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Atlanta, GA | Posted: March 26, 2014
Summary Sentence:
WREK radio waves dominated by the sound of salsa music, thanks to a group of students taking a class in the School of Modern Languages.
Full Summary:
If you tune in to Georgia Tech’s student-run radio station, WREK, between the hours of 7 and 9 p.m. on any Sunday night, you may be privy to the sounds of anything from punk to avant-garde. On one Sunday night in particular, though, the radio waves were dominated by the sound of salsa music, thanks to a group of students taking a class in the School of Modern Languages.
Salsa studentsIf you tune in to Georgia Tech’s student-run radio station, WREK, between the hours of 7 and 9 p.m. on any Sunday night, you may be privy to the sounds of anything from punk to avant-garde. On one Sunday night in particular, though, the radio waves were dominated by the sound of salsa music, thanks to a group of students taking a class in the School of Modern Languages.
After spending a semester exploring Latin American societies and cultures through their musical traditions, undergraduate students Amisha Kadiwar, Priya Verma, and Sina Medhikarimi, produced a two-hour live radio show entirely in Spanish and broadcast it in collaboration with the WREK team. As a final project for the class, Span 4813: The Latin American Music Radio Show, the students were invited to explore their preferred music style, and Caribbean music—specifically salsa—spoke to this trio of soon-to-be radio producers.
The team then began the process of brainstorming ideas for their radio show, topics to cover, and songs that might be included. Their chosen themes were community, the role of women, and recent developments in salsa. Thus, the musical journey titled “Salsa as Representative of Caribbean Diasporic Music” was born.
The radio show included a variety of music within the salsa style, featuring both classically oriented artists and newcomers, as well as an interview with salsa instructor Julian Mejia, a native of Columbia and founder of SALSAtlanta. The full playlist of the salsa special can be found on the WREK website.
Emerging from the process of producing a radio show focused on linguistically and socially meaningful content was the awareness among students of the important role of the human voice in speaking a second language. Students were encouraged to think of the human voice as both a physical and social creation. Learning a new language involves not only discovering news ways of using and articulating the mouth and facial muscles, but also the social dynamic of creating a voice and offering a perspective of the world based on a listening practice of exploring the musical dynamics of another culture.
“Part of our mission as professors of modern languages is to guide students in this process of self-discovery constituted by the desire to have a meaningful voice and intercultural mindset in a second language,” said Juan Carlos Rodriguez, who is teaching the class. “The radio show project allows students to discover and develop their own voices in Spanish. Students discover that their voices in Spanish are the result of a dialogue between personal and collective experiences involving many cultural and social issues.”
