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Building space through sound 

By Karen Herland

You might expect someone returning to Studio Arts for an MFA after eight years as a landscape architect to work on sculptures or monumental installations.

But Douglas Moffat returned to school to explore the sound of spaces.

“Sound is a really important component of built environments,” says Moffat. For the last several years, he’s been recording the over-hyped, speaker-enhanced soundscape of Las Vegas. “It’s a place that needed to be listened to.” All the more so because the current economic climate has had a sobering effect on the glitz and excess.

Listening to Las Vegas, under the direction of his advisor Chris Salter, emerged from that research. His thesis show at the Parisian Laundry, The Love Song Effect, isolated a single element within the canned, over-produced soundtrack of Las Vegas – the romantic love song. He conveyed that in his show with a recording emerging from “one lonely speaker.”

Moffat’s interests cover a range of sounds. This summer he will be returning to the Jardins de Métis festival in Grand-Métis, Que. Two years ago, he worked with Hexagram sound coordinator Steve Bates to create soundFIELD, speakers scattered across a broad landscape. “Inspired by the near-electronic sound of a field of insects whirring at dusk, this project explores the soundscape that results as the distinctions are blurred between the natural/artificial,” according to Moffat’s web site.

Moffat will also spend time in London teaching a studio seminar at the Architectural association. He will soon learn whether the Toronto public art project he is shortlisted for will go forward. “Ideally, I’d like to balance my own work with studio teaching and a typical landscape practice,” he said.

His time here has helped him refine his own work. “The studio arts program gives you space and access to equipment. The rest is up to you.”