Audio Artist / Media Studies professor Robin Davies will be at CVAG to offer an artist talk and a day of knowledge sharing + training.
Registered participants, please bring: laptops installed with Audacity (click here to download), headphones, recording device, and external storage.
This is a free workshop. Donations are gratefully accepted.
THURSDAY May 12
- 6PM – 9PM – Audio Workshop – SOUNDWAVES – in CVAG’s Lower Level Studio – for registered participants
FRIDAY May 13
- 9AM – 4PM – Audio Workshop – at CVAG – for registered participants
Workshop
ORAL + AURAL
How do oral—and more importantly aural—techniques open up creative and pedagogical pathways for artists and audiences? Though ours is a visual culture, we hear in far higher resolution than we see. Sound therefore lends itself to layering, and the detailed collage of editing. Sound can immerse and transplant the listener. Sound is a shortcut to memory. We can close our eyes, but sound is inescapable.
Voices are important. We hear meaning in the delivery, in the emotion, interaction, immediacy and intimacy, in the pauses, the false starts, the thought processes made audible.
Auralization takes us beyond the voices. Auralization is about augmenting a spoken text, doodling in the margins, painting in the background, highlighting words and phrases, and every now and then choosing a really big font.
Bring your laptop, running Audacity (click here to download), and your headphones. Bring any texts, written or recorded, which you might like to use as a starting point for experimentation.
We will consider how to approach the dimension of sound when we create our work, and also when we promote our projects in environments suited to aural possibilities: podcasts, radio, galleries, video and the web.
Audio production has its own grammar—rules and best practices like writing does. This workshop will include a crash course in audio recording to help ensure voices and other elements sound their best.
Biography
Robin Davies teaches in the Media Studies Department at Vancouver Island University. He studied Double Bass and Music Technology at McGill’s Schulich School of Music. His interests include the utilization of the human voice in auditory storytelling, sound design for visual art, the construction and use of software-based musical instruments for live electronic music performance, and helping others embrace technology for use in their creative endeavours.
In high-school Robin helped found the Liberation Symphony, whose performances often featured him playing his bass with a screwdriver; also at that time Robin jammed weekly with free jazz saxophonist Eric Stach. While at McGill, Robin curated and performed in numerous concerts by the Group of the Electronic Music Studio ensemble. From 1985 to 2004 he was a regular member of Cathedral choirs in London (the Canadian one) and Montreal. This diverse background of music making-with an emphasis on experimentation, improvisation and collaboration-informs the content of all his compositions.
Robin’s sound design and remix work can be heard on releases from six records, maple music, ad noiseam, Phoenicia Publishing, and Sunchaser Pictures, and under the alias chaonaut on SoundCloud. He currently composes and performs as part of the multimedia collective Meridian.
SOUNDWAVES is part of the RETURN TO WATER FESTIVAL – a series of arts-based events and presentations that bring the community together to explore issues related to perceptions of water, use of water, the human relationship to water, the climate’s effect on water, and the concept of water as a “living entity”. From May 12 – 14, 2022, daily events will instigate interdisciplinary and cross-cultural considerations of water and its significance through visual art, photography, video, sound, interactive media, texts, performance, music, dance, and song.