This year’s Acoustic Cartographies event featured new audio works by UBC Geography and SFU Communications students, generated from field recordings throughout the Lower Mainland.

Audio Work 1

Jonathan Chan, Cassandra Lobban, Courtney Stickland, and Victoria Tcherven examined the community’s perception of the greenspace along the Arbutus Corridor. Specifically focusing on the community gardens along the Corridor itself, they examined the soundscapes that exist in these areas. The soundpiece is a chronological representation of the transition of the Arbutus Corridor from an industrial space to a public greenspace.  The piece aims to recreate the ideal perception of sounds that existed and continue to exist in the area.

Audio Work 2

Qiyu Dai, Daniella Szalkai, Lenny Wilson, and Carter Xin combined geographical commodity chain research with sound recordings, to record some of the processes involved in a commodity chain. A commodity chain entails tracing the various aspects involved in the production of a commodity with the goal of revealing such processes that are often hidden or ignored by consumers. The piece contains recordings of the Lululemon Lab in Vancouver, showcasing the contrasting sounds found in the lab section and in the retail section.

Audio Work 3

Nathan Bunio, Kathryn Dandyk, Perry Kwok, and Onami Rahman created a sound piece representing “a day on the 99 B-line,” as an artistic rendering of a research topic that they had been exploring over several months. The group collected a series of recordings on the 99 B-line at various times of the day, days of the week, and route directions. In this piece they attempted to mimic the sounds you might encounter at specific times of the day on the bus, to represent the daily changing sensory environment of the 99 B-line.