Rooms (2022)
This project has been completed as a part of virtual residency at at the University of Music and Performing Arts (Graz, Austria)
Parc-nature de l’Anse-à-l’Orme
The starting point of the project was the information I found about Parc-nature de l’Anse-à-l’Orme, a park located in Pierrefonds-Roxboro borough, north-west of the Montreal island. This park consists of forest, wetlands and fields, it is home to endangered species such as bobolink bird as well as many species of trees and plants.
In 2017 city of Montreal planed to develop a large condo project in the area adjustment to a park (on 185 hectares). This proposed development would not only put the existing habitat in danger, but it also threatened one of the few places in the surrounding suburbia where people could enjoy nature. Furthermore, the development would have created a risk of flooding in the surrounding areas.
Fortunately, local activists were able to bring enough attention through self-organizing and other efforts to defend this part of the park when the proposed project was made public.
When I found this information, I started to think about all the places that were proposed to be developed in order to gain more capital. I started thinking about the places and soundscapes that we’ve lost and those that we will lose in the future. Parc-nature de l’Anse-à-l’Orme is a case where people were able to come together in order to defend something that was important to the community, and this gave me hope. Through the use of spatial sound, my aim was to recreate the diversity of this unique area, which exists on the border of a highly industrial area with a highway surrounded by suburban sprawl and green park zones with a rich habitat of a variety of species.
The result of this project is a binaural assemblage of sounds that I encountered during my field recording sessions. The final work also incorporates convoluted field recordings with impulse responses of the IEM CUBE room at the University of Music and Performing Arts it will be played in.
Technical Details
This project involved field recordings of animal sounds in the Montreal area, specifically in Parc-nature de l’Anse-à-l’Orme, a site with vast biodiversity, including endangered species. The recordings were processed using spatial plugins and effects. The area was previously threatened by housing development, but activists successfully halted the project through peaceful protests and inquiries to the City of Montreal (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/anse-a-l-orme-park-conservation-1.4675638).
For this project, I used IEM ambisonic plugins (https://plugins.iem.at/) and SPARTA spatial plugins (https://leomccormack.github.io/sparta-site/) to create an assemblage of field recordings based on impulse responses from a specific room at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG). The final outcome was a 24-channel ambisonic composition presented in that same room at KUG. A stereo version of the project is available on my SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/nalobi-zrobe/parc-nature-de-lanse-a-lorme