I went to visit the Pier 21 museum in Halifax, which focuses on immigration to Canada, and has a special exhibit this year for Canada 150. One activity it asks of museum-goers is to write about their first day in Canada, which I did. It was August 1968. I remember clearly walking by a vacant lot by the highway between our high-rise apartment and the restaurant where we had dinner that day. The lot was filled with chirping crickets, and that sound along with the pervasive sound of a multi-lane highway, seemed very Canadian to me as an immigrant from the UK. Both highway and insect sounds were unusual to my ears, although it feels strange to write that now, having become so accustomed to them in the intervening half century. In both cases, it was a buzzing, layered, sound caused by many individuals. And it turns out that my perception of the cricket sounds as unusual, and more Canadian than English, has an ecological reason. At that time in the UK, crickets were almost extinct because of industrial farming practices. So I would not have heard a field filled with crickets like that before.

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While walking

While walking is a research project headed by Pohanna Pyne Feinberg, who lives currently in Montreal, and did a residency at the Dare Dare centre.

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While Walking is a research project that explores walking as an artistic process and practice. How can walking contribute to the creative process? How can we understand walking as an art form? How does interaction with public space influence walking art practices? In what ways does the urban environment become a source of inspiration, distraction or perhaps intimidation? And, more specifically, what experiences do artists who are women encounter as they make art that involves walking the streets?

While Walking is an opportunity to learn from Montreal-based artists who walk as an aspect of their diverse art practices. Excerpts from recorded conversations with the artists will be shared in the format of an audio walk designed to enable the listener to reflect on the artists’ ideas while walking through the city.” While Walkingproject

Going Underground (CBC)

http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Local+Shows/Quebec/Cinq+a+Six/ID/2438337682/

La marche – est haute 4 juin 2015

Le 4 juin 2015, David Madden va donner une balade sonore “Soundwalking home” (15:00h),
St. Viateur et Outremont.

This is one stage of the sound art and writing project “Here be dragons” by Andra McCartney.

Plus de détails ici:

On 4 Jun 2015, David Madden will be giving a soundwalk entitled “Soundwalking home” beginning at 3 pm, rain or shine (except thunderstorms).

Une partie du projet “La marche – est haute” dirigé par Eric Mattson. “La marche (est haute) présente, entre avril et juin 2015, dix interventions numériques, sonores et artistiques en milieu urbain.”
http://oral-records.blogspot.ca/

Journées sonores canal de Lachine, 2000-2004

Journées sonores canal de Lachine, 2000-2004

Andra McCartney, Concordia University

Le Project

<<Journées Sonores, canal de Lachine>>est un projet sonore de documentation sur les modifications du paysage sonore du canal Lachine au fur et à mesure des différentes étapes de son réaménagement. Comme tous les projets de rénovation urbaine, ce projet de plusieurs années et millions de dollars a de profonds effets sur le contenu sonore des abords du canal. L’enregistrement, pendant plusieurs années, des sons depuis la piste qui court le long du canal a permis la création d’images sonores condensées accompagnant ces changements urbains. Nous espérons qu’en les écoutant, ces sons vous sensibiliseront au lieu – en particulier vous qui vivez et travaillez aux abords du canal – et que vous serez amenés à penser votre rapport avec les sons de ce lieu. Contrairement aux représentations visuelles, les enregistrements de sons ne cadrent pas de scènes ou d’édifices particuliers, mais soulignent des rapports entre sources différentes, comme la circulation de voitures ou de bateaux, des cyclistes, des machines industrielles ou de construction et des piétons.

Les enregistrements sonores ont été juxtaposés à des illustrations du canal Lachine. Notre intention était de mettre en relief différents angles d’un environnement donné en fonction de sources et perspectives différentes.

Le document ci-attaché Lachine Canal francais était produit pour l’installation au Musée de Lachine. En commençant sur la page 24 on peut trouver une liste de notes qui s’agissent de l’environnement du  canal de Lachine. On peut les entendre sur youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh341k2f4lU&list=PLIG92ZJmuTlXF4FpScYlXOOCBSNDpAna6

Journées sonores, canal de Lachine is a sound project which reflects on shifts in the soundscape of the Lachine canal as it changed with each phase of a revitalization project, as the canal re-opened as a recreation area in 2002, after many decades of dormancy while the St. Lawrence Seaway moved shipping and industrialization to another area on the south shore of the river. Like all urban renewal projects, this multi-year, multi-million dollar project has profound effects on the areas surrounding the canal. By recording sounds from the areas around the canal over several years, this project created condensed sonic images that followed these urban changes, as well as imaginary scenes from its past based on interviews with local residents. These sound recordings do not frame particular buildings or scenes, but point to relationships among different sources such as auto and boating traffic, cyclists, industrial/construction machines and pedestrians, and reveal the changing ambiences of these places over time.

In the final phase of this project, a multimedia installation was produced for display at the Musée de Lachine (2004), in a historical building adjacent to the canal. The show included an interactive computer installation, bringing together sounds recorded throughout several years. It also included more composed meditations on particular sites, along with photographic and drawn images and found objects. Comments from the project’s website were also included. Visitors to the gallery were encouraged in turn to comment on the installation and how it affected their perception of and attitude toward the sounds of the Canal. It was possible then to go outside and do a soundwalk immediately after experiencing the installation.

The booklet that is inserted here was produced for the Musée de Lachine installation. Journées sonores canal de Lachine.

Starting on page 24 is a list of notes that are associated with short pieces about the Lachine canal sound environment. These pieces can be viewed as a playlist from the andrasound channel on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh341k2f4lU&list=PLIG92ZJmuTlXF4FpScYlXOOCBSNDpAna6

Dance Dramaturgy: Returning to the Memory of the Event (2) / Retour sur la mémoire d’un événement (2)

(Version française ci-dessous/ French version below)

In February 2014, I contacted the participants of a Soundwalking Interactions (SI) performance-installation, presented at York University for the Dance Dramaturgy conference in June 2011, to enquire on their memories of the project. At SI, we were interested in learning if this project might have affected their subsequent work, and in how their memories of the experience took shape. How does the memory of such an embodied experience translate into words? How to account for the elusive remains of an encounter between artists of different disciplines and the experience of immersive environments? Collaborations often work mysteriously; others’ ideas infiltrate one’s own and, in the case of performance, blend into an ephemeral production that survives mostly in memory, with videos and photographs sometimes providing an imagery for the experience. Such encounters may influence and further inspire artists in their work, for their vision may have momentarily met another’s and created a communality of interests that persists in time and memory. Similarly, the memory of an immersion within the environment of a performance may exert an influence on further artistic work. The embodied mind remembers and may partially reproduce the experience throughout subsequent works.

The Dance Dramaturgy performance-installation was a choreography structured by a soundwalk and by dancers improvising in a responsive environment. The performers’ movements activated edited sound excerpts from the walk in different sections of the installation and traces of those spatial explorations also appeared as colored projections onto a screen. The result could be considered as a multilayered score of different traces of embodied memories: firstly those from the soundwalk in a park in Toronto, secondly those from the rehearsed improvisations and creative process and finally, the real-time responsive colored projections also offered ephemeral traces of the live performers’ improvised movements. With this project of returning to the memory of the performance, we are adding an additional layer, one that is perhaps even more difficult to seize: the lasting but ethereal traces of a performance in the participants’ memory.

The participants came from different disciplines: sound arts, digital media arts and dance. They seemed to share an interest for using landscapes and soundscapes as playgrounds for creation and artistic inspiration, both in their previous and subsequent works. I gathered the accounts of four participants, via email exchanges with two of the dancers, Jesse Dell and Tracey Norman, and a recorded conversation between artists/scholars Andra McCartney and Don Sinclair, who both initiated the project.

The two dancers described their experience as two different moments in time: firstly the experience of the soundwalk and then the collaborative work. In one account, the memory of the walk was very detailed and multi-sensorial: “ I remember my rubber boots and my red rain coat. I remember the sound of the planes in the sky, the trickling of the stream we briefly stopped at, the sound of our steps in the gravel, the sounds of our steps breaking small twigs and sticks on the ground.” (Jesse) The other account expresses how the memory of the walk permanently transformed the space for this other dancer’s continuing experience of the park: “I remember very clearly our walk through the ravine and I now live very close to where we started the walk – in the St-Clair West area- and so whenever I pass by I think of it. When I walk through the ravine I’m quite aware of the sounds and how they change from season to season because of the soundwalking project.” (Tracey) Both accounts detailed different appropriations of the same event, the former returning in memory to her personal embodied and sensorial perspective of the walk, the latter inscribing the memory of the walk and furthering its impact on everyday walking practices.

One dancer also mentioned how the walk as well as the collaboration between artists of different disciplines contributed to bringing “a larger basis of experience, understanding and relationship moving into creation.” She further adds: “it helped create a truly multimedia experience with many layers.” (Tracey) Don Sinclair also described this interdisciplinary collaboration as “communicating through different means and modes throughout the process” which gave the project different “layers of knowledge”. Both Andra McCartney and Don Sinclair insisted during their conversation on how the dancers brought a different embodied understanding to the soundwalk and the creative process, one that they were unfamiliar with: “it made me much more attentive about the walking part of soundwalking as well as the listening part, which I was much more focused on in the past, coming out of sound ecology.” (Andra) She described how this collaboration with dancers helped her in developing more awareness about the flocking movements of the groups she led during other soundwalks, and helped her to better transfer the lead of the walk to others by simply following these impulses coming from the group.

The way that the dancers physically engaged their bodies into exploring the walk together had already sketched a score for the performance. The rehearsals organized the memories of their movements as a flock and as individuals during the walk, generating a structure for the improvised performance. Throughout our exchange, Jesse remembered finding a heavy metal handle during the walk that made a sound that she particularly liked, and she repeatedly played with this sound during the performance. The dancers’ bodies communicated through movement the landscape and soundscape that they remembered from the walk. In a conversation published online on The Dance Current,[1] Bee Pallomina (another dancer from this SI project) speaks about her method of creation for a subsequent work as “moving not as ourselves but as a landscape”. Perhaps her experience of soundwalking as a creative process for the performance-installation has informed her understanding of “moving as a landscape”. Undoubtedly, her interests remain in close connection with the work produced with Soundwalking Interactions.

The dancers perpetuated in their dance the memory of the soundwalk’s landscape and soundscape and the space they created was further transformed with the projections remixing their live movements within the performance-installation. Could all performances be considered as the remixed memory of a creation process and rehearsals? Traces of previous works surviving in subsequent works also are, in a way, remixing this memory once more. Accounts of performances are deemed to be partial but if pieced together, they may bring a larger perspective on the lasting remains of performances and on the intricate influence of collaborations.

Link to other posts on the Dance Dramaturgy performance-installation:

https://soundwalkinginteractions.wordpress.com/category/dance/

For more information on the participants’ works:

Andra McCartney:

http://coms.concordia.ca/faculty/mccartney.html

Don Sinclair:

http://www.yorku.ca/dws/research-creative.html

Tracey Norman:

http://traceynorman.com/home.html

https://vimeo.com/92143980

Jesse Dell:

http://jessedell.com

http://www.jddance.ca

https://www.youtube.com/user/jessedell

Bee Pallomina: http://www.thedancecurrent.com/review/understory-understory

[1]See Bee Pallomina on her piece The Understory: http://www.thedancecurrent.com/review/understory-understory

 

Version française:  

En février 2014, j’ai approché les participants d’une ancienne performance-installation des Soundwalking Interactions (SI), qui avait été présentée à l’Université York pour la conférence Dance Dramaturgy en juin 2011, afin de les questionner sur ce qu’ils/elles retiennent de ce projet. Avec les SI, nous cherchions à savoir quelle forme a pu prendre leur souvenirs, et si ce projet a pu influencer d’autres créations auxquelles ils/elles auraient participé subséquemment. Comment le souvenir d’une telle expérience incarnée se traduit-il en mots? Comment revenir sur les traces insaisissables d’une rencontre entre artistes de différentes disciplines et sur l’expérience d’un environnement immersif? Le travail de collaboration fonctionne parfois de façon mystérieuse; les idées d’autrui infiltrent les idées de l’un/e et, dans le cas de la performance, se fondent en une production éphémère qui survit principalement dans la mémoire des participants, les captations vidéo et les photographies procurant parfois une imagerie retraçant cette expérience. De telles rencontres peuvent marquer et inspirer le travail des artistes, puisque leur vision s’est momentanément jointe à celle d’un/e autre et a ainsi créé une communauté d’intérêts qui résiste au temps et s’inscrit dans la mémoire. Le souvenir d’une immersion dans l’environment d’une performance peut également exercer une influence sur la démarche artistique. La conscience incarnée a une mémoire et peut reproduire partiellement cette expérience lors de créations subséquentes.

La performance-installation de la conférence Dance Dramaturgy était une chorégraphie structurée par une marche sonore et par les improvisations de danseuses dans un environnement interactif. Les mouvements des danseuses activaient des extraits sonores modifiés de la marche dans différentes sections de l’installation et les traces de ces explorations spatiales apparaissaient comme projections colorées sur un écran. Le résultat pourrait se décliner en une partition étagée de différentes traces de souvenirs incarnés : d’abord celles de la marche sonore dans un parc de Toronto, ensuite celles des pratiques d’improvisation et du processus de création et finalement, les projections colorées réactives reproduisaient en temps réel les traces éphémères des mouvements improvisés par les danseuses. Ce présent projet de retourner à la mémoire de cette performance ajoute une couche supplémentaire à ces traces, peut-être une encore plus difficile à saisir : celle des traces durables, mais éthérées, de la performance dans la mémoire des participants.

Les participants provenaient de différentes disciplines : les arts du son, les arts médiatiques et numériques et la danse. Ils semblaient partager un intérêt pour l’utilisation de paysages et environnements sonores comme terrains de jeu pour la création et l’inspiration artistique, dans leurs travaux précédents comme subséquents. J’ai rassemblé les témoignages de quatre participants, à travers des échanges courriels avec deux danseuses, Jesse Dell et Tracey Norman, et à travers une conversation enregistrée entre les artistes-chercheurs Andra McCartney et Don Sinclair, qui ont tous deux instigué le projet.

Les deux danseuses ont décrit leur expérience en deux temps : d’abord l’expérience de la marche sonore et ensuite celle du travail de collaboration. Dans l’un des témoignages, le souvenir de la marche était décrit dans le menu détail et de façon multi-sensorielle : « Je me souviens de mes bottes de caoutchouc et de mon imperméable rouge. Je me souviens du son des avions dans le ciel, du gargouillis du ruisseau devant lequel nous nous sommes arrêté/e/s, du son de nos pas dans la gravelle, du son de nos pas brisant de petites brindilles et branches sur le sol. » (Jesse) L’autre témoignage exprimait combien le souvenir de la marche a transformé de façon permanente le parc pour cette danseuse dans son expérience de cet espace au quotidien : « Je me souviens très clairement de notre marche à travers le ravin et j’habite maintenant très proche d’où nous avions débuté la marche – près de la section St-Clair West- et donc à chaque fois que j’y passe j’y repense. Quand je marche à travers le ravin je suis plus attentive aux sons et à combien ils varient à travers les saisons, grâce à ce projet de marche sonore. » (Tracey) Ces deux témoignages racontent différentes appropriations du même évènement, la première retournant aux souvenirs de la mémoire sensorielle et incarnée de la marche, selon une perspective personnelle, et la deuxième inscrivant le souvenir de la marche et poursuivant son impact sur les pratiques quotidiennes.

Une des deux danseuses a aussi mentionné combien la marche ainsi que la collaboration entre artistes de différentes disciplines a contribué à fonder «  une plus grande base d’expérience, de compréhension et de liens de relation à transposer dans la création. » Elle rajoute : « cela a aidé à créer une véritable expérience multimédia avec plusieurs couches. » (Tracey) Don Sinclair a aussi décrit cette collaboration interdisciplinaire comme « communiquant à travers différents moyens et modes durant le processus » ce qui procura au projet différentes « couches de connaissance ». Lors de sa conversation avec Andra McCartney, ils ont insisté sur le fait que les danseuses apportèrent une compréhension incarnée à la marche sonore et au processus de création, un type de connaissance avec lequel ils étaient peu familiers : « cela m’a rendue aussi attentive à la partie « marche » de la marche sonore qu’à celle de l’écoute, sur laquelle j’avais porté plus d’attention dans le passé, étant donné que j’étais issue du milieu de l’écologie sonore. » (Andra) Elle a aussi décrit comment cette collaboration avec des danseuses l’a aidé à prendre conscience des mouvements de chœur du groupe lors d’autres marches sonores qu’elle a guidées et à mieux transférer le contrôle de la marche, en suivant simplement ces impulsions en provenance du groupe.

La façon dont les danseuses engageaient physiquement leur corps dans une exploration commune de la marche a jeté l’ébauche d’une partition pour la performance. Les répétitions ont organisé les souvenirs des mouvements de chœur et des mouvements individuels explorés lors de la marche, générant une structure pour une performance improvisée. À travers notre échange, Jesse s’est rappelée avoir trouvé une lourde poignée de métal durant la marche, qui produisait un son qu’elle affectionnait particulièrement et avec lequel elle a beaucoup joué durant la performance. Les corps des danseuses communiquaient à travers leurs mouvements leurs souvenirs du paysage et de l’environnement sonore de la marche. Dans une conversation publiée en ligne sur le site de The Dance Current[1], Bee Pallomina (une autre danseuse qui a participé à ce projet de SI) décrit sa méthode de création pour une performance subséquente comme essayant de « se mouvoir comme un paysage, et non comme soi. » Peut-être que son expérience d’utilisation de la marche sonore comme processus créatif pour la performance-installation a nourri sa compréhension du concept de «  se mouvoir comme un paysage ». Ses intérêts artistiques démontrent sans aucun doute une affinité avec le travail produit pour Soundwalking Interactions.

À travers leur danse, les danseuses ont perpétué le souvenir du paysage et de l’environnement sonore de la marche et l’espace qu’elles ont ainsi créé fut à nouveau transformé par les projections qui remixaient leur mouvements lors de la performance-installation. Toute performance peut-elle être considérée comme la mémoire remixée d’un processus de création et de ses répétitions? Les traces de créations précédentes survivant à travers les performances subséquentes remixent elles-aussi, d’une certaine façon, ces souvenirs. Bien que les récits de souvenirs des performances soient considérées comme étant partiaux, une fois rassemblés ils peuvent apporter une perspective plus large sur les restes durables des performances et sur l’influence complexe des collaborations sur le travail artistique.

Lien vers les autres entrées sur la performance-installation de Dance Dramaturgy:

https://soundwalkinginteractions.wordpress.com/category/dance/

Pour plus d’information sur le travail des participants:

Andra McCartney:

http://coms.concordia.ca/faculty/mccartney.html

Don Sinclair:

http://www.yorku.ca/dws/research-creative.html

Tracey Norman:

http://traceynorman.com/home.html https://vimeo.com/92143980

Jesse Dell:

http://jessedell.com

http://www.jddance.ca

https://www.youtube.com/user/jessedell

Bee Pallomina:

http://www.thedancecurrent.com/review/understory-understory

[1]Voir Bee Pallomina sur sa performance The Understory: http://www.thedancecurrent.com/review/understory-understory

Balade Montreal Equinox Soundwalk

On the evening of March 21, the Soundwalking Interactions group got together for one final soundwalk—Balade Montreal Equinox Soundwalk—following four years of consistent soundwalks and post-walk discussions. The walk began at St. Laurent metro station (corner of St. Laurent and Boul. de Maisonneuve) and headed south towards the Palais de Congres and China Town. The route was not planned in advance and took roughly forty-five minutes to complete. I led the soundwalk, accompanied by three participants, through a series of interior spaces, busy sidewalks and alleyways.

The excursion was one of the most dynamic soundwalks that I have ever participated in. In part, this can be attributed to the location of the walk which transitioned through many borders within the city: namely, the Old Port, downtown and China Town. Liminal (or transitional) zones typically have vibrant sensory ecologies, often resulting in chaotic and competing sensory encounters. Andra McCartney has previously written on this site about the concept of econtonality vis-à-vis sounding environments and listening. This concept is particularly useful when mobilized in relation to urban sounds. As she writes:

The ecotone is a marginal zone, a transitional area where species from adjacent ecosystems interact. Some species in an ecotone are from neither ecosystem but thrive here and do not live elsewhere, because of the rich possibilities contained in such regions, which have characteristics of more than one ecosytem. Beaches and the edges between forests and grassland are both examples of ecotones, or the stratified fresh and salt waters of the confluence where river meets sea.

It is also worth noting that the dynamic intensity of the soundwalk came not only from a range of intermittent loud and softer bursts of sound, but also from temperature changes, gusts of wind, and a mixing of pungent smells dispersed throughout the walk. One of the larger objectives of this project is to better understand how sensory experiences such as touch and smell connect to hearing and various ways of listening during soundwalks. This particular part of Montreal, at this point in the year, seems to provide an ideal site for considering questions at the intersection of listening, walking and sensory experience. Additionally, this is a layered area of the city, with the Autoroute Ville-Marie running just below the sidewalks and with many entryways to Montreal’s Underground City—the more than 30 km network of tunnels, corridors and commercial spaces located below the downtown core of the city. This layering heightened the complexity of the walk given that while traversing along the sidewalks there were sounds coming from above and below.

The post-walk discussion took place in a restaurant in China Town. We opened with a conversation detailing some of the ways in which moving in a group of four while using recording equipment affects other pedestrian encounters. One listener noticed that we seemed to draw attention to ourselves as we moved through the Palais de Congres. Another participant remembered the way we altered people’s conversations as we passed by.

Michael Langiewicz, one of the recordists, recounted his experience of recording a group of skateboarders–which are heavily featured in the audio-visual piece below–and some of the phase issues he encountered while recording them.

Andra talked about how wind is often the most difficult element to deal with when making soundwalking recordings (and/or recording outside).

Another listener mentioned that he was surprised to find quietness in many of the alleyways near the Autoroute.

One of the participants discussed walking by the aftermath of an accident and how he was unable to record anything of note as the area was eerily quiet. Andra mentioned how we walked through an accident scene in Mile End on a previous soundwalk and felt that the experience was characterized by a “weird silence.”

Ben discussed how cinematic the walking experience felt, especially when magnified by recording.

The audio-visual soundscape piece below derives from three distinct soundwalk recordings by Ben Cardilli, Michael Langiewicz and Andrew Willson. Each recordist took a different forty-five minute route after they moved away from the St. Laurent metro station. I cut the recordings into 20 to 60 second fragments and then edited them together using quick cross-fades. Ben’s recording is panned all the way to the left; Andrew’s is to the right; and Michael’s is directly in the middle with the volume level slightly lowered. All three of the recordings play out at the same time throughout the piece.