Part 1: House Auditions Sunday, April 24th @ 3:30pm ******Location: Etherington House (36 University Ave)
Description: The House Band will begin its sonically-driven process with independent House Auditions. These are opportunities for band members to listen attentively and assess the historic Etherington House, which is our main collaborator in this project. In one-hour, quasi-guided sessions, bandmates will learn about the acoustic properties and behaviours of the house’s architecture by conducting close listening and doing descriptive ‘observational’ writing. I (Neven) will be present at each of these independent sessions as well, so we can use your time in the house to also discuss some of your initial ideas, curiosities or questions that you have about the scope of the activity being proposed. We can also identify any technical or logistical needs you may have in order to do what you want to do as a bandmate, and find ways of solving those together early on in our process. Lastly, exploring the space together, we will try to select zones of the house that you are personally interested in ultimately animating or occupying with amplified sound.
Part 2: Band Meeting Sunday, April 24th @ 5:30pm - 7:00pm Location: Outside Agnes (265 King Street East)
Description: This is a casual meeting to come together as a newly formed band, share some of the initial ideas we each have for the activity (which will be developed in our meetings in Part 1), and tackle together a very important task: coming up with a band name.
Part 3: Practice + Assembly Week Monday, April 25th - Friday, April 29th Location: Dispersed
Description: During this week, bandmates will start to practice or assemble their contribution to the House Band, either **independently or in smaller clusters with other bandmates. Throughout Practice Week, bandmates are tasked with developing and preparing the sonic texture, music theme, text, beat, utterance, collage, etc. that will ultimately occupy and play back in the architecture of the Etherington House. This week may involve you collecting field recordings, downloading sounds online, conducting audio processing, training a voice, memorising a script, rehearsing a harmony, writing a score, dusting off an old instrument, etc. I will be available throughout this week to assist bandmates in any way with technical help and logistical coordination, as needed.
Part 4: Recording + Processing Days Thursday, April 29th or Saturday, April 30th Location: Etherington House Broom
Description: Through a series of sessions over the course of two days, members of the House Band will use and occupy the Department of Film and Media’s state of the art Sound Studio. Bandmates will have the opportunity to use this space to record and produce their contribution to the House Band. While not all bandmates will need these recording + processing sessions (some of you may be able to produce your contribution at home or elsewhere, and not need any additional live recording or processing), they are an opportunity for you to make high-quality recordings of your contribution by using the sound-proof room of the Sound Studio (condusive for making vocal or instrument recordings, foley effects, staging a collaborative performance, conducting singers, etc.). These sessions are also an opportunity to do any audio processing, manipulation and mixing needed for your contribution, using the speaker system installed in the studio to hear these adjustments played back with amplification. I will be available at these sessions to give assistance on that process for those of you who need or want help on developing your contributions.
Please write to me at [email protected] if you would like to book one of the Recording + Processing sessions below to use for your contribution to the House Band.
Part 5: Collective Editing + Final Mix Session Tuesday, May 3rd @ 11:00am - 5:00pm (come by anytime) Location: Etherington House @ Isabel Bader Centre (390 King Street West)
Description: This important group session will ideally involve all band members engaging in a ‘collective editing’ process. Using the 6-channel speaker array in the Sound Studio, we will be able to hear all of our sounds interacting in a simultaneous, distributed and spatialised amplification set up. In the surround sound of the studio, we will be able to start to ‘organise’ our sound as a shared architecture or ecology. We will discuss and actively apply movement to each of our sonic contributions, imagining their migration in the studio from one speaker to the next as eventually moving from one site to the next within the architecture of the Etherington House. Bandmates will discuss and experience the effect of their contribution coexisting with other bandmates, and through this start to produce agreements about sharing time, trading places, coming together, clashing, isolating or dispersing. The ultimate aim of this session will be to commit our sounds to set of movements, densities, amplitudes and mode of polyphonic address. The resulting Final Mix from this session will then be installed in the home in Part 6, when we will transpose the experience of the mix in the studio’s surround sound setup to a set of powered speakers embedded in the historic home, playing back our collectively-edited soundscape.
Part 6: Loading In May 3rd, 10:00am - 4:30pm (drop by anytime) Location: Etherington House (36 University Ave)
Description: Throughout this day, the House Band will have access to the Etherington House during its closed hours to ‘load in’ and install our soundscape. Our speakers will be embedded in various parts of the home, and cables will be run from a main audio interface to nodes of amplification in the architecture of the home. Bandmates are encouraged to drop by whenever they can throughout the day to assist with installation or to experience the collectively-edited soundscape (produced together in Part 5) playing back through the historic house, and hearing it interact with the home’s unique materiality and sonic properties. The resulting embedded soundscape will play on loop for one full week during Agnes Ehterington’s gallery hours, and will close out the A guest + a Host = a Ghost exhibition!