MUSIC AND SOUND DESIGN

As a percussionist I've always been keenly centered on sound. The tangibility of sound in all it's shapes, it's textures, coaxing new sounds out of familiar and found materials.  Over the past few years my work shifted more and more into shaping sound in the digital domain, working on remote and hybrid projects, multi-media works and collaborations for music, dance and theatre.

In my work, I'm interested in exploring and creating with source material of field recordings, found-sound, percussion, electro-acoustic processing, and digital synthesis.

EXAMPLES

AND WITH - sound design

My partner Germaine Liu and I were commissioned by The Bentway Toronto, to create And With for their 2022 'The Street' summer season to invite participants to activate their listening and engage with the streets together in creative new ways. The piece featured the Imaginary Percussion Ensemble and the Element Choir activating the voices of everyday structures, objects, and spaces by tapping into the physical potential of materials along the walk; the clang of metal, the crinkling of plastic, the hollow boom of concrete, echoing the roar of traffic, construction, and people who activate these spaces on a day-to-day basis to amplify and transmute the soundscape of the street.

Coexisting and traveling with the performers was a multi-channel mobile sound installation that I designed featuring field recordings, and echos of improvisations from in and around The Bentway site.  An immersive, binaural stereo version of the soundscape also lived online for the duration of the season in the form of a treasure hunt-like map, allowing people to trace the path of the performance and listen in to specific sounding locations along the route on their own devices.

photo: Shane Parent

DANCE WORKS BY SYREETA HECTOR - music and sound design

Since 2020, I've been working with Toronto based dancer and choreographer Syreeta Hector developing music and sound design for solo and ensemble works, Black Ballerina, From the Top (Mocean Dance, Halifax) and Beast a La Mode (Pro Arte Danza).  From evoking surreal underwater whale choruses, to driving electronic glitch beats there is always a heartfelt, compelling, complex story to support and weave exciting sounds through and around in Syreeta's works.