ellen waterman Ellen Waterman

Carleton University

Ellen Waterman is Professor and Helmut Kallmann Chair for Music in Canada at Carleton University. Previously she taught at Memorial University of Newfoundland where she was IICSI site coordinator. She is both a music scholar and a flutist specializing in creative improvisation. Her interdisciplinary research interests range across improvisation, contemporary performance, gender, sound and ecology. With Gillian Siddall, she is co-editor of Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound and Subjectivity (Duke 2016). Her books on acoustic ecology and sound art include The Art of Immersive Soundscapes (with Pauline Minevich, 2013) and Sonic Geography Imagined and Remembered(2002).  She is a member of ~spin~ duo (with James Harley) exploring the intersections between acoustic/electro-acoustic performance and real time multi-channel sound diffusion. Their multi-channel recording Like a ragged flock…was released in 2015 (Canadian Music Centre and iTunes). Ellen is founding co-editor of the online, peer-reviewed journal Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation. With Rob Jackson, she developed the Improvisation Tool Kit at www.improvcommunity.ca drawing together information from several community-engaged projects to create a free resource for teaching improvisation. Ellen is site coordinator for IICSI-MUN which offers annual activities including a postdoctoral fellowship, a public speaker series Improvising Spaces, and an improviser-in-residence program. She also participates in a multi-site research project to develop the Adaptive Use Musical Instruments (AUMI) software interface, a musical instrument that enables people who have very limited controlled (voluntary) movement to independently engage in music making. Her work on AUMI may be found at https://voices.no/index.php/voices/article/view/834/739. Ellen’s current book project is a comparative ethnography of twelve Canadian music festivals, Sounds Provocative: The Ecology of Experimental Music Performance in Canada, www.sonicecology.com.