Performances
August 11-13, 2006
WEEKEND PASS $18 (performances only)/ $35 (performances plus 3 return ferry passes)
To order weekend passes please complete this form (PDF) and return to naisa@naisa.ca.

ARTIST & WEEKEND PASS-HOLDER RECEPTION
August 12 2006 begins at 1:30pm
with SOUNDwalk and Guerilla sound art performances
beginning at Ward's Island Ferry Dock

Note: this reception is open only to the Sound Travels artists and to weekend pass-holders.

A wine and cheese reception for the artists and weekend pass-holders where artists get the chance to meet each other and share their perspectives and interests.

The Power of Space
(co-produced with Contact Contemporary Music)
also part of soundaXis festival
June 10, 2006

If one person could ever symbolize the meeting point between the trajectories of music, architecture and acoustics it would be Iannis Xenakis. Among his complex and varied life as an engineer, a mathematician, an architect, and a composer, Xenakis also created electroacoustic music that influenced or anticipated the thinking behind some of Canada's leading artists in that field, namely Barry Truax and Paul Dolden.

In the spirit of Xenakis' work with Le Corbusier on the Philips Pavillion for the Brussels World Fair in 1959, New Adventures in Sound Art will unveil for the public for the first time a new spatialization system designed by its artistic director Darren Copeland.

This new system will expand from the automated 8-channel system NAISA has used since 1998 to a 16 channel system that will include a sensor controller for real time physical control of how the sound moves in space, spatialization automatation and sequencing software, and a loudspeaker support structure from which speakers will be mounted around and above the audience.

The concert program will be presented in partnership with Contact Contemporary Music and will feature members of its ensemble performing a new commissioned work by Wende Bartley, along with loud and thunderous performances of Michael Gordon's Industry and Xenakis's percussion work Psappha. New Adventures in Sound Art will round out the program with Barry Truax's recent work Shaman's Ascent and Paul Dolden's seminal work Below the Walls of Jericho. After the concert there will be a late night screening of Xenakis's architectural and electroacoustic work Legard D'Eer, which was created for the opening of the Pompedieu Centre in Paris.

Guerilla Sound Events
August 11th,12th & 13th@ 6:30pm & August 12th & 13th @ 1:30pm
These guerilla performances will happen on Centre and Ward's Island during
SOUNDwalks that begin on Ward's Island where the ferry dock lands
Directed by Peter Hatch with a number of guest artists.
Works by Peter Hatch, Debashis Sinha, Nilan Perera, Julia Male & Emily Law

Guerilla Sound Events are short 'spontaneous' performance art pieces that draw attention to the contemporary urban soundscape. While often humorous in nature, they also bring attention to both the noise and recognizable 'soundmarks' of urban life, calling for a more active role in shaping our urban soundscapes. Sound Travels 2006 will feature Guerilla Sound Events by Peter Hatch and four Toronto emerging artists.

The Foggiest Idea
for solo tuba
by Peter Hatch (2004)

In seaside settings, the fog horn is used in dense fog to warn ships of nearby land. Their lonesome call also serves to remind people of the nearby wide-open ocean and can provide an eerie presence to a fog-ensconsced city. This short work for tuba, with its fog horn call repeated at 30 second intervals, provides a mournful song which seems echoes the often lonesome, isolating aspects of city life.

Sunglasses for the Ears
For any number of people dispensing ear-plugs
by Peter Hatch (2004)

As a society our ears are subjected to ever increasing amounts of noise pollution.
An insidious effect of this noise is the stress it adds to our lives, which can lead to numerous ailments and partial deafness. It is in the interest of both protecting your hearing and decreasing your stress levels that these ear-plugs are offered to you as ‘sunglasses for the ears’. In the same way sunglasses are used to to protect your eyes, ear-plugs can be used to reduce the ‘harsh glare’ of noisy environments – in airplanes, on the highway, near loud machinery (including lawn mowers and leaf blowers), at large sports events, rock concerts and in clubs.

Hyper(retro)action
For a highly distracted individual sounding a ‘backup beep’.
by Peter Hatch (2005)

iPods and MP3 players are a regular fixture amongst increasing numbers of urbanites. While empowering individuals with some degree of control over their sound worlds, they can also disconnect them from their surroundings and from one another. Often ‘turned up to 11’, they can produce highly charged and distracted individuals whose presence perhaps heeds a warning.

Cell Life
for four operatic singers with cell phones
by Peter Hatch (2005)

Within public settings, cell phones and their users can produce curious situations. Cell phone users are aurally connected in an intimate way to someone completely removed from the caller’s immediate environment; this environment may consist of a large crowd of people, which the caller often ignores. The combination of aural and social connection/disconnection can create interesting and often strange juxtapositions, as intimate details are announced publicly but obliviously.

Tandemtwo
For a singing couple riding a bicycle built for two
by Peter Hatch (2006)

Refuges within the harsh environment of cities, city parks, with their more open and relatively quiet aural and visual environments, allow for more contemplative thought and the chance for more intimate human contact. Nevertheless, the incessant din of the city is never far away. Building on this theme, ‘Tandemtwo’ presents a short operatic ‘park scene’ humourously dealing with love’s passions and toils, drawing on the Harry Dacre’s well known tune ‘Bicycle Built for Two’.

Car(ry)ing Play
For a woman pushing a baby carriage
by Peter Hatch (2006)

For children, a park playground symbolizes freedom, a place to make noise. This freedom, however, relies on the nearby and ever watchful parent/guardian, who ensures their safety and protection in a context fraught with potential danger. This short piece features a mother ‘tuned in’ to the sounds of children emanating from her baby carriage.

Kolkata Garden
by Debashis Sinha

"kolkata garden" is a sound environment which re-contextualizes the angry urban sprawl of that great and desparate city. Listeners reinterpret their preconceived notions of urban sound by moving through a space in which small memories and clouds of sound float by.

Light and Sound concert
August 11, 2006 8pm / $5 at the door
St. Andrew by-the-Lake church, Toronto Island

A musical interplay between sound and silence and darkness and light using the extremes of sonic and visual perception, the Friday night Sound Travels concert will include the multi-media work beshadowed by Bernhard Gal for Flute, cello, light and sound projection as well as the world premiere of Darren Copeland's Let Me Out. This concert will be followed by an artist Q&A with Peter Hatch, Darren Copeland and Bernhard Gal.

Performance Notes
for LIGHT AND SOUND CONCERT

"beshadowed"
by Bernhard Gal
For Flute, Violoncello, Sound- and Light projection

except here
About the shadowy omnipresence of future and past, the foreshadowing and the repeating.Within this 34 minutes long composition, 15 time windows of light and sound emerge. Acoustic instruments dissolve overshadowed by electronic sounds, performers (re-) appear as shadows of the spotlight. Musical shadings in an interplay of development and repetition, improvisation as the shadow play of composition. - Bernhard Gal, March 2002

"Let Me Out"
by Darren Copeland

Going about everyday business is sometimes harder then we like to acknowledge. This is a piece for the subconscious. For the delusions that drift through our thoughts as we move from one place to the next... from a hallway to a subway platform, to the subway turnstiles to the street outside. This is a piece for all those crazy urges that we get when we feel smothered by a small space or overwhelmed by a large space. Sometimes we want to scream "Let me Out... Now!! " This piece should not give anyone nightmares of these rather ordinary spaces and places that invite delusion. It is a celebration of the artist, the madman, or the dreamer, within us all.

Special thanks to Charlie Fox for the recording of the empty corridors of the University of Regina during the summer break of 2004 and for Barry Prophet recording with me similar spaces at the University of Toronto in February 2006. Also a special mention is in order to Sebastian Schafer whose wonderful vocal recordings made for the companion piece to this work "i dont want to be inside me anymore" and for use in this piece as source material and to Birger Sellin's great insight into the autistic mind, an influential book to this work and to other works I have made in the past. Finally, a gracious thanks to Elisabeth Zimmerman and everyone at the fabulous Kunstradio program in Vienna, Austria for making this piece possible as well as the Canada Council for the Arts, media section.

Multi-channel Concert
August 12, 2005 8pm / $5 at the door
St. Andrew by-the-Lake church, Toronto Island

This multi-channel concert will explore the beautiful natural acoustics of St. Andrew-by-the-Lake Church with a new 12-channel surround system designed by artistic director Darren Copeland that features the physical control over the movement of sound above and around the audience. Works featured include Masques et Parades by Stéphane Roy, Denis Smalley's Wind Chimes, John Young's Virtual, a selection from Clear Dawn for tape and Japanese Shoh performed by Toronto-based sound artist Sarah Peebles, the soundscape work "Addy en el país de las frutas y los chunches" by Francisco López and brief candle by the software programmer of the new system Ben Thigpen.

Programme Notes
to MULTI-CHANNEL CONCERT

"brief candle" (2005)
by Ben Thigpen

To the sparrows...

Some things are hurrying into existence, and others are hurrying out of it; and of that which is coming into existence, part is already extinguished. Motions and changes are continually renewing the infinite duration of ages. In this flowing stream, then, on which there is no abiding, what is there of the things that hurry by on which a man would set a high price? It would be just as if a man should fall in love with one of the sparrows that fly by, when it has already passed out of sight. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (II.17, VI.15)

"brief candle" was composed during an artist's residency at Djerassi (California), then at SCRIME (Bordeaux), then at home (Paris), and finally at La Kitchen (Paris).

Most of the sounds were created through spectral and temporal transformations in SuperVP, controlled by programs I wrote in OpenMusic. Other sounds were generated by programs I wrote in Max/MSP. The 6-channel spatialization is based on variable phase relations of independent point sources.

Many thanks to Christian Eloy, Mikhail Malt, Régis Renouard-Larivière, Thierry Codys, and all the team at Djerassi. Comissioned by the French Ministry of Culture and by SCRIME.

"Masques et parades" (2000-03)
by Stéphane Roy
Exultation; Burlesque; Noir silence [Black Silence]

(sound excerpt on www.electrocd.com)
The tragi-comic nature of the circus is the lifeblood of this work. The circus provides a marvelous metaphor to bring together irrationality and drama, jubilation and self-control: a show spiced up with extreme moments and paradoxical quests where celebration and tragedy hold hands. Following this example, Masques et parades (Masks and Parades) stages the opposite dimensions of introspection and mask, sides hidden and revealed, darkness and light, drama and derision.

The work consists of three sections titled Exultation, Burlesque and Noir silence (Black Silence). The lively, euphoric, even brotherly mood of Exultation contrasts sharply with the grotesque feel and irrational, iconoclastic nature of Burlesque. Noir silence, the last section, draws its inspiration from the art of trapeze, metaphor of the compensatory work done by our psychological mechanisms in answer to the destabilizing assaults of a troubling world out of which one must make sense.

"Masques et parades" was realized between 2000 and 2003 at the composer’s studio in St Louis (Missouri, USA) and later in Montréal and was premiered on 22 March 2003 as part of the Rien à voir (13) concert series presented by Réseaux at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. The composer’s writings are recited by Claudine Jomphe and Stéphane Roy. Masques et parades was realized with the help of a productive scholarship from the Canada Council for the Arts. [English translation: François Couture]

"Wind Chimes"
by Denis Smalley

(sound excerpt on www.electrocd.com )

The main sound source for Wind Chimes is a set of ceramic chimes found in a pottery during a visit to New Zealand in 1984. It was not so much the ringing pitches which were attractive but rather the bright, gritty, rich, almost metallic qualities of a single struck pipe or a pair of scraped pipes. These qualities proved a very fruitful basis for many transformations which prised apart and reconstituted their interior spectral design. Taking a single sound source and getting as much out of it as possible has always been one of my key methods for developing sonic coherence in a piece. Not that the listener is supposed to or can always recognize the source, but in this case the source is audible in its natural state near the beginning of the piece, and that ceramic quality is never far away throughout. Eventually, complementary materials were gathered in as the piece’s sound-families began to expand, among them a bass drum, very high metallic Japanese wind chimes, resonant metal bars, interior piano sounds, and some digital synthesis. The piece is centered on strong attacking gestures, types of real and imaginary physical motion (spinning, rotating objects, resonances which sound as if scraped or bowed, for example), contrasted with layered, more spacious, sustained textures whose poignant dips hint at a certain melancholy.

Wind Chimes was composed in the Electroacoustic Music Studio of the University of East Anglia (UK) in 1987, with computer sound transformations carried out on the digital system of Studio 123 of the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) in Paris (France) in 1986. It was premiered during the Electric Weekend at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in September, 1987. This piece was first released in 1990 on the Computer Music Current #5 compact disc on the Wergo label (WER 2025-2). Wind Chimes was commissioned by the South Bank Centre, London (UK).

"Virtual"
by John Young

(sound excerpt on www.electrocd.com )

Virtual attempts to convey the idea of an illusory soundscape set in vibrant motion by the wind—an invisible and capricious source of energy for the ‘virtual’ objects in the space, the exact nature of which we are left to imagine. This idea extended partly out of my fascination with the process of making field recordings in the natural environment, where the wind is typically regarded as a pervasive and problematic intruder. But, in fact, the wind is often a part of the sonic signature of a place (especially in the notoriously windy city I was living in when I composed this piece). So I set out to record wind ‘noise’ trying to take advantage of the very active stereo play it produces across a pair of microphones (just as it does across our ear canals). Other sound identities were designed around this idea, mostly derived from turbulent air streams and tube resonances. I also attempted to give some of these complex sound shapes something of the spectral coloration of human vocal resonance, in an attempt to set up a sense of inanimate sounds taking on more animate behavior. Linked to this are some characteristic patterns of spatial morphology within which these sounds evolve and transform.

"Virtual" was realized in 1997 in the Electroacoustic Music Studios of Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) and premiered there on April 24, 1997. The work was awarded an honorary mention in the 1997 Prix Ars Electronica (Austria), Special Mention in the Prix international Noroit-Léonce Petitot (Arras, France, 1997) and pre-selected in the 1997 Bourges International Competition for electroacoustic music.

"Addy en el país de las frutas y los chunches" (1997)
by Francisco López

“Addy en el país de las frutas y los chunches” elevates environmental sound recording to a dramatic level and transcends Lopez’s usual association with ambient music. Dark, and multi-layered, “Addy en el país de las frutas y los chunches” is dramatic both in structure and effect.

"Clear Dawn: Meditations from Paparoa and Kapiti Island" Part 1 (July, 2005)
by Sarah Peebles
for tape and Japanese Shoh performed by Toronto-based sound artist Sarah Peebles

“Clear Dawn” was inspired by my experiences recording birds in Aotearoa/New Zealand 2004-2005, and in coming together with a wide variety of people whom I met along the way. A traditional Mäori concept shared with me by Gary Millan in Paraparaumu - near Kapiti Island, one of the recording sites - seemed to reflect the essence of my experience while spending focused, long periods of time on the land while recording or in just being. It roughly translates into English as “that which is just beyond our perception”. This idea is a part of The Mäori legend identifying three concepts of knowledge contained in Ngä kete o te Wänanga (Baskets of Knowledge). As I explored and transformed my field recordings into new sonic expressions, I was inspired by this concept and also by the poems “The Long Dream of Waking” and “A Short Dream of Waking”, penned in 1948 by New Zealand artist Leonard Charles Huia Lye.

“Clear Dawn” features transformations of birds I recorded at or near dawn in Paparoa National Park (South Island West coast) and at Kapiti Island (North Island West coast), and, of bees gathered atop and inside glass jugs as recorded from inside the vessels - their wings vibrating against the glass, causing the containers to ring at their resonant frequencies - recorded with the assistance of Frank Lindsay at Lindsay’s Apiaries, near Wellington. Additionally, de-tuned and digitally processed shoh (Japanese mouth-organ) is elemental to the piece both sonically and conceptually. An instrument of mysterious and ethereal beauty, the shoh has historically been associated in ancient China and Japan as embodying the Phoenix (an auspicious mythical bird) in form and sound, and is still used today in Japan where, among other things, it accompanies deities in their journey to and from the spirit world during Shinto ceremonies. Underpinning these sounds are modulated frogs, recorded at dusk in Singapore while returning to Canada, and processed train sounds en route from Toronto to Montréal. Structurally, this work is a combination of pre-determined, carefully constructed materials, of chance operations involving libraries of sampled sound chosen and mixed by computer via simple algorithms, and of fairly long stretches of ambient recordings of habitat.

“Clear Dawn” was commissioned by “RPM” for Radio New Zealand. Matthew Leonard, producer. Many thanks to Matthew Leonard, Radio New Zealand, Dean Hapeta/Te Kupu and family, Kirsten Hapeta and Gary Millan, John and Sue Barrett, Veronica Meduna, Phil Dadson, Richard Nunns, Brent Clough, Ted Philips, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

THE LONG DREAM OF WAKING

Of thinking no length
I stand now in a long dream of doing
I stood then in a short dream of knowing
It was I black, sun white, sea silk with sky.
I stand now in that new day on the world
Up out of its water
Its light through my teeth,
My solid eyes dreaming
My mind steeped in sheen;
I stand now on its horizon,
My shadow its centre
In the waters of sun.

A SHORT DREAM OF KNOWING

In the long dream of waking
Of thinking no length
I stand now in a long dream of doing
I stood then in a short dream of knowing
It was I black
Sun white
Sea soaked with sky
I stood still in that new day on the world
Up out of its water
Its light through my teeth
My wakened eyes dreaming
My mind steeped in sheen
I know now an endless horizon
My shadow its centre
In the waters of the sun.

© Len Lye, 1947
With kind permission of the Len Lye Foundation.

OUTDOOR SITE-SPECIFIC performance

"A TREE IN THE MIDDLE"
by Carey Dodge
for percussion, horn, violin/electronics, double bass and computer
August 13, 2006 3pm / $5 at the door (begins inside church)
St. Andrew by-the-Lake church, Toronto Island

Tree in The Middle is a performance about music in motion. Set around a tree on Toronto Island, the audience joins the musicians on a playful journey through an exploration of moving music and sound.