Part of what interests me about the Lakeschore of Toronto is its liminal qualities. This area exists between the states of transport corridor, industrial zone, high-density housing & luxury condos, and nature preserve - all while the city sinks towards the lakeshore. Much like Toronto as a whole, the lakeshore seems unable to find and hold onto a single identity.
These places of transition and translation were reflected through a number of techniques I used in this piece for processing both video and audio. At the same time as exploring the strangeness of thecoastline of Toronto, I became interested in digital formats and data storage - thislead me to experiment with a number of data-bending techniques. In the first movement, the sound of the contrabass clarinet ‘opens’ a shade, revealing with each pulse. The second movement is a repetition of this slow pulse, this time reinterpreted by Ableton Live’s audio to MIDI algorithm. By setting the conversion setting to ‘harmony’, the algorithm reinterprets the harmonically rich recording of the contrabass into a series of piano chords. I ran this algorithm recursively, reinterpreting the audio produced from the MIDI information back into the audio to MIDI algorithm. The final piano part is a superposition of all of these iterations of change and translation.
For the videos - I used a similar process of superposition. By opening a video file in a hex editor and deliberately removing data from the file, the videos break in a rather unpredictable but very satisfying way. These flashing and broken visuals worked particularly well when superimposed over the original, unbroken file, with some light chroma keying so chunks of the original video are visible through the flashing of the databent version.
Overpass Music is a sonic exploration of a particular place that I became fascinated with in Toronto. A place where the Gardiner Expressway crosses over the river closest to the place I was living at the time in Toronto. In this single location, three eras of transportation infrastructure intersect. The first is Niwa’ah Onega’gaih’ih, known in English as Little Thundering Waters, or commonly by the colonial name Humber River. This river has been an important tributary for trade for thousands of years as a major route between Lake Ontario and Lake Simcoe; a gateway into Northern Ontario. Crossing over the river is the Gardiner Expressway, a classic mid-century North American urban motorway, cutting through the downtown core with the misguided automobile optimism of 1960s urban planning. Running parallel to the river, and underneath the overpass of the Gardiner, is a bike and pedestrian path - leading towards the Martin Goodman trail, a massively important piece of bicycle infrastructure in a city where travelling by bike remains dangerous in many places and is still highly politicized.
I discovered a lovely resonance under the highway and made a short field recording of the sound of cars passing over the bridge.
Using the field recordings as a baseline, I tuned my viola strings to harmonics of the resonant pitch under the bridge. I then played the recording through my viola via a transducer, recording it again, and then playing back the subsequent recording in the same way. I repeated this process ten times, sometimes improvising drones on open strings and harmonics. The final audio of this piece is all ten of these iterations, and the original recording, playing simultaneously.