Immersive Soundscape Music

This presentation will take place in person at ImprovLab, MCKN 108 at the University of Guelph. The event is free and open to everybody!

This event celebrates sound works by Andra McCartney (1955-2019) and Darren Copeland (1968-) that will be interpreted for multi-channel listening in a performance by Darren Copeland using the NAISA Spatialization System.  Thematically the pieces on the show explore movement and travel from different personal perspectives and using contrasting approaches to sound creation.

This immersive event is co-presented by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation and the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph.

More About the Event

Andra McCartney’s radio piece Learning to Walk is an experimental radio story made in 2004 about traumatic memory, love, and walking. Her piece Waiting games and widespread smoke (feat. Narcy) from 2018 is based on a train trip from Toronto to Vancouver reflecting on the widespread smoke and freight delays that structured it during the 2018 fires prevalent in Western Canada at the time.

Darren Copeland’s works on the program combine acousmatic and soundscape approaches to sound creation.  His piece …while working and walking is based on exploring his new rural home on foot back in 2015 and while cleaning up and removing old building structures. His piece On Schedule from 2003 transforms a soundscape recording from the World Soundscape Project collection at Simon Fraser University. Synthetic sounds are also generated by plotting the times of station stops on the multi-day route from London Waterloo to Moskva Byelorusski.  

More About the Composers

Andra McCartney was a sound artist, scholar and composer that led public SOUNDwalks, created gallery installations, made soundscape recordings, performances and radio works. She taught at Concordia University and published articles with Organised Sound, Leonardo Music Journal, Perspectives of New Music, Musicworks and organized the conference In and Out of the Sound Studio.

Darren Copeland is a Canadian sound artist who has been active since 1985 and currently lives on a rural property outside of South River, Ontario. His fixed-media soundscape and electroacoustic compositions are published by empreintes DIGITALes and have been premiered in concerts by Akousma Festival, The Sounds Like Festival and New Music Edmonton among many others. He is the founding and current Artistic Director for New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) in South River.

Copeland’s work with multichannel spatialization took focus with residencies in Europe and Canada from 1999 to 2001 where he facilitated the exploration of automated octaphonic spatialization using the Richmond Sound Design Audiobox and ABControl diffusion software. In 2006 he developed a performance-oriented system using the Polhemus Patriot as a gestural controller along with customized Max programming by Benjamin Thigpen. Later in 2011 he explored making spatialization an ensemble practice by adding two more spatialization performers that manually manipulate directional loudspeakers.