THE FRONT

BLOCK (CODE) PARTY

A Q&A WITH SIYONA GANGIDI AND RICHA ARORA.

The sourdough starter and the backyard shiitake logs you nursed during pandemic lockdown might be cool, but they’ll never be “Nine-year-old learns coding and builds a jam band app” cool. Sorry! So went the summer of 2020 for Siyona Gangidi, a fourth-grade student at Don R. Roberts Elementary School in the Little Rock School District whose collaborative app for music composition, “Band Fun,” is a finalist in a contest for young coders called “18u18.” We talked with Siyona about her project, and with Siyona’s mother, Richa Arora, about why we should help kids learn to code.

So is fourth grade a lot different than third?

Not really! At least not to me.

Tell me about the Band Fun app! What would I do if I wanted to use it?

My app is a social networking app to help musicians interact with each other easily, and create bands.

When did you first get the idea?

My inspiration for the app was because I love music, and I play the violin. I also got into the Prelude [Orchestra] Arkansas Symphony for kids, so for this project I wanted to combine how I love music and the project together.

Richa, I suppose you might know a thing or two about how valuable coding experience is for Siyona, because you work in an IT field yourself, yes?

Richa: Yes. I work in IT — me and my husband both. Coding is everywhere, and will be especially in the years to come. They’re talking about artificial intelligence, and even surgeries being performed as much as possible in an automated fashion. So we definitely understand that in this time, even if the kids don’t grow up to be actual coders, that the thought processes — the critical thinking and the problem solving that come with learning how to code — are very important. It can help them understand advanced concepts and apply a step-by-step approach to build up something or to debug.

How did y’all get involved with the coding program in the online learning platform BYJU’S Future School?

Richa: So that started during the pandemic, early on, when schools were closed, and kids had a lot of time at home, and there was not much learning going on. I was worried about her getting behind, so I started looking for options to supplement the development. At that time she was taking twice-a-week coding lessons. And then as she started working and developing small things, I could see the joy on her face. Just to make an object move in a programmatic way, like a ball moving from Point A to Point B. To understand that there is something going on behind making the ball move on the screen, and that it works when I press enter or whatever. That really caught her interest. And there was a point when she would go on YouTube to search for information about a piece of code, and about how things can be implemented. We hope that she creates more apps that can serve the community and help the people around her.

WHAT ARE YOU READING RIGHT NOW?

I’m trying to read the “Wings of Fire” series. I’m on the 14th book. And I want to read “The Trials of Apollo” next.

I don’t know very much about coding. Are we talking about strings of HTML code or something different?

Siyona: I’m learning block coding.

What’s that?

Siyona: It’s these blocks that will do something when you put them in the right way.

Like a puzzle?

Siyona: Yeah! Richa: And things that involve “if, then.” If a user presses enter on the keyboard, move the ball to the right, if the user presses backspace, move it to the left. However you want your logic to flow, you insert those blocks of code at the right places.

WHAT INSTRUMENTS DO YOU PLAY?

piano, violin

HOW DOES THE APP WORK? Users log in, create a user profile that lists instruments they play, then join a chat room Are there other kids at your school who are with others who have the same inter- interested in coding, who you can talk to about it? ests, plus share audio files with others. Siyona: Not really. There was a kid in my third “They can sing into the microphone and grade class who knew about it, but not in fourth hit send to share,” Siyona said. “It’s easy grade. to use.”

So the competition that you’re entering is called “18u18,” like “18 under 18.” So all the competitors are under 18, but you’re only 9! Do you think you’ll get to talk to older students about coding, or trade any tips?

Siyona: Sometimes maybe I do feel that I will as I get more advanced, but right now, no.

So what stage is Band Fun at? Are there bands forming on the app, and are they mostly Little Rock people, or all over the world?

Siyona: I just submitted it for the competition, so it’s not really live yet! [Laughs.]

How did you test it?

I opened it on a LOT of browsers, so it would be different, and my mentor who was helping me build it signed in, and where it was storing all the data, I could see that his name was in there.

What happens at the competition? Do you have to show them the app?

Siyona: I submitted it using Google Forms, and after that, I just waited and in the summer, I heard that I was a finalist in it. I hope I win, but there are also other talented people out there. — Stephanie Smittle

PHAROAH SANDERS (1940-2022)

Free jazz — that nebulous and borderless terrain of which Little Rock-born tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders is undoubtedly a sovereign statesman — gets compared to meditation a lot. And the comparison makes sense. Like meditation, Sanders’ jazz was less concerned with doing something and more concerned with being ready for something to happen. Less concerned with making a statement than with making room for a statement — creating the right set of conditions under which a statement might develop and then being present and curious and patient enough to let it waltz into view on its own time. In the avant garde company of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane and Albert Ayler (and, these days, Kamasi Washington), Sanders devoted himself to a form of jazz that valued expression above all else, and which viewed improvisation as The Whole Damn Point, not merely a series of creative liberties to superimpose atop an existing structure — say, the math of Brubeck or the melody of Duke. (What would a “lead sheet” for “The Creator Has A Master Plan” look like? Preposterous!) If there was an overarching rule in Sanders’ music, it wasn’t typically a melody or a set of chords, but a malleable “groove” to linger in and around and above. It was as if he and Alice Coltrane in “Journey in Satchidananda,” for example, had set out not to “perform” a song at all, but to set a scene and make a mood.

Often, it was much more than a mood; how Sanders managed, for example, in the aforementioned “Creator” to express the whole of the human condition in half an hour on a tonal foundation that, at its core, vacillates between only two notes, I’ll never know. But he did. By whittling away the trappings of versechorus-verse in favor of humanity-universehumanity, Sanders cut straight to the core for his listeners, many of whom liken the piece to a transcendental trip, or a medicinal salve. One YouTube commenter claimed that Sanders’ 1969 album “Karma” cured her insomnia when pharmaceuticals wouldn’t. Another fan, in his late 60s battling throat cancer, said he’d been listening to the record for decades and that it had made COVID-19 “almost bearable.” Another

said he’d played it for solace in the barracks as a soldier in Germany in 1970, catching “all sorts of shit from other GI’s.”

The tenor saxophone, in the wrong hands, has been the weapon behind some musical crimes of the most gruesome variety, rendered synonymous with something called smooth jazz, which hangs out in doctor’s office lobbies and customer service queues and ladies’ department stores. In Sanders’ hands, though, the instrument had not just a “tone,” but a whole personality and voice, one that asked questions and offered up theories and moaned and shimmied and fluttered and floated and threw wild parties. The man spoke little in performance other than to credit his fellow performers. When I saw him in 2018 at North Little Rock’s Pulaski Technical College for the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame’s Distinguished Laureate Series, he was nearly silent except to gesture his permission for the crowd to dance. But what Sanders said through his saxophone, then and ever, felt bigger than a single emotion from a single person. When he soared on a solitary note it felt not like a bird, but a whole flock, and when he undulated and wailed in seemingly unspeakable suffering, it sounded like the suffering of multitudes. (What I wouldn’t give to be there during a satellite jazz radio algorithm fail in the home decor section at Dillard’s, Sanders’ blood-curdling sax screeches midway through “Creator” freaking out the daytime shoppers.)

A saxophone reed is made from a Mediterranean member of the grass family called “giant cane.” It has a tough job, as it must be strong enough to withstand great pressure but supple enough to phonate and resonate. The reed is thick at its base where it’s secured to the horn’s mouthpiece by a metal ligature, but near where the player’s lips and tongue rest it’s shaved terrifically thin so that it can vibrate under pressure from the player’s airflow. Sanders was known for a throbbing “split reed” technique that produced a harrowing howl. He’d bite the reed, or yell into the horn, or blow so hard into it that the whittled strip of cane would go into vibration overdrive, threatening to splinter into a thousand shards. Sanders had trouble finding the right reeds, he told The New Yorker magazine when he was 79 (he was 81 when he died Sept. 24), often tossing away whole boxes when they didn’t sound right. It’s no wonder; because they’re organic, no two reeds are exactly the same. Then again, no two of his performances were, either. Here’s hoping wherever he is, he’s found a good one.