House Band
2022
Agnes Etherington Art Centre / Etherington House

Activity Pitch

House Band is an activity that merges collective sonic experimentation and spatial thinking. Members of the activity’s Curatorial Guild will negotiate, design, and install a clandestine sound installation in and around the historic Etherington House, as a shadow exhibition. Multi-channel or surround-sound technologies will be approached and used by the guild as a common grammar, with participants occupying discrete nodes of sonic amplification, inhabiting the shared and distributed array of a 6.1 sound system. The activity will oscillate between independent sonic exploration (recording, collecting, remixing, downloading, chopping up, etc.) and “Collective Editing” sessions, during which the Curatorial Guild will tackle together questions about the interrelationship, overlap and co-contamination of the group’s assembled sounds, aiming to produce agreements about the progression of a shared mix or edit.

While this activity will produce a culture of open sonic experimentation, the Etherington House will provide us with a necessary and generative set of ‘enabling constraints’ that will guide our production and help to forge a cohesive dynamic for the House Band, in three important ways:

1. Firstly, the architecture of the house itself provides us with an exciting but also limited set of opportunities for the placement and playback of sound in the space. We will need to inventively seek platforms, surfaces, nooks, and peripheries where speakers can nest themselves and from which our sonic materials can be heard, felt, and sensed.
   
   
2. Secondly, in navigating the complexities of this architectural space, we will also need to consider sound’s potential to be in relation to a range of other occupants and guests of the home, such as the exhibiting artists, the Agnes staff members and publics who attend the exhibition. We will need to determine what attitude the sonic material generated by the House Band will take in relation to these other guests and hosts – An ambience? An interruption? A support structure? A haunting
   
   
3. Thirdly, we will need to consider the addition of the House Band’s sonic material to the Etherington House in relation to the curatorial framing of the ongoing a gust + a host = a ghost project, which seeks “methods for transitioning the house back into a home that furthers the cause of art in the community.” How might we interpret, respond to, or refuse this prompt through sonic means? What forms of sound can actively “transition” or “prepare” the space for its future function as a home?

What if you don’t have any experience with sound? You are more than welcome to join this activity! There are many ways for you to consider and play with sound beyond needing to be capable of complex audio recording and processing, although some instruction or assistance with that will also be provided, if needed to develop your ideas, or if you would like to learn some new skills. What is key here is simply your interest in sound, and its relation to space and architecture, as well as a willingness to think about these themes in an openly collaborative context with other participants and peers.

Collective Editing Sessions + Editing Timeline Installation

“Collective Editing Sessions” will be contexts where participants will “plot” the dynamic of a shared soundscape, discussing and negotiating the progression of one another’s sound occurring over the span of a shared timeline. This could be seen as kind of “jam-session” in a conventional band, where individual players in a group determine when and what they will play over the duration of a song. Similar decisions will be discussed during “Collective Editing Sessions” by the House Band through the use of materials such as stickies, wall tape and floor plans to imagine and chart the trajectory of the sound through space. This will occur first in an “analog” format, before we commit the group’s sounds to a single “digital” playback file, to be diffused into a relational surround-sound set-up installed in the home. Our resulting soundscape will then play on loop in the house for an extended period. During this period, we may also endeavour to leave traces of our Collective Editing Session timelines on a wall in the Etherington House as a score or a map to the sound that will be playing back in the house on a subliminal infra register.

These “Collective Editing Sessions” are drawn from a similar exercise created for my production intensives in my undergraduate course Sound + Synthesis, delivered in Fall 2021 at Queen’s University as an undergraduate course.