Walk, bus, metro, a new soundtrack
There to Hear is the first “music-route” I ever created. Inspired by the concepts of the “soundwalk” and the “audio walk”, I developed the “music-route” to emphasize musicality in multiple modes of transportation. A music-route is a meta-composition where the movements and trajectory of a listener, the environments the listener moves through, and the sounds carried by the listener all converge in context-dependent and site-specific ways in the constitution of the composition.
I created There to Hear entirely through the manipulation of field-recordings of a specific public transit route in the city of Montreal. The resulting 42-minute musical composition comes into contact with its origins as participants listen to the piece on an mp3 player while travelling along the route from which the field-recordings were made. The route is comprised of 3 transportation movements – walking, taking the bus, and taking the metro – that roughly correspond to three movements in the musical composition. The sounds used to create each movement of the musical composition were recorded during the corresponding movement of the route. However, as listeners travel along the route chance occurrences, such as a bus arriving 3 minutes earlier or later, result in an infinite variety of ways in which the music and the route combine.
Another one of my projects, Verdun Music-Route, provides an example of a geo-located and interactive “music-route” where participants re-mix the music in real-time through their movements.
Year: 2010
Role: Artist/Composer
