlds of art and activism by any medium necessary. It's taking something beautiful -- the art of beat-making which is not widely taught. Instead of just leaving that in the ivory tower on [a] college campus which is only accessible to students, we're bringing it to the streets from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Panama. That's the artivism; it's putting in the hands of community members who could really use it. On "Health Worker Beat" from Dakar, Senegal: We partnered with an organization called IntraHealth and they train healthworkers. Their focus in Senegal is family planning. We went to a family planning facility in Senegal with one of our students and a recording device and just started capturing sounds. There's baby squeals, there was a goat on the campus of the hospital. We took those sounds and chopped them up and made them a beat. The beat was actually produced by our students in Fiji, which was a really cool collaboration. On measuring Beat Making Lab's success: We're still in our first year. We were in the Democratic Republic of Congo about a year ago this month. Some of the impacts have come a little later. We had a student in Congo who, was part of one of the workshops [which] was teaching kids how to blog about their experience. Through the workshop, [he] won an award which got him the opportunity to fly to Dakar, Senegal to be a part of a blogging conference. That conference was in Dakar during our Senegal Beat Making Lab. So we reconnected with this student that we'd met months ago in Congo. Off the strength of one of the lessons he learned in the Beat Making Lab curriculum he was already applying those skills in ways that were allowing him to travel the continent and engage other young bloggers and to be a part of a larger community.
