Part of a larger sound art residency at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, this work-in-progress etude is an analysis and repurposing of sounds documented in the 140 year-old building's west stairwell. This liminal space is home to many resonances, both active and dormant. The challenge of this project was to understand a portion of the affordance of this space by activating sounds in peculiar ways. I would thump on the railings, remove transients of resonating metal, perform on a cymbal at various floor levels, and process these moments to reveal their subtle intricacies. It’s about hearing what is not often heard, and listening deeper than what is typical in a space such as this.

About the residency:

What sound does a building make? And how can these sounds be used to aid in the composition of new music? These are just a few of the questions I plan to explore throughout my residency at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre (CSAC).

To create this first composition, I chose to explore the West Stairwell. 

Between July 2024 and February 2025, I will be exploring, recording, and composing new music using this 140 year old building as my main instrument. Check the Charlotte Street Arts Centre socials often for updates on this project. 

This residency was made possible through support received from the New Brunswick Arts Board.

West Stairwell (etude)

Part of a larger sound art residency at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, this 2nd work-in-progress etude is of sounds the building hosts with a particular focus of Girls+ Rock Camp week. The idea was to document the ambiences from this camp throughout the building to use on an abstract piece that draws parallels between rock band mentorship, photosynthesis, gardens, propagation, and sewing seeds of future-sound matter. The piece represents an imagination-based cellular journey of a growing garden of sound. 

About the residency:

What sound does a building make? And how can these sounds be used to aid in the composition of new music? These are just a few of the questions I plan to explore throughout my residency at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre (CSAC).

Between July 2024 and February 2025, I will be exploring, recording, and composing new music using this 140 year old building as my main instrument. Check the Charlotte Street Arts Centre socials often for updates on this project.

This residency was made possible through support received from the New Brunswick Arts Board.

Photosynthesonic-GRC (etude)

This piece uses some recordings that I collected in the foyer at several levels. I was really interested in the resonance of speech and the way in which the diffusion in space makes it difficult to make out words that people speak from afar. With this I was inspired to revisit the research of Diana Deutsch, who works in the realm of Phantom Words and Auditory Illusions. When formant and form and closely related in time, it's possible that the brain will perceive words that are not really there. It's kind of like pareidolia for the ears.

Uncanny Foyer / Phantom Words (etude)

This piece was developed using recordings collected in the building's creaky and crackly front stairwell as well as the overhead auditorium rumblings from the Connexion ARC office. The intimate sounds of floorboards were documented by taping contact mics to the floor. I composed gestures by walking around and applying pressure to different areas around the mics, which lends the piece an essence of live performance. Room sounds were also collected using my Zoom H2n. The tonal element of the piece was built out of a computer notification sound. At one point, the subtle anomalous sound of typing can be heard as a counterpoint to the creaking floorboards.

Floorboards (etude)

Elevator Music (etude)

An etude designed with hums, drones, buzzes, and textural sounds documented all around the Charlotte Street Arts Centre building throughout December 2024. Water fountain motors, AC buzzes, bathroom hand dryers, drones of snow plows from the Xmas Eve snowfall resonating through space are but a few of the distinct recordings that make up this piece. This composition is meant to highlight the lesser noticed tones that make a space run and ensure that it remains accessible as well as habitable.

Hum (etude)

This track was designed to conclude my collection of etudes developed using field recordings collected around Charlotte Street Arts Centre. The piece is meant as a playful reflection on western temporality and tonality centring, utilizing field recordings of the A440 piano key and a small clock located in CSAC’s piano room. There’s an irony embedded in this piece that is meant to challenge  broader musical habits of tuning and time when compared to the rest of the etudes from this collection, which are composed mainly with the non-linear and unplanned environmental sounds of the building. These concepts challenging time and tone are explored through manipulation of the clock speed and regularity of tiks and toks as well as the ringing of one note, spatialized and transformed, throughout the entirety of the piece. An additional objective of this piece was to reveal the deep complexity in simple procedures. It’s amazing that a small clock and a single note on a piano can lead to so many outcomes.

Charlie Harding

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