Episode 3: Music and Sound Art

EP3_ Sound from Scratch

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:00:04] Hello everyone, and welcome back to this new episode of our Trash to Treasure Podcasts series on Green jobs.

I’m Anne Cassuto from Ayamola organisation in Barcelona.

In today’s episode, we’ll talk about Reuse Sound Art and discuss the fascinating concepts behind this movement.

Join us as we explore the compelling trajectory of Rocco Papia, an Italian musician now based in Spain.

[00:00:35] Known for his originality and strong social commitment, Rocco builds and performs with his own instruments made from scrap materials, and designs immersive sound installations that invite you into a completely new world of sound

Rocco Papìa

[00:00:48] What creative reuse in music allows us as artists to achieve is to create new sounds, basically to create a new world.

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:01:04] Curious to see how an octopus trap can be transformed into a musical instrument? Join us to find out!

Have you ever heard of Reuse Sound Art and thought, wait, what exactly is that? Let's break it down.

To get what Reuse sound art really means, let's talk first about sound art itself. This concept is pretty recent. Until the 1950s, all anyone talked about was music. Sound installations? Sculpture? Forget it. That word didn't exist yet.

[00:01:38] Instead of sticking to melody or rhythm, it’s about exploring textures, spaces, and the way sound makes you feel.

[00:01:53] You'll find it in installations, performances, sculptures, and recordings. In the end, it is all listening to the world in a completely new way.

Let’s now rewind for a second and see where it all began…

Sound Art has its roots in the early 20th century.

The Italian Futurists, like Luigi Russolo, were already experimenting with noise machines to capture the sounds of modern life: the streets, factories, the city buzz…,

[00:02:29] What was their purpose? To challenge what people thought music could be.

Then in the 50s came American John Cage, one of the biggest game changers. He redefined what music could be by using silence and everyday objects.In his most famous piece, 4’33”, the musician doesn’t play a single note.

[00:03:03] Instead, the sounds of the audience and the room become the music.

With this approach, Cage wanted to show that sound is everywhere, and that listening itself can be an art form.

Meanwhile in Europe, French composer Pierre Schaeffer and Luciano Berio in Italy were already cutting, mixing, and looping sounds way before it was cool

[00:03:34] Nowadays, we look back at them as the pioneers of the electroacoustic music. After that, other artists took things even further….

American Max Neuhaus turned city streets into immersive soundscapes, while South Corean Nam June Paik mixed sound, video, and tech to create mind-blowing installations that completely changed how we experience media.

[00:04:00] All together, they opened the door to what would later evolve into Reuse Sound Art.

But here’s the deal: while these artists were all about everyday sounds, none of them was focused on recycling or waste. That came later, when pollution and the environment became bigger issues.

Sure, people had been making instruments from unconventional materials, but it wasn’t a conscious practice yet.

 [00:04:25] By the end of the 20th century, a new wave of artists mixed sound with eco-awareness. And that’s when Reuse Sound Art really came alive!

The artists turned trash into instruments, installations, and totally fresh sonic experiences.

[00:04:39] It’s like taking Cage’s idea that “sound is everywhere” but with a twist: sustainability, creativity, and a new way of listening.

Suddenly, you start hearing the world differently, turning waste into sound, and sound into awareness.

Rocco Papìa

[00:04:55] In my opinion, there are two main paths in Reuse sound art. Some artists reimagine old-school instruments with recycled materials, like the Cateura Orchestra in Paraguay, where kids play violins made from cans and drums from barrels

[00:05:20] And it's all about making music out of it. Of what most would you throw away. Others, like me and other artists, go all in and invent new instrument from scrap, letting the material itself shape the sound and shape the idea and the creation, the creativity to build and to invent a new instrument.

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:05:49] Today, we’ll dive into Rocco’s world, our guest of the day, an Italian sound artist based in Barcelona. We’ll find out how he has gotten here and what drives him to transform discarded material into both unique instruments and immersive sound experiences.

[00:06:05] So stick around. Because when imagination takes over, trash isn’t trash anymore. It’s treasure!

[00:06:16] We’re going back to 1985. Rocco is 6 yo.

His family, originally from southern Italy, now lives in Bologna, up north.

Their home is always packed with children from abroad in difficult situations, whom his mother, a social worker, is helping.

Rocco Papìa

[00:06:35] My mother was working with people from all over the world. Most of all, Pakistan, the first wave of Asian migrants and North African migrants in Italy. And my house was always full of these children that can't speak Italian.

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:07:04] They all gathered in the kitchen. In the background, a song of Pino Daniele, one of the family's favorite artists, is playing.

Rocco Papìa

[00:07:12] Pino Daniele was very important for me, because he’s a musician from Naples very in love with blues, with jazz and so on and who played with a lot of international musicians and melt a lot of musical traditions.

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:07:45] Daniele, together with other great Italian artists in 1970s and 1980s Italy,, represented the working class and those fighting for their rights in a very tense period for the country.

Rocco, like many artists who were raised within the tradition of political music, brought his own critical spirit and sense of social justice into his art.

Rocco Papìa

[00:08:08] When I was 11 years old I started to play guitar and make music, writing my own music with my brother.

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:08:17] In that moment something shifted and perhaps everything began there for his future.

Since then, he´s never stopped.

Completely self-taught, Rocco naturally picked up all kinds of styles and world music, from Eastern refugees he met in the squats of Bologna, from his travels around the world: To south America, the Balkans, Africa, Mediterranean countries and so on..

[00:08:45] From then, he has been moving through all these styles, and world music has always been his main inspirational source as a musician.

Rocco Papìa

[00:08:53] I went to Kosovo to play and to Serbia, to Macedonia, it was natural for me to link the musical activity with a political activity. I mean, there was a war very near our home and we see the people struggling and live this very broken life as refugees there in Bologna.

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:10:05] Soon after, he also took on the environmental cause, and for the past few years, he’s been fighting for climate justice, a broader concept that links human rights and environmental issues.

Rocco Papìa

[00:10:20] I talk about people, migrants, and pollution, and I try to highlight how deeply these issues are connected, because their relationship is now clearer than ever.

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:10:31] Rocco’s concerns have evolved with time, growing bigger and bigger…, just like the problems in our world. 

Rocco Papìa

[00:10:37] Maybe I followed this evolution as an artist, because I think that every artist has to be connected with the issues of their contemporaneity. Maybe the temporality itself brought me to this transformation

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:10:53] So how can a musician fight for climate justice, you may wonder?

Well out of that very question, the “Reusonic Orchestra Trio”, was born in 2019.

[00:11:13] After moving to Barcelona, Rocco crossed paths with two musicians who shared his concerns: Antonio Sanchez and Xavier Lozano.

Together, they became the  “Reusonic Orchestra Trio” and took to the music scene their bold new vision.

The 3 pillars of their concept: Music, Ecology, and Creativity

Imagine a fusion of world, jazz and traditional music.

[00:11:56] This sounds incredible, right?

But even more fascinating is that all their instruments are truly unique, handmade from reused materials. Nothing compared to anything you’ve seen before…

Rocco, once a guitarist, now calls himself a plucker of just about anything.

[00:12:14] Xavier Lozano claims the superpower of blowing into objects, while Antonio Sanchez plays percussion and pretty much anything that makes a sound.

When Rocco talks about the instruments he plays besides singing, you get why they describe themselves this way…

Rocco Papìa

[00:12:31] In my experience I used a surfboard, a broken surfboard to make a very strange string instrument that it doesn't seem nothing known because obviously it's not a classical instrument made by a surf board.

It is a stringed instrument because the construction is inspired by an Iranian instrument called Santur and I call the new instrument Surftur and it's a string percussion. So you play with sticks percutting the strings, but the sound is very different because it's lower, it's like a big, I don't know, it is a surf tour

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:13:25] And here goes another of his creation:

Rocco Papìa

[00:13:26] I’ve built an instrument made from an octopus trap that is forbidden at the moment. It's not legal to fish for octopus with this kind of trap, but you can find many of these traps on the beaches and all over the Mediterranean Sea. So this shows that this fishing technique has not ended; it’s still in use.

[00:13:51] So I built this string instrument using this particular object. It's real garbage, real waste that I found in Galicia, on the Atlantic Ocean. And every time I play this instrument, it gives me the opportunity to talk about these problems: illegal fishing and the problem of fishing nets, ghost nets, and all these big problems in the marine ecosystem at this moment.

[00:14:19] So the memory of this object allows me to talk about these things and has a very big impact because normally no one in the public knows this object, this trap. And I have not recycled this object. I have not broken it and used the plastic from this object to make another, but I reused it, so the object is therein front of the public eyes.

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:15:00] So for the members of “Reusonic Orchestra Trio”, REUSE is way more than a concept.

It means going back to the roots of music

It’s their way to be creative, act eco-friendly, invent new sounds, and raise awareness about climate justice.

Rocco hasn’t stopped there. On his own, and sticking to the same idea, he’s taken it a step further, running creative workshops to spark change.

Rocco Papìa

[00:15:27] With the participant, I build musical instruments together from waste that themselves take to the workshop. So it's very interesting because people can visualize the transformation of an object that they think is waste, they think it's ended his useful life. And they see the transformation of this object in a musical instrument and afterwards they play this instrument

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:16:01] By getting people involved in the process, it somehow becomes more impactful. Like everything, when you do it yourself, it’s more likely to stick!

And that’s not all! In 2020, Rocco founded “International Sound Reuse Art Workshop”, a collective of artists who gathered to produce what they call Sound Reuse Artworks, or S.R.A. for short.

Sound Reuse Artworks… what’s that? …Honestly, when Rocco first told me, I couldn’t picture it either.

Here’s the idea: these are sound installations and sculptures made from urban and industrial waste.

[00:16:42] Their approach is simple: turn trash into sound, sound into art to raise awareness : a playful mix of creativity, ecological and sustainable development.

Let's listen to Rocco describing  “the sound Coral”, one of their master pieces, to get a better sense of it.

Rocco Papìa

[00:17:09] The Sound Choral is a huge visual installation, more or less three and a half meters by two and a half meters, made, entirely made of industrial residues, industrial waste. It has some sensors that, when you touch them, you can interact with the sound installation.

[00:17:29] It has five branches and each branch emits the sound of existing animals, marine animals, divided by categories, they're odontocetes cetaceans, fish invertebrates and mammals like seals.

But the sounds are real: sounds of animals recorded with hydrophones, and I found these sounds in some archives of North American universities that specialize in marine biology.

[00:18:07] The aim of this artwork is to allow people to listen to the marine soundscape and, in particular, to listen to sounds that are normally inaudible to people. And I want to raise awareness of the desertification of the marine soundscape because it's a very big problem, because what we don’t really know is that sound is a very important tool of communication under the sea.

[00:18:40] There is no light under the sea, I mean, it’s completely dark, so the only light you can find is bioluminescence and biolumination. Not all the fish and the animals can do this, so the principal way to communicate between animals is sound. And the way water carries sound allows it to travel over long distances

 [00:19:05] So it's very effective tool of communication and human activities disturb a lot the animals' communicational environment.

The coral is a symbol, it's emblematic because coral reefs are really the symbol of the crisis of the marine ecosystem, caused by the high temperature of the water, the acidification of the water, and the loss of biodiversity

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:19:35] When I ask him about the ISRAW collective’ s other projects and how they worked together, this is what he shares with me:

Rocco Papìa

[00:19:57] ISRAW gathered four times to make four installations. Every time we stand with a methodology, a very, particular, peculiar methodology, because we stay one week in a place and in one week we design, we develop and we implement and we present the sound installation. So we have a few time, a lot of limits, a lot of problems, but to solve all the problems and to pass across all the limits, we have to develop a lot of creativity.

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:20:33] Curious to see these works up close?

You’re in luck! Many S.R.A. installations are still visible across Europe, from Padua and Bologna to Mallorca and Barcelona: recycled materials turned into interactive sound experiences to raise awareness about climate justice

 [00:20:51] Don't miss the chance to see them live!

[00:21:15] Now that we’ve met Rocco, it’s time for his advice.

If you’re a young creative interested in reuse sound art, here’s where to begin.

Like every artist, it all starts with one thing: finding what truly moves you, your passion. Because if it’s not your passion, it won’t last, and it won’t feel real.

[00:21:35] Once you find it, Rocco encourages you to follow your own path. Don’t copy others, don’t do it for the money, do it because it makes you feel alive.

Rocco Papìa

[00:21:47] If you develop a project because you think that this project is good for the market, it is not your work and it doesn't work. It doesn't work because one of the things that is very evident from outside is passion. People are interested in passion, people are interested in beliefs, not in products

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:22:12] He also reminds us to stay curious. Look around, get inspired by other artists, other projects, by culture in general. Learn as much as you can, that’s how your creativity expands!

See what’s already out there, Rocco says. That’s how you make something new, something that’s truly yours.

In the end, art is about finding your voice, and daring to use it.

[00:22:36] It all starts with the right attitude, no matter what kind of artist you are

Now, when it comes to reuse sound art, Rocco reminds us that you also need solid skills:

First of all, since we’re talking sound and music, Rocco keeps it simple: you gotta be a musician to start! That means studying, practicing, and living the music

 [00:22:52] For Rocco, what really matters is training your ear and to do that, he emphasizes that modern or contemporary music schools are especially great, since they focus on listening, experimenting, and exploring sound itself.

Rocco Papìa

 [00:23:13] In my case, I'm completely self-taught. So I can't suggest which kind of educational path you can do. But for what I see in my colleagues, it's very, very important to make academic path

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:23:33] After all, music isn’t just notes on a page, it’s all about sound…

But he also says classical training has its value: it gives you solid foundations and discipline.

In the end, it’s all about finding the path that works best for you.

Then, when it comes to the knowledge needed to build your instruments or art installations, with reused materials, Rocco keeps it simple:

Rocco Papìa

[00:24:01] what I suggest is to use your hands. I mean, practice and experiment. The most techniques you can experiment, the better. Because you have to understand how to work, how to manage wood, how to manage metals, how to cut, how to use glues, and so on.

[00:24:28] You have to experiment. I think that the best suggestion is work in your house, when you have to, Don't buy a library, make your own library if you want to know how to build a guitar.

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:24:47] Go DIY! Build, try, fail, rebuild” , Rocco says. The more you experiment, the more you understand materials, and that’s how new ideas start to flow.

Today, there are also academic paths and artistic residencies to learn how to work with reused materials. Rocco points out that in his time, this wasn’t even a thing but now there are so many options:

[00:25:10] Artistic residencies, workshops, and collaborations where you can pick up new skills, learn from other artists, improvise, and go hands-on with building instruments and experiment with new ways of creating sound.

[00:25:31] And if you’re looking for concrete info—don’t worry! On our website, you’ll find the TTT GreenJobs Training Guide, packed with all the details on academic programs and resources

Let’s take a look now at Rocco’s recommendations for the process of creating reuse sound art pieces

[00:25:48] Rocco recommends collecting as much material as possible and gaining a solid understanding of their characteristics so you can work with them more easily.

He also encourages you to find a big space to store and organize everything, if possible: by shape, by material, whatever works for you.

Remember inspiration often comes from what’s right in front of you…

[00:26:11] The more materials you have around you, the more ideas will come!

[00:26:18] Alright, we’ve already got some awesome tips to get started. To wrap it up, Rocco’s gonna explain how you can actually earn a living from your art..

First up, he suggests connecting with and looking for support from institutions of all sizes.

[00:26:33] One of the top options, according to Rocco, is the EU “Creative Culture” program, although it’s mostly for more established artists.

He also recommends checking out local institutions, which are great for helping and supporting emerging artists.

[00:26:49] Since your work involves reusing materials to make sound art, it's definitely worth looking into opportunities in both art and sustainability. These channels can open up more chances for fundings.

Rocco Papìa

[00:27:03] It’s easier for an artistic call to evaluate environmental content in a work of art positively than for an environmental sustainability call to do the same with art. So it’s easier to apply to an artistic call with some environmental value than to a sustainability call with some artistic value.

Anne Cassuto (Host)

[00:27:34] So, in this episode, we explored the world of reuse sound art and how it’s evolved to influence the future of creativity.

We had the chance to meet Italian artist Rocco Papìa, a self-described "plucker of anything," and learn about his unique approach to create sound from scrap, transforming everyday waste into sound instruments and art installations.

[00:28:03] We're almost at the end of this episode. Take a moment to look around and explore waste around you. Who knows what kind of sound art you could create from it. Keep in mind, trash can always become treasure.

And stick around!  In our next episode, we’ll jump into upcycling fashion, showing how ordinary waste can be turned into unique and creative clothing pieces.

 [00:28:28] It's going to be fun, inspiring and full of ideas.

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Also, make sure to visit our website “trashtotreasure.eu” where you’ll find tons of tips, inspiring blog posts, as well as the TTT GreenJobs Training Guide, a comprehensive document full of information on training opportunities and practical tools. 

[00:28:53] Finally, be sure to register for our Web Desk Service to benefit from a B2B session with one of our team members and receive personalized support and advice.

Remember, trash is treasure and the future is as green as the jobs that will shape it!