““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

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).

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