This is a short excerpt from The Absent Listener series of pieces by Darren Copeland.  This version is outputted from the early stages of an automated soundscape composition generator currently being developed by Darren Copeland.  The recordings were made with 2 DPA omni lav mics in a stereo boundary configuration and placed on a third floor balcony about 30 feet up from ground level. This location was chosen so that the soundscapes of daybreak could be livestreamed for the annual Reveil broadcasts that happen every year on the first weekend in May.  

At the beginning of this excerpt you will hear a barred owl and the spring peeps from around 4 am and then at 2:07 the segment shifts to around 7 am where you will hear a wide variety of morning northern birds, including drumming from the Pileated Woodpecker and the Roughed Grouse.

The accompanying picture is the view from the recording location. Notice the snow still on the ground as the location in Central Ontario (Canada) was still in the spring melt stage at that time of the year - evident in the dripping eaves and the soft hum of the furnace audible in the second half of the segment.

For information on The Absent Listener project go to: http://www.darrencopeland.net/web2/?p=563

AbsentListener - May 2 2020

Rights of the Child is a radio art piece commissioned by Réseaux des Arts Médiatiques for a webcast in December 2009. The piece is structured around the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child. The idea of the piece originated in a residency the composer did with Theatre Direct Canada at Kent Senior Public School in Toronto called Letters to Africa. The residency took inspiration from the book Our Stories, Our Songs: African Children Talk About AIDS by Deborah Ellis.


Rights of the Child

Lapse in Perception is a text-sound composition about the challenge of understanding complex sensory phenomena in the everyday world.

Typically attention paid to everyday situations is quite superficial. While walking down the street one is quite happy to know that there are a row of shops on the right, vehicle traffic to the left, and the odd pedestrian passing by. Any more information begins to take the mind away from apparently more important matters. I wonder how much relationship there is between tuning out the external information in this way and our general neglect of the natural environment.

There is an element in this work that portrays what happens to something when its presence is neglected. This element is represented by the word "lap" and repeats frequently followed by a number that increases sequentially from one to fourteen. Each time the phrase appears it loses more of its intelligibility and assumes a strident pure-tone character. This process of textual obliteration illustrates the recession of clarity in our acoustic environment due to indifference and actions guided by self-interest.

The physical environment is a complex phenomenon, as is the make up of human personalities. The many layers that make up a person or a physical environment are combined every moment in a day through a complex network of interconnecting and contradictory patterns. Ignoring this complexity is to walk away from the beautiful contradictions and intricacies of life and reduce experience to mere surface impressions.

Lapse in Perception was composed in 1998-99 for the radio program Out Front on CBC Radio One. Special thanks to Judy McAlpine for her feedback and support throughout the process, to the Geneva Centre in Toronto for their assistance with research into the topic of autism, and to Mike Ladd for his invaluable recording contributions on Ward's Island in Toronto.


Lapse in Perception

““Absent Near Dawn” is based on recordings that happened within one hour before or after daybreak. They are arranged in a chronological sequence of recordings that happened approximately every 4 to 6 weeks between December 2021 and June 2022. All of the recordings retain their original character, pitch, speed and spatial imaging. Multiple recordings are overlapped throughout the piece. The piece was premiered for multichannel concert presentation in April 2023 at the Ear Sound Scape series in Copenhagen and Malmö.

Absent Near Dawn” is part of “The Absent Listener” series of soundscapes pieces, which are all derived from continuous soundscape recordings made on a 14-acre rural residential property in Northern Ontario Canada. The property has mixed forests with a variety of maple, white pine, cedar, spruce, tamarack and birch trees. It borders on a lake, and a creek, and has a mixture of rocky and swampy terrain. It is also 20 KM from a highway. This distance limits the road noise audible in the soundscape to only local vehicle traffic. 

The recordings are made continuously and unsupervised save for battery changes and maintenance visits every two days. This is done so that the presence of the recordist has as little influence as possible on the sound-making of people, animals and insects. Recordings are made with a pair of DPA 4060 lavalier omni-directional microphones mounted in a boundary configuration that are occasionally augmented with an Aquarian Audio hydrophone and/or LOM geophone.

Absent Near Dawn

Snow Plow, Tree Pops and Logging Truck - March 23, 2025

Cricket soundscape in the tall grass at Warbler's Roost in South River, Ontario recorded by Darren Copeland with MEMS ultrasonic microphone array.  

The left channel is an unaltered recording of the environment, the right channel is transposed in real time by passing the signal through a Raspberry PI and Wolfson audio card with software written in CSound by Hector Centeno.  

For technical reasons the two channels had to be recorded at different times (immediately after each other) but what is noteworthy is the layers of cricket sound in the transposed right channel that are not audible in the other channel. 

Ultrasonic Crickets - Recorded by Darren Copeland

The Absent Listener is a series of pieces derived exclusively from long duration soundscape recordings made at my home, a rural property 22 KM west of the village of South River, Ontario, Canada.

This 45-minute piece in the series is based on recordings made through the month of February in 2019. It was composed for a winter solstice performance on December 21, 2019 at the Dispersion Lab, York University in Toronto. Other works in the series focus on recordings from the same location but during other periods of the same year.

February is a time where there is minimal human presence within earshot of my home. The recordings ran unattended anywhere from 24 to 120 hours. I approached the recording process in this way so that my presence has a recordist had as little influence as possible on anything that might be heard in the recordings. Also, it was a way for me to keep listening to the soundscape of a rural property that was important to me while circumstances in my life were causing me to spend a lot of time away from it.

The recording equipment was setup in a way that it did not draw attention to itself, while also remaining protected from water. I mounted two DPA 4060 miniature omni-directional microphones on either side of a sheet of plywood and then in most cases clamped that plywood under the overhang of a small out-building. This building was located behind my house and convenient for access to a protected area with electrical power and WIFI for live streaming the recordings on locusonus.org.

The recording location was among pine, birch and cedar trees that were 
roughly 1000 feet from the shore of Deer Lake. The area is inhabited mostly by woodpeckers, ravens, rabbits, chickadees and red squirrels. Other sounds like wind, sleet and rain, as well as the cracking from trees and built structures reflect the shifts in winter temperatures that happened in 2019 through the month of February.

The piece follows the chronological order of the recordings and often layers four or more of them recorded from the same hour, which in multi-channel concert performances are distributed spatially throughout the venue. Recordings were selected for the piece and edited and organized to evoke a sense of the natural rhythms and nuances of the events that unfold when I am not present.

Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts whose funding allowed for the recording system to be built and this composition to be made.

Absent Listener

Absent Listener - February 2019

The Absent Listener is a series of pieces derived exclusively from long duration soundscape recordings made outdoors at my home, a rural property 22 KM west of the village of South River, Ontario, Canada.  The recordings were made unattended, which means that once the recording button was pressed I left the location of the recording only to return every 12 to 14 hours to change the battery.

This 60-minute piece is the second one composed in the series and it is derived from a continuous soundscape recording between March 16 and 18, 2020, which was close to the start of the COVID-19 social distancing measures in my area.  This piece follows a previous 45-minute piece in the series which is based on outdoor recordings from February 2019 at my home.  If my location of the recordings were in an urban setting then the difference in the soundscape would be more pronounced then it is between these two pieces.  The difference in my case has more to do with seasonal changes between mid-winter and late-winter as well as the slight difference in location of the microphones with this piece being located at the shoreline rather than 1000 feet uphill from the shoreline.

The circumstances for composing the two pieces was also different.  The first piece was composed for a multichannel sound system which had the advantage of distributing in space several recordings playing at the same time. With the second piece made for no particular occasion, and during the social distancing measures, the assumed audience member would - at least theoretically - be listening in isolation on headphones or a personal stereo system.

With that in mind I chose to make the experience more intimate and spare by avoiding any obvious layering of content.  Instead I focused on sequencing together singular moments.   It was an interesting period of three days as the weather shifted from high winds, to rain, and then to freezing cold temperatures with periods of sunshine and snow.    Through all of this the ice on the lake was in the process of thawing and then freezing again making these distinctive low frequency “whoop” sounds at different periods.  Bird life was also more apparent in this piece with woodpeckers, blue jays and chickadees all coming to visit the microphone and inspect it up close at different times.

The recording equipment for this piece used the same two DPA 4060 miniature omni-directional microphones separated by a boundary.  The mics were about four feet from shore under some trees. The stereo recordings are used in this piece with very minimal signal processing for equalization. The piece follows the chronological order of the recordings. Recordings were selected and arranged to evoke a sense of the natural rhythms and nuances of events as they unfold without my presence.

Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts whose funding allowed for the recording system to be built and this composition to be made.

The Absent Listener

Absent Listener - March 2020

A remix for Harvestworks' Tellus Tools remix project. All 16 samples kindly made available by Harvestworks from the Tellus cassette magazine were chopped, shuffled and blended using Kenaxis software. The results of which were mixed in Reaper with spatial imaging applied from Daniel Courville's Ambisonic plug-in suite.

Ear of Plenty

Realization of a text score by Anne-F Jacques for Art's Birthday 2021. The text score required one to use a take out coffee cup and lid over top of a microphone or portable audio recorder - in a sense, taking the place of a contact microphone. I didn't have a paper coffee cup on hand so I used a portable coffee thermos.  The last part of the score asks to open the window or door, allowing some outside sound in.  However, the day of the recording the sound ambience was very quiet - mid-winter in the country.  So this last part is difficult to discern other than the playing of the objects is captured through air transmission rather than through the material of an object such as coffee thermos.

Realization of Anne-F Jacques' "Piece for objects found in the Street"

Darren Copeland is a Canadian sound artist who has been active since 1985 and lives outside the village of South River (Ontario). His work encompasses multichannel spatialization for live performance, fixed media composition, soundscape composition, radio art and sound installations.

His fixed-media compositions have explored both abstract and referential sound materials. Many of these works are released on the empreintes DIGITALes label. His radio art works engage in the associative qualities of environmental sounds in relation to spoken text and have been commissioned and presented by public radio broadcasters in Canada, the US and Europe. His sound installations include gallery and sited works which examine the relationship of sound and place, including Sound Columns (2011) co-created with Andreas Kahre, and Copeland’s installation Expanded Listening (2014).

Darren Copeland founded New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) in 2001. The organization established the NAISA North Media Arts Centre in South River in January 2017 after operating in Toronto for 16 years. The organization presents year round programming that include installations, radio and multichannel concert presentations, artist talks and workshops.

Copeland’s work with NAISA has included his development of multichannel spatialization systems that began in 1999 with the Richmond Sound Design Audiobox and Third Monk Software’s ABControl, and in 2006, a performance-oriented system using the Polhemus Patriot as a gestural controller along with customized software by Benjamin Thigpen.

Darren Copeland is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre (CMC). He has served on the board of directors for the Canadian Association for Sound Ecology (CASE), the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC), Vancouver Pro Musica, and Rumble Productions. He holds degrees from University of Birmingham (England, UK) and Simon Fraser University (British Columbia, Canada).

Darren Copeland

Popular tracks