Child band hits high notes with instruments made from garbage

"My son learned to play drums but traditional music education is usually boring for kids," he says. "This is different. Making instruments themselves and playing music with friends excited them."

In January 2018, the band gave a debut show at the university and then the kids performed in Gulangyu Island, a popular Xiamen tourist site, earlier this year.

Team member Muyuan says: "I like the rhythm of the percussions."

Jiang Donglin is another band veteran, not bad for an 8-year-old. He joined the band at the outset and quickly learned how to make music from a plastic bottle, cork and cardboard.

"I glued different parts of the instrument together and each part sounds differently when I strike," he says with justifiable pride.

When the band plays together, the youngsters seem both excited and poised, and a confident foot-tapping rhythm emerges.

"We learned from our teachers that it's important to listen to the sounds made by others when we play together," he says.

Parents are their children's unconditional supporters, not least his mother.

"Improvisation is taught when the kids play in the band. It's a great way to display themselves and discover their musical potential," says Donglin's mother, Qin Jingjing, a teacher at the local Confucius Institute.

She and her husband, also a teacher at Xiamen University, witnessed their son's growth after joining the band.

"The kids are not afraid of being on stage any longer," Qin says with a smile. "We are glad to find that they have become more confident about themselves."

Chen thought it a pity after the band's initiator Gao Ye graduated from Xiamen University this summer. "It was him who kept on encouraging children to learn music and make instruments from garbage," says Chen, who later invited his friend from Serbia, Nemanja Radovanovic, to join in the band as music teacher.

Radovanovic, 33, who's a graphic designer specializing in illustration, animation and clothing design, works as a freelance artist. He had experience in coordinating art workshops for children, and he's also "a big supporter of recycling", so he took the job.

"We make new instruments 'from nothing' and use different things to make sounds. The kids saw that it is possible to make music without real instruments by just using imagination," says Radovanovic, who played clarinet and bass guitar since young.

Once he found an empty cake box and made a guitar. The kids were amazed. Together they also made flutes, drums and xylophones out of discarded bamboo.