Sound students heard but not seen at Sala Rossa

jason gondziola

It was a night like any other at La Sala Rossa, one of the Plateau’s most popular venues. The lights were dim and the audience sat attentive, focused on the performance, but the velvet-curtained stage remained empty for the large part of the night. The air, on the other hand, was brimming with sonic delights.

The event was Bandwidth Illegal Phatness, the vernissage for Communications 478 (more commonly known as Sound 3), and comprised a sampling of student work from this advanced technical course.

“People are used to watching things, so when they come somewhere where they’re forced to sit and listen it can be awkward,” said student Carola Duran, who presented a movie soundtrack and a mixed recording of her band. “You really have to learn to appreciate it.”

Themed around criminality, the event included mug shots of the 10 students in the class, each with a gangsteresque alias.

“We wanted to come up with a theme, something that would make it stand apart from the other vernissages that are happening this week in the Comms program,” said course instructor Owen Chapman, who DJ’d the event along with student Jeremy Parkin.

“In class, we wound up spending quite a bit of time talking about sampling as a practice and its relationship to copyright, so the chosen theme wound up being criminality.”

Chapman said that the event has been held off-campus since he was a TA in the course four years ago. The original decision was motivated by a need to make the event accessible to a broader public and to set it apart from the other events held as a part of Prodfest, the annual showing of Communication Studies student work.

Duran said that this exposure is needed, as the Sound specialization in Communications is often overlooked.

“When you see the ratio of people that go into Comms for video and film, its way bigger,” she said. “In a way, we’re more privileged to be here, because there’s only 10 of us.”

The evening’s compositions ran the gamut from sample-based experimental works to musical compositions and documentaries.

Mira Burt-Wintonick presented a touching six-minute audio documentary about her grandmother entitled Muriel’s Message. The work is about “memory and remembering” and was motivated by the discovery of a mysterious box in her house.

“I found these old tapes in my basement of my grandmother and me singing together when I was little, before she died, so I sort of built a portrait of her through these tapes,” she said.

Fellow student Cristal Duhaime presented a sample-based work, as well as two soundtracks. The first was for an experimental animation and the other was a composition she and Parkin created for a dance piece performed at the event.

She became interested in sound after taking a course with Com-munication Studies instructor Iain Cook, whose enthusiasm for the medium quickly became contagious. Duhaime said that studying sound has given her a broader appreciation for the importance of it, especially in cinema.

“If there’s anything I’ve learned this year it’s how undervalued sound is, when in reality it adds so much value to a picture,” she said. “You can totally transform anything with it.”