If you missed Tales from the Road Part 1, check it out here.

We left Thursday afternoon, four music/sound geeks packed in a car together for the next 6 hours. While the conversation started off on fairly mundane stuff about our everyday lives, once it got dark and we got tired of playing word-games the discussion turned towards our mutual (yet still fairly different) appreciation of music, sound, and noise.

Michael Palumbo, a former music promoter from Toronto, currently enrolled in the Electro-Acoustic Studies program at Concordia, never ceases to offer me new and interesting ways of understanding sound and noise, and our discussion of sympathetic vibrations seemed to me to provide a perfect metaphor for this road-trip experience:

Noun

sympathetic vibration (plural sympathetic vibrations)

- The vibration of a body, at its natural frequency, in response to that of a neighbouring one having that frequency; resonance.

- I.e. a vibration produced by one body sets off the vibration of neighbouring objects tuned to the same frequency. Think about striking a tuning fork next to a piano – the sound vibrations set off by the fork will make piano strings of the same frequency vibrate, with no physical intervention other than the soundwaves from the tuning fork.

By the end of our road trip Sunday night, we were all vibrating in sympathy with each other, all on the same wave lengths, a unique entity formed through our close proximity and shared experiences throughout the weekend.

As we hummed down the 401, our discussion took on a variety of themes, most related to our mutual appreciation for sound. With the gender balance of two women and two men in the car, one of the more interesting conversations revolved around speculation as to why women are underrepresented in the sound engineering profession (specifically) and the music industry (in general). Lately I’ve been pondering gender balance in the music industry, after reading a bit about how, historically, women who wished to studying classical music or professional music performance tended to be channelled towards “female-appropriate” areas such as vocals, piano, and strings. While this tendency is clearly changing (and changing rapidly), the fact remains that certain instruments, genres, or styles of performance are heavily slanted towards the male. I have experienced this first hand, as an elementary-school student who fought fairly hard to be granted the option of playing drums in the school music program – and then to be taken seriously as a drummer. A number of times I was recognized for my rhythmic talents – but sometimes this recognition included a qualifier: “She’s really good – for a girl.”

In the music industry women still tend to be channelled into “female-friendly” genres such as vocal jazz, folk-music, or singer-songwriter. Male-dominated genres such as rock or hip hop are still struggling to accomodate women – and part of the problem here is that the rock ‘posture’, and the ‘hip-hop’ attitude tend to be gendered male: aggressive, brazen, loud and proud. With women in our culture generally taught to be gentle, discreet and restrained, these are genres within which women must work extra hard to make their mark. I mean, when was the last time you heard of an all-girl metal band? Add to this the double burden of professional representation: female solo performers in the realm of popular music (until fairly recently) usually have had a much harder time in the industry, surrounding themselves with male figures such as managers who exert fierce control over the career choices that artist or performer makes. The professional music industry is still heavily balanced towards the male end of the spectrum. While performers such as Madonna or Lady Gaga can command high fees for their concerts, they are still a minority.

With all this historical context behind women’s presence in the professional music world, it should then be hardly surprising that not many young ladies consider sound-engineering as a career option. The engineering professions are still largely dominated by males, and sound-engineering is no exception. The highly technical skills required for mastery of production techniques are skills traditionally attractive to males. But women are just as capable of understanding and excelling at these skills as are men. Why the continued gender disparity? Why don’t women tinker with phase distortion pedals and sound-boards as much as their male counterparts do? The answer is probably pretty complex, but I would suggest that the historical factors are hugely important. Young girls don’t have many female role models in this area, and don’t see themselves behind the consoles at venues presenting live music. Instead, they see women vocalists fronting the band, strumming a guitar, or sitting behind a piano. If more women got involved in fiddling with noise-emitting gadgets, if more women installed themselves behind the drum kit, or were major players in engineering and sound recording, we might finally see many more young girls interested in pursuing careers in these areas.

It is perhaps ironic that while we were having this conversation, we were grooving to “Whokill”, the fantastic new record from tUnE-yArDs, aka. Merrill Garbus. Garbus is a former theatre student who began playing around with audio recording techniques when her parents bought her a Sony ICD-TK digital voice recorder and  Dell laptop. With help from the free audio-software program Audacity, she began recording melodies, sounds, and lyrics, layering samples on top of each other, building up a unique musical style of her own. “Whokill”, her second album, is a fantastic example of a modern female approach to sound & music.

I first heard tUnE-yArDs on CBC’s “Q” with Jian Gomeshi, and was astounded by the eclectic live performance of “Yes Yes You”, which you can watch here.  I highly recommend you check out the album, as well as this informative article from the New Yorker. To get a sense of tUnE-yArDs sound and style, check out this video for “Bizness”.

.

So much great music was heard during our trip, including the performance which was the raison-d’etre of our trip in the first place: Sacred Balance’s EP release party at El Mocambo. But this blog post is already running a little long, so I think I”ll leave it till tomorrow. In that next post I’ll give my review of Sacred Balance’s show, as well as more discussions from my road-trip, including a rant about the Juno Awards and a bit about my discussion with my cousin Christina, who is studying music at the University of Toronto.

Until then, stay tuned!

This weekend I’m taking a road trip to Toronto for a friends’ CD release party. I’ll be spending five hours in a car with three lovely sound people: enthno-musicologist, music therapist and fellow blogger Gloria Lipski, Pouya Hamidi a recording engineer and pianist for Sacred Balance, and Michael Palumbo, for whom I don’t have a specific title but he’s a guitarist studying something to do with sound and performance at Concordia University. I have no idea what kinds of conversations we’ll be having to pass the time, but I have absolutely no doubt that they will be awesome.

We’re all heading to Ontario to help Pouya celebrate the release of Sacred Balance’s self-titled, independently produced EP, and I’m super stoked. He’s a very talented fellow, and his band-mates are too. I’ll blog about Saturday’s show (and our road-trip conversations) once I’m back in Montréal. In the meantime, please do check out the band’s website, where you can listen to some of their compositions. And if you happen to be in Toronto, you should come out to the show (at El Mocambo)! Hope to see you there!

Sacred Balance

.

It’s true. Language issues aside, there is no single factor in Quebec’s soundscape that is more definitive than the sound of ringing church bells. Yet, while you can hear these ringing relics on any Sunday morning across the province, more and more Quebec’s bells seem to toll the erosion of religious practice here, rather than celebrating the population’s rootedness in Catholicism.

"Bell repairman Daniel Desormiers examines the clapper on one of the bells at Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs in Montréal on Dec. 14" Photo credit: Peter McCabe for the Globe & Mail

Still, regardless of the fact that parish pews may seem sadly empty these days, the church bell remains an intensely rich symbol of this province’s material and cultural heritage. Over the next few weeks I’ll be exploring the history of bells – both in general and in terms of Quebec – with a series of posts dedicated to those beautiful ring-ding-ding-dong-bing-bong-bells.

Most of what I’ll be talking about comes by way of two sources: Alain Corbin’s classic study of sound and meaning in France, Village Bells: Sound & Meaning in 19th Century French Countryside (1998) and a more recent work by Quebec visual artist François Mathieu, Les cloches d’église du Québec, sujets de culture (2010).

In today’s post I’ll talk a little about Corbin’s views on bells as structuring factors in village life, especially in terms of their role as markers of time, place, and community. Upcoming posts will deal with some of the general history of bells, Montréal’s bells, and hopefully also carillons. As you may have guessed by now, it’s a complex subject. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more written on this subject, especially in terms of Quebec. But I digress.

Corbin’s Village Bells is widely acknowledged as a masterwork on the aural history of bells, which he reveals as complex markers of time, place, and community, aural signals that structured the daily habitus (or habits) of French villagers. Take, for example, the roll of the bell as a marker of time. Before the advent of clocks (our modern time-pieces) the ringing of the church bell would have been the only regular auditory signal of the passage of time, what Corbin describes as “the temporal architecture of life”. This particular way of marking the passage of time has a very different ‘feel’ to it from our modern habits of clock-watching. Corbin describes the difference as essentially one between qualitative time (bells) vs. quantitative time (clocks). Here the peal of bells mark out sacred or meaningful moments throughout the year, the week, or the day. As the bell is rooted in space, up in the church bell-tower, it helps create a sense of time as rooted and immobile. As Corbin puts it:

“Listening to a bell conjurs up a space that is by its nature slow, prone to conserve what lies within it, and redolent of a world in which walking was the chief mode of locomotion. Such a sound is attuned to the quiet tread of a peasant.”

.
Compare the slow, steady sound of a ringing church bell to the constant and precise ticking of a clock. Clocks conjure a sense of speed, a sense of consumption of a limited number of temporal units. The passage of time slowly came to be marked by public clocks in municipal buildings or private homes, and eventually available to all individuals through the pocketwatch and wristwatch. This change in the ‘temporal architecture’ of life points to a shift from the communal and spiritual sense of time as infinate, toward a de-sacralized sense of time as linear and quantitative, something to be consumed by the individual.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Lets go back to that time before clocks, when the sound of church bells are still the pre-eminant authorities marking the passage of time. I said at the start of this discussion that Corbin’s book describes the role of bells in structuring time, but bells also bear a relationship to the structuring of space and community.

The churches in France (and Quebec) were the authoritative centres of their towns and villages. The bell, calling to worship all the members of the parish community, was thus an aural signal of territorial identity. As Corbin writes:

“Whatever degree of religious fervor of the local population, the church served to define a small space at the very heart of the village that was generally respected. From this center of padded silence emanated the sound waves that extended their “sacralizing” hold over an aerial space undisturbed by any other din.”

Bells were meant to be audible everywhere within the bounds of the community, and it was important that no part of the territory remain deaf to the messages being rung by the bells. Indeed, it is no accident that bells are positioned at the tops of towers – from these heights, the soundwaves could travel further, thus reaching more distant ears. There was also a correlation between the loudness of a bell and the extent of a parish’s territory (something I’ll come back to when I post about Montréal’s bells). It was important that everyone in the community be able to hear the church bell (at least until the advent of the 20^th century), since the sound of church bells ringing were the authoritative auditory signals of daily life.

Bells were mighty messengers, capable of conveying quite a selection of messages: aside from marking out time, peals could be meant as public announcements such as a marrage or death; they could raise the alarm in the event of fire or invasion; they could command citizens to prayer or mass; they could sound a signal to guide wayfallen travelers through heavy snows or fog; or perhaps even summon angels, or ward away demon spirits.

The supernatural powers of bells slowly eroded with the coming of the Enlightenment and the ascendence of scientific rationalism – a process which undermined the authority of the Catholic Church, and the church’s bells. But this is something I’ll talk about in my next bell post, which will cover some of the general history of bells in France, Germany, Quebec, Canada, and the United States. So stay tuned for that, as well as later on some more stuff about the bells of Montréal.

[As a curious aside: when I Googled "angel bells" I found a website that still subscribes to the idea of bells having supernatural powers: Guardian Bell sells protective bells to motorcyclists. In the website's words: "...by attaching a small bell onto your bike, ...Evil Road Spirits will become trapped inside the bell where the constant ringing drives them insane, making them lose their grip until they fall to the ground." Huh...]

The London Sound Survey, a great website chalk full of sounds from England’s capitol, including music, field recordings, historical radio broadcasts, sound maps, and more. A person could spend hours exploring and listening to the myriad sounds collected here. Kudos to the people who put this together. It’s a real treasure for those of us interested in historical soundscapes.

I’ve added it to my blogroll.

Speaking of historical soundscapes… I’ll be working on the bell posts today, and the first should appear very soon. I swear.

- KJ

PS: Since I didn’t offer much info here (preferring just to send you over to the LSS to see it for yourself), you might be interested in checking out EAR ROOM’s very informative post about the London Sound Survey. the website’s content, the project’s origins, and how people can contribute their own audio recordings of London’s soundscape.

A few weeks ago I promised to post some thoughts on bells, which will be coming soon, especially as I spent most of the weekend with François Mathieu’s book Les cloches d’église du Québec (The churchbells of Quebec). There’s tons to say about bells, in this province as well as globally, so I might have to break it down into a series of posts over a few days.

Mathieu’s book also led me to the discovery of a fantastic expression of Québécois music/performance, Walter Boudreau’s Symphonie du millénaire (Millennium Symphony), which was performed in June 2000 in the public square at St. Joseph’s Oratory here in Montréal. Since this performance involved over 2000 hand-bells, pre-recorded clips of some of Montréal’s most famous bells, the Oratory’s carillon, and two firetrucks (!), I’ll probably use the performance piece as a wrap-up of the bell thread. So stay tuned for that!

Meanwhile I’m also knee-deep in some old books about the legendary Québec singer song-writer Robert Charlebois, so I’ll probably post some stuff about him and his path-breaking approach to ‘underground’ rock in the 1960s & 70s.

But just so you don’t go away empty handed today, here’s a classic (and accessible) track from Charlebois, to whet your appetites: “Les ailes d’un ange”, with it’s great sing-a-long chorus: “1-2-3-4-5-6-7 Québec!!” and sprinkling of english/franglais/joual, typical of Montréalers. Enjoy!

This month I had a hard time choosing which of three original January episodes to feature. Should I go with “School of Rock”, which featured my conversations with Scott Rutherford about the global sixties? Or “Nature’s Way”, which was my musical reflection on the changing nature of the environmental movement? Or “Turn on Tune in Trip out?” a rollicking interview about drugs and drug culture with retired Queen’s professor Geoff Smith?

It was a hard choice, but in the end I decided to go with the latter – my interview with Geoff Smith. So smoke em if you’ve got em, and if you don’t, that’s fine too. But don’t miss this episode – it was one of my most memorable moments from my time at CFRC. Check it out!

Episode 19: Turn On Tune In Trip Out

Geoff Smith, the inspired, admired, and presently retired prof. of History @ Queen’s joins me in the studio for talk and music around drugs, drug culture, and the politics of addiction. A wild & crazy time is had by all!
(Aired Jan. 31/10)

Recently a friend turned me on to this article about ‘disappeared’ sounds – sounds that were ubiquitous in our recent history, but which sound foreign and strange to youngsters today, i.e. a generation growing up with a soundscape radically different from that of their parents or grandparents.

What I Still Hear, a short article by Robert Krulwich of NPR (National Public Radio), reminds us that the advent of the digital age has resulted in a wholesale replacement of analog noises. Take, for example, the sound of a telephone. When you dial your cell phone, the beeping you might hear is a pretty far cry from the click-whirrrrr that characterized rotary phone service.

Krulwich argues that these differences are important, because they are the sounds conjured by our imaginations when we talk, when we tell stories, or when we make music. If our aural reference points are different between age groups, what can this mean for inter-generational communications?

Its an intriguing question for which I have no answer. But it warrants exploration. A fine place to start might be this list of disappeared sounds: 11 Sounds That Your Kids Have Probably Never Heard. I’m old enough to have heard all these, even if the technologies they represent belong to a much older generation. I still listen to records, have a rotary phone at the cottage, and long ago wrote elementary school assignments with a manual typewriter. And the gas-station bell? It still exists at some of the country filling-stations I’ve frequented as a motorcycle rider. The bing! bing! of the air-hose alarm-system somehow always makes me smile.

The sound of bells, whether in gas-stations or church steeples, is something that has been a part of our human soundscape for quite some time. In the next few days I’ll be working on a post all about bells – so stay tuned!

- KJ

Its been a busy but wonderful holiday break for me, so I havn’t been able to post as often as I would have liked to. But I’m back, and this means more sounds @ Kaleidophonic!

I spent Christmas in Ottawa, where we were lucky to get a white Christmas. With climate change, the possibility of white Christmases grows less and less likely each year. But yesterday I got a lift back to Montreal, through a snow-storm, so it looks like winter has finally settled in. You know what this means: time for more sounds of winter!

Special thanks to Bobad for this one: Montreal’s Beau Dommage perform “Chinatown” (circa 1974-5), a nice number about snowfall in Montreal. The video for this one is another great nostalgia trip back in time – look for the wood-panelled station wagon.

.

Hope you’re all having safe and happy holidays. Posts might continue to be sporadic until early into the New Year, but don’t drift too far out of broadcast range!

Cheers,
KJ

Hey all, I thought I’d following up on my last post about thinking through the Occupy movement as a sonic amplification of dissent.

The good people over at Sounding Out! have also been thinking about how sound-studies can help us understand and explore the Occupy movement.

Important caveat: while I think there are important differences between the Canadian context within which I live and work and the American perspective heard in Sounding Out!, I think that this movement is inherently global and that therefore dialogue between all Occupy groups is essential. I know that the movement here in Canada must continue to distinguish itself from its counterpart in other parts of the world, but I havn’t seen much in the way of sonic perspectives on Canada’s Occupy movement, so for now all I can offer are some thoughts from our friends south of the border.

I’ll start with Gina Arnold’s piece on the sound of drum circles at Occupy Wallstreet. She talks a bit about the contested nature of the drum circle as the ‘sound’ of Occupy, then moves into an interesting history of drum circles in general, back to indigenous musical practices. Arguing that drum circles in America have become curiously ‘whitened’, this article is a great look into the sonic expressions of race, and also serves as a reality check for a movement that (in Canada at least) sometimes seems to take its white privilege for granted.

I should add, however, that while Arnold’s piece does a good job of tracing the Afro-Latin roots of drum circles it somehow leaves out Native drum circles. A curious (and perhaps revealing?) oversight. In Canada, support and solidarity for First Nations people has been a concern for the Occupy Movement – Canada’s aboriginal peoples have long been on the front line of the battles against aggressive capitalist resource exploitation. We need look no further than the Alberta tar sands or the current housing crisis in Attawapiskat to see that any Canadian movement that deals with environmental or social justice issues (among others) must go beyond proclamations of solidarity and actually seek to work in tandem with activists from our hugely diverse aboriginal communities. I wonder if a critical engagement with First Nations drumming traditions might be a constructive place to start?

While drumming at Occupy was Arnold’s focus, Ted Sammons tackled another icon of the Occupy movement: the People’s Microphone. If you don’t know what the People’s Microphone is, check out the vid below. Essentially its a form of call and response that grew out of a police ban on megaphones or amplifiers (i.e. using these without a permit). In action, the People’s Microphone works like this: one individual communicates to the crowd in short, precise bits of information, and this information is repeated and forwarded by the crowd. This way everyone can hear what’s being said.

.
Sammons’ article discusses traditions of call-and-response, as well as the architectural resonance of public spaces. He makes an argument that tactics such as the People’s Microphone are a way “of challenging government’s increasing control over the audible city“. This falls neatly in line with my previous Occupy post, about the movement as the amplification of dissent and a critical intervention into to the tranquilizing hum of our urban capitalist soundscapes.

The Occupy camps may have been removed or dismantled, but make no mistake: Occupy is still out there. Listen for their communications – but also listen to how they communicate. The use of communal communication techniques like drum circles and call-and-response bears an important relation to the communitarian nature of the Occupy movement.

As Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message.”

- KJ