Visitors to the New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) gallery in the northern Ontario village of South River will soon get to give nearby lakes and rivers a call.
Sound artist Eric Powell has a new installation called Voice of the Water that connects a rotary phone from the 1970s to recordings of waterways from the region.
“When you come into NAISA , you’ll be able to lift the receiver and, and dial a number that corresponds to nine different recording locations,” Powell said.
“You’ll be able to kind of dive into these underwater or even these blended sounds underwater and above water sounds from whichever particular location you had selected.”
A group of local volunteers with NAISA recorded sounds from the various rivers and lakes using traditional audio recorders and devices called hydrophones.
A hydrophone is placed underwater to detect and record sound from all directions. Powell said whale song recordings, for example, are captured with hydrophones.
Darren Copeland is NAISA’s artistic director and led the team of volunteers that recorded audio from the nine waterways.
He said working with hydrophones runs counter to best practices for sound recording, because wind and rain can be beneficial.
“The more rain, the better because the sound on the surface of the water hitting it, it becomes like a drum,” Copeland said.
Powell mixed the recordings taken at the surface, and underwater audio from the hydrophones, to arrive at the finished product.
For past projects, he recorded his own sound and Powell said it’s given him a new perspective to edit work other people recorded.
“I get to listen to them in the same way that my audience does, kind of with fresh ears,” he said.
Powell said he wanted visitors to connect to the sounds with a rotary phone because there’s an intimacy that comes from using a phone.
“We are connecting ourselves intimately, like on a one-on-one basis with someone or something that’s far away,” he said.
“So we’re able to use this ability to project ourselves through the telephone.”
The Voice of the Water installation starts on July 18.
