This Sign Waves installation series will open our fifth annual Sound Travels event being held again on Toronto Island opening on July 27 and run every Sunday until August 31, 2003 (2-6 pm). Each installation will use the acoustically and visually beautiful church of St. Andrew-by-the-Lake on Centre Island. Built in 1884, St. Andrew-by-the-Lake has been restored to its original wood floors, wooden arched ceilings and stained glass windows. (location and map)

Included in the exhibition is the sound sculpture Clusterflux by Garnet Willis. The Clusterflux is similar in structure to the soundboard of a grand piano, the central spruce board sprung into a maple frame to maximize its sound amplification. Across it stretch 48 harpsichord strings spanning 4 octaves, tuned to pitches chosen to optimize their potential for sympathetic resonance. An alternating current fuels each octave, creating a magnetic field around each string. The magnets on the spruce board then attract and release the strings, causing them to vibrate, while the soundboard acts as a natural amplifier. Although electrically powered, the Clusterflux is an acoustic instrument - you hear what you see - the natural sound of wood and strings.

Also running throughout the exhibition will be a realization by Nicholas Longstaff of Alvin Lucier's piece "I am sitting in a room" using the acoustic space of St. Andrew-by-the-Lake. In this fascinating exploration of acoustical phenomena, "I am sitting in a room" slips from the domain of language to that of music in the course of 40 minutes and 32 repetitions of a simple paragraph of text. In "I am sitting in a room," several sentences of recorded speech are simultaneously played back into a room and re-recorded there many times. As the repetitive process continues, those sounds common to the original spoken statement and those implied by the structural dimensions of the room are reinforced. The others are gradually eliminated. The space acts as a filter; the speech is transformed into pure sound. All the recorded segments are spliced together in the order in which they were made and constitute the work.

Listening Gallery

The Listening Gallery will give visitors to the Sound Travels Documents photo exhibit and opportunity to listen to past performances presented during the annual Sound Travels concerts on Toronto Island. Included on the two CDs are: Paths (2003 Concert version), by David Eagle; DreamSpin by Wende Bartley; Gibraltar Point by Anne Bourne & David Gamper; Music Box Bell Curves ("Hello Paris!") by Tim Brady; No Man's Clan by Lori Freedman; The Toll by Marilyn Lerner; System Test (Fire and Ice) by Maggie Payne; The Toronto Sound Mosaic (excerpt) by Darren Copeland & Richard Windeyer; and Wind by Dirk Veulemans. The Sound Travels Documents exhibit features photography by Stefan A. Rose.

Bios

Garnet Willis is a Canadian composer, sculptor, sound designer and instrument builder. He got his first tape recorder at an early age and has been keenly interested in experimentation, combining electronics and sound ever since. Recently he has been focusing on building and exhibiting sound sculptures. His work "The Kinetoflux"- a
series of four hanging electromagnetic harps is now on permanent exhibition at the Banff Centre for the Arts. He has written many commissioned works and is a regular recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and has been a resident composer at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1994, 95, and 1998, 99. In 1996 he won the Bourges International Electroacoustic Competition prize for experimental electroacoustic music for his first electromagnetic harp " The Clusterflux." During the summer of 1999 he had two of his sound sculptures exhibited at the Aldeburgh Festival of Contemporary Music and Art in Suffolk England and in 2000, his most recent work, "Triquetraflux II" was exhibited at the Netherlands Institute of Media Art. He has had many exhibitions in Canada and has also had his works exhibited and performed in the USA, France, Mexico and Colombia. Garnet has an acute interest in composing computer music based on sounds produced by his original acoustic instruments. It was from this juncture that he started building instruments that could both compose forms and generate sounds by themselves. He also teaches audio production and runs a small digital studio, where he records, edits and masters classical and world music as well as composing for film, theatre and dance.

Nicholas Longstaff is a composer and sound designer for stage, stereo, and screen. His other activities include teaching, set design, web design, graphic design, and technical direction. Beyond these, he creates artwork in audio, video, and 2 & 3 dimensions - most recently "The I Project," an interactive installation funded by the Canada Council for the Arts & Earful Arts, in association with NAISA, presented at the Art System gallery. Nicholas just completed composing and arranging orchestral, choral and incidental music for Appleby College's production of "Romeo & Juliet". His recent theatre & film work includes Sound & Production Design for "American Buffalo" (Yucky Samson Productions & the Edinborough Theatre, London) and Music & Sound Design for "The Store" (Sudden Storm) airing on CBC, WTN, IFC Canada and an official selection of the 2002 Vancouver International Film Festival.

Alvin Lucier was born in 1931 in Nashua, New Hampshire. He attended Yale and Brandeis and spent two years in Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship. From 1962 to 1970 he taught at Brandeis, where he conducted the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus which devoted much of its time to the performance of new music. Since 1970 he has taught at Wesleyan University. In 1966, along with Robert Ashley, David Behrman and Gordon Mumma, Lucier founded the Sonic Arts Union, for whose concerts he developed numerous live electronic works, exploring echolocation, brain waves, room acoustics and the visual representation of sound. His recent works include a series of installations and works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and orchestra in which rhythmic patterns and related spatial phenomena are created by close tunings. In 2001 Lucier's "Ovals" for chamber orchestra was performed at Donaueschingen by the Hilversum Radio Orchestra and, in 2002, "Just Before Dark" was premiered in Vienna by the Soloists of the Tehran Symphony Orchestra. He recently completed "Ever Present" for flute, saxophone and piano and Almost New York, for flutist Carin Levine. He is currently working on a collaboration with sculptor Alain Kirili for baritone voice and French Horn, commissioned by Thomas Buckner.

Stefan A. Rose is a Waterloo-based photographer, poet, and video artist who studied both Engineering and Fine Arts at Mount Allison University. He works in various photographic formats and styles, in artistic and documentary forms. Stefan has collaborated with other visual artists in making limited-edition books, and taken part in numerous group and solo exhibitions. He is also documentary photographer for NUMUS concerts, Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound, and Sound Travels. In 2002 Stefan received the Equinox Emerging Artists Video Award from Ed Video Media Arts Centre. This award enabled the creation of an original video piece premiered with the performance of Annie Gosfield's composition "Flying Sparks and Heavy Machinery" during the 2003 Open Ears Festival. Stefan is presently working on a multi-disciplinary collaborative artistic documentary project called "Townsend Retraced" that examines the long-term impact of failed city planning upon a farming community, to be exhibited in 2004.

Detailed notes of the various installations:

"I am sitting in a room" by Alvin Lucier ­ realized by Nicholas Longstaff

In this fascinating exploration of acoustical phenomena, "I am sitting in a room" slips from the domain of language to that of music in the course of 40 minutes and 32 repetitions of a simple paragraph of text. In "I am sitting in a room," several sentences of recorded speech are simultaneously played back into a room and re-recorded there many times. As the repetitive process continues, those sounds common to the original spoken statement and those implied by the structural dimensions of the room are reinforced. The others are gradually eliminated. The space acts as a filter; the speech is transformed into pure sound. All the recorded segments are spliced together in the order in which they were made and constitute the work.

"I am sitting in a room" was composed in 1970 and was first performed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City that same year. A second version was made in 1972 to accompany the dance, Dune, performed by the Viola Farber Dance Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Since that time, numerous versions of this composition have been realized in various ways by other musicians, including a Swedish radio broadcast version.

Nicholas Longstaff will be realizing his own version of "I am sitting in a room" using the acoustic space of St. Andrew-by-the-Lake.

Clusterflux - Garnet Willis 1995

The Clusterflux is similar in structure to the soundboard of a grand piano, the central spruce board sprung into a maple frame to maximize its sound amplification. Across it stretch 48 harpsichord strings spanning 4 octaves, tuned to pitches chosen to optimize their potential for sympathetic resonance. An alternating current fuels each octave, creating a magnetic field around each string. The magnets on the spruce board then attract and release the strings, causing them to vibrate, while the soundboard acts as a natural amplifier. Significantly there are no loudspeakers - although electrically powered, the Clusterflux is an acoustic instrument - you hear what you see - the natural sound of wood and strings.

The strings "listen" to each other and are inclined to respond to the shifting harmonic activity around them ‹ as the strings are heated by the current passing through them, they lengthen and the pitch falls. As they cool and contract, the pitch rises. At each point during these glissandi each string has the potential to stimulate, and in turn respond
to, new frequencies produced by other strings. In the same way the Clusterflux "listens" and responds to the space around it - reacting to the ambient sounds and changes in temperature, causing developments in
it's music.

If one looks at the Clusterflux as a physical score then the large structure of the unfolding composition is predetermined by the physical structure of the instrument itself and influenced by the environmental starting conditions. Endless variations occur within this structure, governed by the natural laws of chaotic behaviour contained within the musical laws of stochastic - or constrained chance - composition.

The Clusterflux is incapable of producing predictable results. It exists in a state of flux without past or future, where the creation and destruction of the sound generation process occurs at the precise moment you hear it.

The Clusterflux was produced with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts / Media Arts section and the Banff Centre for the Arts.

"Sound Travels Documents" Photo Exhibition by Stefan Rose

"Sound Travels Documents" is an exhibition of 24 black-and-white photographs by Stefan A. Rose documenting previous Sound Travels events on Toronto Islands. Translating the original auditory experience into the visual, using visual textures and point-of-view, the images are a record of soundwalks, participants, performers, composers,
and sound installations.

The Sign Waves Companion - Information from Sign Waves 2002 at eContact.

The Sign Waves 2002 webpage

Charles Street Video is a non-profit, artist-run centre located in downtown Toronto. Its mandate is to provide media artists with opportunities for production and to foster an environment for the advancement of the media arts practise.

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