Gordon Monahan: When it Rains
the Children's Museum

When It Rains is an interactive-automated-sound-sculpture-environment, consisting of a set of home-made sound-making instruments. Pre-programmed musical sequences play on an ensemble of kinetic sound sculptures. These sequences are triggered by data input from viewers. The data is processed through a computerized-random-decision-making-process that determines which sequences are played and how many sequences are layered upon each other.

At the centre of the kinetic instruments are two ‘Tilting Instruments’ that consist of metal tubes in which ball bearings roll up and down, as in a ‘rainstick’ (a traditional South American instrument). The tubes are balanced at their fulcrum point and will tilt back and forth intermittently as weights (bags of water), suspended from each end of the tubes, fluctuate. The rolling of ball bearings inside the metal tubes is indeterminately-controlled by the dripping of water out of the water-bags that are in balanced suspension from the end of each tube. The drips fall on amplified percussive instruments (metal and wood based objects) in rhythmic patterns; the choice of patterns is determined by the interactive midi-data received by the computer. An element of suspense arises as we await the tilting actions, and as with a scale, the tilting instruments symbolise comparative processes.

These tilting instruments, combined with metal sheets and amplified piano strings, will produce a montage of sound imagery that stimulates the listener to examine the question of ‘opposites’ and ‘contradictions’ in sound and musical phenomena. The central compositional concern is to use the ‘primitive sounds’ (e.g. water dropping on amplified metal, etc.) to imitate ‘technological sounds’ (e.g. electronic samplers imitating natural sounds) that are not present in the installation but whose acoustic images reside in the perceptual memory of the modern listener.

Gordon Monahan is a Canadian artist now living in Germany. His works for piano, loudspeakers, video, kinetic sculpture, and computer-controlled sound environments span various genres from avant-garde concert music to multi-media installation and sound art. His interest in “hi- and low-tech” and “high and low culture” led him to collaborate with Laura Kikauka and Bastiaan Maris in establishing The Glowing Pickle in Berlin (1993-95), an electronic surplus store using 20 tons of discarded East German scientific equipment, parodying both communist and capitalist cultures.

As a composer and sound artist, he juxtaposes the quantitative and qualitative aspects of natural acoustical phenomena with elements of media technology, environment, architecture, popular culture, and live performance.

Laura Kavanaugh and Ian Birse

Laura Kavanaugh and Ian Birse have been collaborating since 1997 on projects involving improvised and composed audio/video in immersive environments. In performance their audio work uses live sampling, mic and mixer feedback, voice, contact pickups, and effects. Their video work focuses on the real time transformation of recently shot and edited footage. For Open Ears, Laura Kavanaugh and Ian Birse present daily studio performances using locally gathered audio and video material.

In 1998 a tour was organized that took them to eastern Canada and New York, and in 2000 they traveled to Cambridge and London for performances and collaborative work. The fall of 2001 was spent performing in Canada and eastern Europe. In late 2002 they performed at festivals in Montreal, Spain, and Hungary, and were a part of a team of 18 international artists exploring the theme 'open source, open art' at the _backup festival in Weimar, Germany. A highlight of the tour was a netart project called SPLICE created for the Interfiction colloquium at the Kassel Documentary Festival of Film and New Media. After Open Ears Laura and Ian travel to Victoriaville for a performance at FIMAV 2003.

To see/hear clips of past work visit <http://members.shaw.ca/kbduo/>

Darren Copeland: Stream of Whispers

Charles Street Video commissioned Streams of Whispers in October 2001 for the stairwell of the Latvian House as part of the Tranz-Tech Festival.  The idea of the octaphonic sound installation was to think of the stairwell as a place of migration or transition, or perhaps more figuratively like a current of water through which particles of sound flow as if they were salmon escaping the ocean. The version at Open Ears uses the horizontal plane for sound movement rather than the vertical plane used in the stairwell. The sound material is all derived from vocal phonemes of the title.

The Soundscape Carillon serves as a public timepiece for Kitchener City Hall during the Open Ears Festival. The Soundscape Carillon fuses the bell sounds of the Carillon found in the psychiatric clinic in downtown Kitchener with common everyday sounds from the remote past and immediate present. A total of eight audio miniatures are programmed to move spatially at every quarter-hour amongst the eight loudspeakers positioned in a circle around the Rotunda of City Hall.

Darren Copeland is a soundscape composer, radio artist, sound designer and concert producer. He has studied electroacoustic composition under Barry Truax (Simon Fraser University) and Dr. Jonty Harrison (University of Birmingham). His concert works have received mentions in competitions and appeared on compilation CD releases. Rendu Visible, a CD devoted to his work, is available on the empreintes DIGITALes label. In addition to composing, he has written articles about listening and environmental sounds is the artistic director for New Adventures in Sound Art, a Toronto-based producer of international experimental and sound art performances, residencies, and festivals.

Scott Willson: Müllmusik
Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (stairwell)

Müllmusik (literally 'garbage music') is derived from discarded and reused data. Materials such as audio and images from news and other websites, corporate logos, the components of various operating systems and programming languages, and donations from composers and soundartists of unused material, were all converted and recycled as sound. Processing methods specific to the original data types were reinterpreted as ways of processing audio. For instance, in the section Photo Shopped Music sound was converted to image, processed using imaging software and then converted back to sound. Similarly, image files were manipulated before conversion in order to produce sonic variants. The process of conversion was not a conscious mapping of parameter to parameter (i.e. image position to pitch, etc.). Instead, I accepted the data raw, as a rough material in which to mine for sounds beautiful, ugly and inconclusive. The results are seemingly arbitrary, noisy, but also unique, containing traces of their previous structure. The origins of the final sounds are not necessarily apparent, so when to hide them, when to hint, and when to reveal became an engaging, if ‘extra-musical’ concern.

The video is naturally enough derived from the source materials for the sound: images, texts, visualized sounds. Its creation has involved a similar process of searching within, looking for arbitrary beauty, ugliness, noise, and meaning.

Scott Wilson (1969-) was born in Vancouver, Canada, and is a composer and performer who has worked in a variety of genres, including music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, dance, film, tape, and interactive computer systems. He has studied in Canada and the United States, and his teachers have included Barry Truax, Owen Underhill, Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier, and Ron Kuivila. His works have been presented internationally, with notable performances in France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada. His work Come to me from Krete…won first prize in the Godfrey Ridout Category of the 1999 SOCAN Competition. He was a founding member of the new music group Ensemble Symposium, and is a past president of Vancouver Pro Musica. In 2000/2001 he was a guest artist at the Institute for Music and Acoustics at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, and toured several countries in Europe giving performances of his electroacoustic work Müllmusik. He currently lives in Toronto.

Musicworks' Audio-Art Show
Walper Terrace Hotel Art Gallery, May 3-11

The year 2003 will mark the 25th anniversary of the first issue of Musicworks Magazine, which since 1978 has been exploring the sound art practices of concert music, electroacoustics, improvisation, world musics, sound sculpture, unusual tuning systems, etc.

To celebrate their milestone, Musicworks is presenting an Audio-Art Show. This project will showcase 25 audio samples from their musical archives along with graphic scores and information about the artists and composers, and historical information about Musicworks Magazine and the Canadian new music community. Visitors will have the opportunity to listen to a recording at any of the 25 listening stations (with a CD walkman) as well as being able to read the score and background information on the artist/group. Also available will be booklets containing more information on the tracks, artists, and entire Musicworks show.

The excerpts will represent some of the gamut of sound activity found in Musicworks, including music of the Inuit, Maritime fiddle music, sound poetry, electroacoustics, experimental film music, radio art and music for balloons.

Rover
anywhere, any time...

ROVER is guerilla audio spun from a collaboration between composers Richard Windeyer and Cam McKittrick, Fox Force Five's Katie Shulist and local fashion designer Maite Retamales.