Sonic Responses invites eight musicians and one composer to respond to the changed aural conditions of UBC’s outdoor spaces. Their music making confronts and enters into a dialogue with the quiet that currently resides on campus. Responding to different locales and situations, the repertoire for Sonic Responses stretches across a broad range of traditions.

Michael Ducharme, Continutity. 12 min. 5 sec.

 
As the final instalment of the Sonic Responses series, we are pleased to present Continuity, a site-specific electro-acoustic composition by Michael Ducharme. This work draws upon and transforms sounds of the UBC campus that were gathered throughout the month of June 2020. In the following program note, Ducharme describes his creative process and the form of the piece. Markings on the map below indicate the location of where the sounds were recorded and the timings of where they occur within the composition.

“While carrying out field recordings, I was struck at first by how few people were present. I began recording in the campus’ northwestern corner and captured sounds of heavy machinery and birds, but there was very little aural evidence of human life. It felt as though I had materialized into a post-apocalyptic future, where everyone had suddenly disappeared, but everything else was as before. Throughout my journey to find recording sites, the carillon of the Ladner Clock Tower continued to sound, as a sort of  ‘old faithful’ of the university grounds. Eventually, as I made my way in a general southeast path toward the residential area of campus, there were more and more people, until finally at the Jim Taylor Park it began to feel like a relatively normal day – children playing and laughing in the playground, and adults simply enjoying the weather. My trek across campus felt as though it were a microcosm of the COVID-19 experience, with people isolating themselves for protection, leaving behind machinery and wildlife, and finally beginning to re-emerge as the threat subsided.

Continuity for fixed media explores this idea. It is divided into three sections. The first explores the sensation of being on a university campus with only the birds, the machinery, and the carillon. In this section, the only signs of human life are found through heavily processed sounds of voice and other human activities, becoming almost unrecognizable in the process. The second section explores continuity across time, reflecting on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam people where UBC stands. The piece integrates a performance of the Musqueam Paddle Song by Sempùlyan, a talented singer of Musqueam and Squamish descent.  I would like to thank Sempùlyan for granting me permission to use his performance. Reverberation has been added as a means to acknowledge Musqueam’s continuous and ongoing presence on this land from time immemorial. The final section explores the idea of people returning to the campus. To this end, it reprises many sounds of human beings from the first two sections, but this time the heavy processing is lifted and they become recognizable as human voices. The elements of birds, machinery, people and heritage of the campus land become unified.

Throughout the entire work, the carillon is a continuous aspect – sometimes more identifiable, and other times with heavy processing. It represents a sort of sonic idée fixe, being the most identifiable sound unique to UBC.”

Download a map of of the locations of all the recordings used in Continuity. [PDF 1MB]

Sonic Responses furthers the collaborations between the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the School of Music that will continue through Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts (Fall 2020). The project is led by Barbara Cole, Curator of Outdoor Art, David Metzer, Professor of Musicology and Chair of the University Art Committee, and Judith Valerie Engel, a doctoral candidate in piano performance. Sonic Responses was initiated by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in collaboration with the School of Music and supported by the British Columbia Arts Council’s Arts and Culture Resilience Supplemental Award and UBC’s Catalyzing Research Clusters Program.