Artist Talks

For this artist talk Glenn Hubert will share examples of his favourite nature recordings and provide background to the steps involved in making them. Choosing locations specific to the environments he wishes to record, Glenn sets out his microphones, and leaves them for several hours, up to a day or two in order to allow the birds and animals to return to their natural routines, creating a natural soundscape rarely heard by people. Over the years Glenn has developed an archival library of thousands of hours of recordings, creating sonic time stamps of wilderness areas, some of which no longer are as peaceful as they were in his early days of recording.

This talk is part of World Listening Day events that include a concert and a soundwalk on July 21.

Alexis O'Hara will speak about the role of breath in her performance of Seufzenstadt - The City of Sighs on the previous night by explaining the many non-verbal human expressions latent in breath sounds as well as how the work is connected to her long history of vocal performance.

Gestural interfaces open up the possibility to integrate a physical gesture and a sound into a musical expression in live electronic music performance. This talk by Takuto Fukuda and Ana Dall'Ara-Majek focuses on a vocabulary of musical expressions developed for blablaTrains’ concert on the previous evening (as well as others in the past) with the design of their gestural interfaces and notation system. Participants will have the opportunity to try Ana’s augmented Theremin and Takuto’s gyro-based sensor instrument in order to experience the cause-effect relationship between gestures and sound.

Sherry Ostapovich talks about listening to and recording space in the context of her most recent work, "In a Queer Time and Space," which is being performed in a concert the previous evening. She discusses motivations in creating the work, making recordings in a still functioning cement factory, and composing for an ambisonic speaker arrangement.

Elizabeth Chitty has been active as an interdisciplinary artist for over 40 years. She will speak about her current work, which is place-based in that the work considers a site’s geology, plants and birds, natural and built landscapes, governance including treaties, histories, and water and its infrastructure. Her work is anchored in sensing and making sense of our surroundings through bodily experience, social interactions, and simple technology. Photo: Henry Chan.

Toronto filmmaker Robert Fantinatto is the director of the internationally acclaimed documentary I Dream of Wires, which traces the history of analog modular synthesizers and their usage in both experimental and popular music. Interestingly, Robert Fantinatto became involved in analog modular synthesizer long before the making of this film and has been producing his own electronic music for some time. He will talk about his music and film-making intersect and influence each other. His talk follows the Modular Tribute concert of the previous evening.