Building Sounds at Charlotte Street Arts Centre 2024-25 Residency - Reflection
Throughout July 2024 and February 2025 I had the privilege in participating in a residency at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, exploring the sounds and stories of the renowned 140 year old community arts hub. Throughout my residency, I had the opportunity to document an array of environmental sounds from the building—creaking floorboards, resonant stairwells, the rhythmic energy of dance rehearsals, and the subtle shifts of seasonal atmospheres. My aim for this residency was to develop a cohesive collection of compositional etudes that reflect various areas throughout the building as well as its overall resonance, encourages deep listening and sensory awareness. My creative process reimagines the built environment as an instrument, revealing the interplay between architecture, memory, community, and sound.
The goal of is residency was to engage in a sonic deep dive once a month that resulted in a composition or performance reflecting a certain aspect of the building’s character. This led to the development of 7 etudes (West Stairwell, Floorboards, Photosynthesonic-GRC, Uncanny Foyer / Phantom Words, Elevator Music, Hum, and Equal Intemporal), and well as a performance on Feb. 7, 2025, which involved live processing of human sounds in the space through Silent DJ headphones. Throughout this process I found that my ears became acutely attuned to the general character of the building, through repetitive listening, deep analysis of field recordings, and re-interpretation of auditory materials through processing. I felt the subjective and psychoacoustic effects of this deep listening practice as I engaged with the material and space. It was a privilege to be able to extend a project over such a long period of time, allowing me to reach an intimate level of listening that I had not experienced before. The experience allowed me to deepen my practice and attune my ears in a way that will benefit my work in the years to come. This residency taught me that having time to absorb, digest, and contextualize is a very powerful ingredient in creative process and listening practice. I learned that to dawdle through a process can also be to calibrate the mind, appropriately working through the details in both the conscious and subconscious lense, allowing the practice of listening to gently become lifestyle, integrating with the body and mind. It is a nourishing lesson that extends into many facets of my being, whether through empathy for nature, through human connection, through sensory awareness, and my ability to understand the context of my existence. I’m very grateful for this new understanding and I am excited to see where it leads my future ears, mind, and body.
Below is an audio playlist followed by a description for each of the etudes from this residency.
West Stairwell - This etude is an analysis and repurposing of sounds documented in the 140 year-old building's west stairwell. This liminal space is home to many resonances, both active and dormant. The challenge of this project was to understand a portion of the affordance of this space by activating sounds in peculiar ways. I would thump on the railings, remove transients of resonating metal, perform on a cymbal at various floor levels, and process these moments to reveal their subtle intricacies. It’s about hearing what is not often heard, and listening deeper than what is typical in a space such as this.
Floorboards - This piece was developed using recordings collected in the building's creaky and crackly front stairwell as well as the overhead auditorium rumblings from the Connexion ARC office. The intimate sounds of floorboards were documented by taping contact mics to the floor. I composed gestures by walking around and applying pressure to different areas around the mics, which lends the piece an essence of live performance. Room sounds were also collected using my Zoom H2n. The tonal element of the piece was built out of a computer notification sound. At one point, the subtle anomalous sound of typing can be heard as a counterpoint to the creaking floorboards.
Photosynthesonic-GRC - This etude is of sounds the building hosts with a particular focus of Girls+ Rock Camp week. The idea was to document the ambiences from this camp throughout the building to use on an abstract piece that draws parallels between rock band mentorship, photosynthesis, gardens, propagation, and sewing seeds of future-sound matter. The piece represents an imagination-based cellular journey of a growing garden of sound.
Uncanny Foyer / Phantom Words - This piece uses some recordings that I collected in the foyer at several levels. I was really interested in the resonance of speech and the way in which the diffusion in space makes it difficult to make out words that people speak from afar. With this I was inspired to revisit the research of Diana Deutsch, who works in the realm of Phantom Words and Auditory Illusions. When formant and form and closely related in time, it's possible that the brain will perceive words that are not really there. It's kind of like pareidolia for the ears.
Elevator Music - This piece was developed using field recordings taken inside and outside of the Charlotte Street Arts Centre elevator. The idea was to explore metamorphic sonic spaces that are tied to the rhythms of the elevator's mechanical impulses. Everytime the elevator arrives at a new floor, the occupant is exposed to a new and unique soundscape. Compositionally, this idea opens up possibilities for some very dynamic settings and gestures.
Hum - An etude designed with hums, drones, buzzes, and textural sounds documented all around the Charlotte Street Arts Centre building throughout December 2024. Water fountain motors, AC buzzes, bathroom hand dryers, drones of snow plows from the Xmas Eve snowfall resonating through space are but a few of the distinct recordings that make up this piece. This composition is meant to highlight the lesser noticed tones that make a space run and ensure that it remains accessible as well as habitable.
Equal Intemporal - This track was designed to conclude my collection of etudes developed using field recordings collected around Charlotte Street Arts Centre. The piece is meant as a playful reflection on western temporality and tonality centring, utilizing field recordings of the A440 piano key and a small clock located in CSAC’s piano room. There’s an irony embedded in this piece that is meant to challenge broader musical habits of tuning and time when compared to the rest of the etudes from this collection, which are composed mainly with the non-linear and unplanned environmental sounds of the building. These concepts challenging time and tone are explored through manipulation of the clock speed and regularity of tiks and toks as well as the ringing of one note, spatialized and transformed, throughout the entirety of the piece. An additional objective of this piece was to reveal the deep complexity in simple procedures. It’s amazing that a small clock and a single note on a piano can lead to so many outcomes.
Playlist - building sounds etudes
Interviews & Context
Residency Info
“What sound does a building make? And how can these sounds be used to aid in the composition of new music? These are just a few of the questions sound artist Charles Harding plans to explore when he begins his residency at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre (CSAC) later this summer.”
- Grid City Magazine
I am so excited a proud to have been invited to be Charlotte Street Art Centre’s Artist in Residence for 8 months starting in July. It is a huge step in my career and I can’t wait to see what amazing new sounds come from this experience. It will be an in-depth exploration of the 140 year old building that is home to the centre.
As a composer and sound artist specializing in electroacoustic/soundscape composition, I explore the intricate relationships between nature and technology through computer-based music. My creative journey delves into the intersections of human activity and its impacts on the rest of nature, employing field recordings to design immersive sonic narratives.
During my residency, I will employ a variety of microphones and recording techniques to capture sounds in and around CSAC. Creaky floor boards, echoing stairways, a potter’s spinning wheel, and the percussive rhythms of weekly dance classes are just a few of the sounds available they I’ll aim to collect and manipulate during the residency.
This eighth month residency, made possible through ArtsNB’s Artist in Residence grant program, will stretch from the warm summer months to the coldest nights of the year providing a full range of seasonal sonic possibilities. Each month, CSAC will share a new soundscape composition accompanied by a short video explaining the piece and the source material. The residency will also include open studio sessions, and a live performance with a Q&A, and CSAC’s first immersive audio gallery exhibitions.
I’ll be in residence from July 2024 until February 2025.
Charlotte Street Arts Centre
https://www.charlottestreetarts.ca/
The Charlotte Street Arts Centre is a unique community of entrepreneurs in the arts, culture and wellness sectors, as well as provincial arts and culture organizations, and individual artists in a wide variety of disciplines (music, dance, new media, visual arts, etc). The Charlotte Street Arts Centre facility is a registered nonprofit charity.
The Charlotte Street Arts Centre officially opened for business as an arts facility in 2005, and in 2006 became part of the Local Historic Places Register (municipal). The Charlotte Street Arts Centre acquired Provincial Historic Site status in 2009.
In 2008, the Foyer, front staircases and landings on two floors of the CSAC were officially established as the Charlotte Glencross Gallery (in honour of founding member Charlotte Glencross who passed away October 2007). Regular exhibitions are featured in this space and have been since 2006. In 2009, as part of the City of Fredericton/ Canadian Heritage Cultural Capitals 2009 projects, they developed their backyard into a Culture Garden, featuring high caliber outdoor installation art.