Imagine Home : The Music Donation Project

Belgian foreign correspondent Rudi Vranckx launches ‘Imagine Home’. A special project that seeks to aid young refugees through the power of music. On imaginehome.canvas.be you can buy music notes from an exclusive composition that was made in collaboration with young refugees and musicians in Mosoul. The sound of a note is only revealed when it is bought. The more donations, the more the composition comes to life. And only when all music notes have been bought, will the complete composition be revealed. ‘Imagine Home’ symbolizes the role music plays in the lives of people who have been affected by war and terror. It is a sign of hope and involvement. 

When Rudi Vranckx reported on the liberation of Mosul last June, he met Nabeel Atraqchi. Nabeel’s music school had been destroyed completely during the occupation by IS, who think playing music is sinful. Almost all musical instruments were destroyed, and the musicians were persecuted. Rudi decided to start a project. Back in Belgium he collected all the instruments he could gather and shipped them to Mosul, so that Nabeel could rebuild his music school. The campaign was dubbed ‘Imagine Mosul’, after John Lennon’s famous song. ‘Imagine Mosul’ became a tremendous success, instruments with a long history were given a new future in Mosul. After the success of this campaign, Rudi wishes to take it a step further and do something in his home country. With ‘Imagine Home’ he wants to help young refugees who were forced to leave everything behind and who want to build a new future here. Music can give them a feeling of peace, of coming home.

How does it work?

On imaginehome.canvas.be, you can find the partition of a very exclusive track composed by Belgian composer Peter Baert and performed by young refugees in Belgium in collaboration with musicians in Mosoul. As soon as you pick a note and buy it, you can listen to it. The more donations, the more the composition will reveal itself.

Pieter Nijs, Digital Director at mortierbrigade:

« This project was really challenging. After recording over 20 different instruments in the studio, we had to identify and isolate each note so we could put them in the score separately and allow users to buy them one by one. All in all, we isolated almost 5000 notes to compose the track in its entirety. » 

The minimal price for a note is €5, but you can donate as much as you want.

All of the proceeds go to The Sound of Home, a project that wishes to give young refugees the chance to feel at home through the power of music. The collected money will be used to enable young refugees to practice music in local music academies in Belgium.

Imagine Home is an initiative of Rudi Vranckx and Canvas, and was created by the Belgian advertising agency mortierbrigade in collaboration with sound studio RayGun. The musical piece has become a musical journey, a soundtrack to the story of Nabeel in Mosul and young refugees in Belgium.