Developed during a residency at Fredericton’s Charlotte Street Arts Centre, Hum is a soundscape performance that draws on months of field recording inside the 140-year-old building, documenting its creaking floorboards, resonant stairwells, rehearsal rhythms, and subtle seasonal shifts. These recordings are transformed live through real-time electronic processing into a sound collage that centres the abstracted, resonant stories embedded in this community hub. By treating the building as both instrument and archive, Hum seeks meaning in acts of attentive listening—revealing how place, memory, and community are inscribed in sound. The performance is meant to push beyond passive hearing, encouraging deep listening as a way of engaging with surroundings and the textures they hold. Hum opens a space for reflection on how sound can alter our understanding of where we are and where we’ve been.

Part of a larger sound art residency at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, this work-in-progress 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.

“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

Hellsö by Charles Harding released via Patient Records

This performance video was recorded live on Kökar, Åland, Finland by members of Trajectories Collective while embarking on the Åland Archipelago Guest Artist Residence program hosted by Kökar Kultur.

I'm feeling so lucky to have been able to perform at Soundwich XV on Nov. 3, 2022, presented by Conservatoire de musique et d'art dramatique du Québec and Akousma! The performance consisted of a 16-channel live diffusion of 2 pieces from my recently released soundscape album Rain Beast!

Rain Beast is a collage of field recordings collected in New Brunswick and Montréal between 2018 and 2021. As part of a greater meditation on connecting technological mediums in artistic practice to notions of Anthropocene, this collection reflects upon the dissonances of nature and industry in the south of NB and some of the prominent soundmarks that relate to this theme.

This workshop covered methods for collecting and composing with sounds found in the world. Developing pieces of music with found sound is fun, inspiring, and can lead to unique results that define the character of your work. This workshop was designed to demonstrate a wide range of tools that can be used to record and process found sounds as well as to highlight music that has been created with these techniques.