Artist Spotlight is our regular feature introducing you to Cities and Memory artists around the world with an in-depth interview. In this edition, we introduce you to Ontario sound artist Troy Ouellette, inspired by the sounds of the Great Lakes, and the electromagnetic resonances of VLF recordings.

I am one who can never sit still in terms of experimentation – this is probably a bit of an Achilles heel when it comes to creating a sound body of work; on the other hand, it allows me a certain amount of creative freedom that allows me to explore various ideas in multi-disciplinary ways and to not emphasise one sense over another.

Examples of this are in works like: E-Air, Language, Life Bubbles or Echosystem.

Southern Ontario, Canada, is home to an incredible array of flora and fauna. At the same time, it hosts the largest city, Toronto, which continues to grow around Lake Ontario. I have lived mostly in rural areas – farming communities and fruit-growing areas. Needless to say, I am a child of the lakes.

So water sounds have always been central to my work, but growing up, I was exposed to the sounds of small-town streets, trees and leaves blowing in the wind on hot summer days, and the scraping of snow shovels in winter. At present, I live adjacent to the Welland Canal, an engineering marvel that links Lake Erie and Lake Ontario.

From an early age, I experimented with record players, turning discs back and forth on the turntable, later messing with audio tapes, and finally working with sampled sounds. When I was 9, I picked up an old acoustic guitar my grandfather had; the action was so high that my fingers bled when I played it.

By my teenage years, my brother had purchased a drum kit, and while he was away, I used to jump on it and play my heart out. After that, I joined a punk band at 16 and played gigs around the Windsor/Detroit area. I have always had a love of sound and music, feeling the magic and information it carries through the airwaves.

I would have to say this is composition, learning about artists like Luc Ferrari, Chantal Dumas, Luigi Nono, Pierre Schaeffer and Pauline Oliveros has really influenced the way I work with sound and acoustics.

E-Air consists of a series of videos that reference place and time, foregrounding the sonic possibilities of each space in Hyères, France and St. Catharines, Canada. Each chosen site resonated differently as the surroundings changed in the video, yet one common theme remained: a tuning fork that marked the space’s sonic resonance.

As an object of obsolescence in music, the tuning fork has taken on a contemporary function as a tool for healing through sound. It references the therapeutic nature of resort towns with littoral space as places of convalescence and respite. It also becomes a rudimentary instrument, like a bell, that transports the listener, psychoacoustically, from scene to scene. In each case, the video transitions from one site to another, creating the synergy needed to follow the video as it moves through various environments. Using the tuning fork throughout, there is an attempt to merge science, sound art and music into one composition.

In my submission for the Autumn Project, I reimagined Rebecca Goldberg’s People Mover recording. In this work, I was drawn to the musical sounds used to indicate the stops along the line. I wanted to elevate these sounds as punctuation over the tracks’ existing mechanical sounds and the train’s breaking sounds. I also wanted to emphasize the acceleration and deceleration in terms of movement, giving the composition an almost otherworldly quality.

I like Bernhard Lietner’s acoustic sculpture work  as well as the Cymatic work of Hans Jenny  and Daphne Oram and her use of film and photoelectric cells.

VLF sounds are particularly interesting to me because they remind me of listening to shortwave radio as a child.

It’s a toss-up between my Mini Freak and my Nitro Mesh kit for producing sounds, and my Zoom H8 field recorder. Any recorded sound can be ported to MIDI using Bjornes Sample Mapper or a similar program, so I regard any sound as having the potential to serve as an instrument.

I plan to bring a class I teach to New Adventures in Sound Art in South River, Ontario, to create field recordings. I have done several projects up there in the past via residencies and I plan on creating field recordings to use percussively on a keyboard to create a composition.