Develop creativity, experiment and realise your own audiovisual projects – the holiday workshops of the Image & Sound department offer children and young people a unique opportunity to explore the connection between sound and image in a playful way.
As a cooperation between the Basel Music School, the Basel Music Academy and the Gare du Nord, two workshops have been offered every year since 2012, creating space for artistic and technical development. The content is tailored to the interests of the participants and encourages unconventional ideas. This results in interactive computer games, fascinating shadow theatre, singing cuddly toys and bicycles that make music.
The children and young people develop their own works in courses that usually last a week - from the initial idea to the final realisation. In the process, they learn practical and artistic skills in programming, sound design, sculpture making, sewing, soldering and many other areas.
We will publish the workshops for the 25/26 season here shortly.
Would you like to tell an exciting story with sound and noises? In this workshop, you will learn how to capture noises and sounds with a microphone and use them to create funny or scary audio stories. You'll put everything together on the computer to create a soundtrack. Finally, on Friday, 8 August, at 2 p.m., the Soundwalk will take place at gare du Nord, where visitors can walk through the rooms with your soundtrack on their ears and listen to your exciting stories and sounds.
Music, video, beats, pixels: how does a sound know what it should sound like? What are pixels and how do they know what colour they are? How does a drawing become music? And how is an image created from a sound? We will create images and sounds on the computer and transform them into symbols, colours and patterns. You will learn how to make your drawings sound. On Saturday, 26 April 2025 at 2 p.m., we will present a unique concert – a show with movement, light and music – and invite your family and friends to join us at Gare du Nord, Schwarzwaldallee 200, 4058 Basel.
Writing music without sheet music?
Of course! Instead of using sheet music and classical scores, you invent your own symbols! You will learn how symbols become sounds and sounds become symbols. We will use computers and iPads to create rhythms, sounds, shapes and colours. Every day, we will switch roles: first, we will draw pictures that become music, then we will compose music that becomes pictures. We will recognise patterns that exist in both pictures and music and produce new ones.


