"Ode to the Salish Sea"
by Paolo Pietropaolo, 2009

A dream-state balancing the reality of what the Strait of Georgia and Puget Sound sound like today with imagined past and future sounds of the Salish Sea. The Salish Sea is the new official name for the body of water that contains the Strait of Georgia, Puget Sound, and the many other inland saltwater bays, straits and passes of the Pacific Northwest.

"Ode to the Salish Sea" was commissioned by CBC Radio's Outfront and the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio Arts on the theme of Ecology: Water, Air, Sound, and premiered on CBC Radio across Canada on May 15, 2009 and in octophonic surround sound at the Deep Wireless Festival in Toronto, Ontario on May 29 & 30, 2009.

Ode to the Salish Sea

"The Sound and the Sea"
by Paolo Pietropaolo, 2009

In Nov 2009, the United States Board of Geographic Names voted to endorse the name Salish Sea as an official geographic name for the inland waters of the Pacific Northwest. In July 2010, the Canadian Board did the same. This is the story of the Salish Sea. 

"The Sound and the Sea" won a Silver Medal for Best Sound at the 2010 New York Festivals.

The Sound and the Sea

"Music and Mental Illness"
by Paolo Pietropaolo, 2010

The composer Robert Schumann struggled with mental illness for his entire life. This piece, part radio essay and part musical journey, examines the relationship between music and mental illness.

Music and Mental Illness

"Temporary Hearing Loss"
by Paolo Pietropaolo, 2010

I first started suffering from tinnitus about seven years ago. I’ve learned how to live with it, mostly. It usually affects me the most when I’m in a very silent environment, like somewhere in the wilderness.

Gordon Hempton is someone who knows all about very quiet places and so I thought he might have some insight into how I might learn to listen to them again despite my tinnitus. He’s a Grammy-award winning sound recordist and acoustic ecologist based in Port Angeles, WA, and he’s also the founder and caretaker of One Square Inch of silence in Washington’s Olympic National Park – the quietest place in the USA.

When we spoke, he said some very interesting things about how society is sort of suffering from a collective temporary hearing loss – and how he believes that learning how to listen again could help us take better care of the planet we live on. I mixed his words from that conversation together with some of my recordings of human and environmental sounds to create this short radio piece.

Temporary Hearing Loss

"For the Love of Cricket"
by Paolo Pietropaolo, 2011

For years now, I’ve been experiencing the onset of a slow love affair with cricket. Maybe it’s because I love puzzles (especially the cryptic kind), and here in North America, cricket is usually shrouded in mystery.  It’s viewed as baseball’s exotic, off-kilter cousin whose rules are just a bit too cryptic to figure out, thank you very much, especially if there’s a baseball game on.

As it turns out, just as with cryptic crosswords, puzzling through the rules of cricket offers great satisfaction.  Now that I have a clue what’s happening on the pitch, I can hardly tear myself away.  And the language!  Can any other sport compete with googlies, doosras, yorkers, maiden overs and ducks?

There’s a kind of poetry to cricket.  In honour of the 2011 Cricket World Cup in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, I produced this mini-doc on how I came to love the sport.

Thanks to Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons for the photo of the cricket ball.

For the Love of Cricket

I love recording things. Capturing moments in time. Working in radio is like being a photographer of sound.

Microphones are like best friends. They’re reliable. They don’t lie. They tell you exactly what happened. Who said what. How it all went down.

In 2011 on CBC Radio’s DNTO, I joined Sook-Yin Lee to tell the story of the day my mic let me down.

It happened a few years ago when I was producing a CBC summer show called Subcultures.  Host Hal Niedzviecki and I were in backcountry BC, “embedded”, I guess you could say, in the subculture of cryptozoologists – people who spend the better part of their waking hours in the pursuit of mythical creatures, like the Ogopogo or the Sasquatch (aka Bigfoot).

That morning might have been the breakthrough cryptozoologists were waiting for, because we might have nearly recorded the sound of a Sasquatch snuffling.

The Land Rover you see dangling off the side of the road in the photo is part of the story. (It was much worse than it looks in the photo. Sasquatch hunter Thomas and I were almost fish food.)

This is the rest of the story.

Of Mics and Men

If you drive through the Lower Similkameen valley in British Columbia, you can’t miss the NO NATIONAL PARK signs by the side of the highway.

There's been a proposal for a National Park in the works for nearly a decade now. Right from the beginning, the proposal ran into problems with the locals. But the locals themselves are strongly divided: many are against the park, but many (some sources indicate more) are for the park.

It’s a very complicated situation and the people involved are all very passionate about their particular point of view, whether it’s for or against the park.  I put together this report for All Points West on CBC Radio 1 in BC, giving a general overview of this story about a very beautiful and important part of the province in which I live.

The Beautiful Similkameen Valley

"The Precinct Years"
by Paolo Pietropaolo, 2001

Many years ago, I lived with two good friends in a 2nd-floor apartment in Toronto. The landlords, a young middle-aged Portuguese & Brazilian couple, lived on the ground floor. We moved in in the dead of winter. One day, come spring, we heard some yapping coming from the backyard. That's how we found out our landlords were breeding chihuahuas in their garage. They must've had 12 or 13 dogs back there.

The dogs and us had a suspicious regard for each other for the duration of our time there. They yapped at us from the backyard. We laughed at them from the balcony.

This lil' trip-hop track includes some phone messages from one of my roomies detailing certain incidents in our chihuahua adventures.

WARNING: some language may offend.

The Precinct Years

"Signal to Noise"
by Paolo Pietropaolo, 2011

This is the story of my tinnitus, which affects my ability to enjoy silence. Through the telling of the story, I've tried to create a kind of music that questions where the edge lies between signal and noise.

Tinnitus (ringing in the ear) is one of the most common medical conditions in North America. I've struggled with tinnitus since 2004. Sometimes, noise is my ally, especially at night. It’s made me think about what makes us call certain things noise, silence or music, and it’s led me to believe we’re suffering from a sort of societal tinnitus.

The original music in this story includes audio derived from everyday sounds that we think of as noise: the hum of my refrigerator, the whine of my TV, the buzz of my computer, and so on.

Featuring the voices of Gordon Hempton (sound ecologist, Grammy-award winning recordist, defender of One Square Inch of Silence) and Dr. Glynnis Tidball (my audologist, who runs the Tinnitus Clinic at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, Canada).

The creation of Signal to Noise was funded by a Sound Bank grant from In the Dark (inthedarkradio.org). Special thanks to Francesca Panetta and Nina Garthwaite.


Signal to Noise

"The Origins of Rhythm"
by Paolo Pietropaolo, 2011

Anytime I take the bus these days I notice the unsynchronized wobble of nodding heads, the arrhythmic patter of tapping feet: an outward indication that many of my fellow passengers are locked into private worlds, captive to personal soundtracks.

It’s curious that we so often listen to music as a way to block out the world, since many scientists now believe that music evolved as a way to bring humans together and to help societies function harmoniously. In The Origins of Music, biologist Walter J. Freeman makes the case that “music together with dance have co-evolved biologically and culturally to serve as a technology of social bonding.”

In some cultures, there are no separate words for “dance” and “music”. They are one and the same. That’s always rung true to me, even when swaying and otherwise reacting with my body to classical music, in overbearing concert halls, while feeling the disapproving stares of my neighbours.

I recently produced a series of documentaries about Indian music called The Subcontinental. One of the things that struck me was how much Indian music ties itself to the body with its rhythms. And dance is a big part of Indian music, from folk music like bhangra to the great classical dance traditions like Bharatnatyam, to the modern Bollywood stage.

I’ve long loved Indian music, and one of the reasons is because it always reminds me how much music is of our bodies as well as our minds.

In seeking to understand the origins of music, scientists like Freeman are analyzing the activities of our brains as we sing, dance, play or listen. (Their fascinating search inspired another documentary series called The Nerve.)

But there are other stories, old stories about the origins of music - perhaps none older than the Hindu story of the dances of Shiva and Parvati.

In this sonic exploration of the origins of rhythm, the great tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain tells that story.

I think of this piece as a “scored story”, somewhere between traditional audio storytelling, and a musical composition with lyrics. In addition to Ustad Hussain, you’ll hear the voices of filmmaker Deepa Mehta and Bollywood choreographer Shiamak Davar. As well, you’ll hear the sounds of Bollywood movie dance rehearsals led by Shiamak, and the sounds of the very first college-level Bhangra dance course offered in North America, underway right now at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University and taught by Raakhi Sinha.

Taking these words and sounds, and adding others they suggest, I’ve attempted to celebrate the importance of dance - and its implication of people moving together - to the origins of music. 

-Paolo Pietropaolo


The Origins of Rhythm

"Antiques Violin Show"
by Paolo Pietropaolo, 2010

Meet Jason Price - musical treasure hunter. He travels around North America appraising antique violins, cellos & bows. People line up for his sessions, carrying their old family heirlooms or dusty articles from their attic, hoping that he can help them strike musical gold.

Antiques Violin Show

I'm a freelance writer, broadcaster, producer and composer based in Vancouver. My audio documentary work includes the series The Wire: the Impact of Electricity on Music, which won a Peabody Award and the Prix Italia.

I currently host a classical music program on CBC Radio 2 called In Concert. Wearing other hats, I created the CBC Radio 3 Bucky Awards, played taiko in the Kiyoshi Nagata Ensemble and was cultural correspondent for CBC TV’s coverage of the 2006 Winter Olympics.

Lately I've been really excited about a new series I'm working on called The Signature Series. Check it out right here on Soundcloud:

http://soundcloud.com/thesignatureseries

Paolo Pietropaolo

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