After playing at Music Waste Festival in Vancouver early this month, I spent two weeks at Lobe Studio doing an artist residency. Lobe is located in Strathcona, almost kitty corner to a building where I lived when I was 19, during another era for myself as well as the neighborhood.
I spent four hours a day in the studio during the week, which I arrived at via a commute involving two separate buses. This new routine was quite a departure from my usual schedule of working from home according to my natural energy flow. But it was well worth the challenge of imposing a bit of temporary rigor on my habits.
Lobe is a spatial sound studio built with 4DSOUND technology, a unique combination of hardware and software that can be used to create “sound holograms.” These holograms can be designed to be tiny or infinitely large, and to move through the space as one or in multiples, on paths of different shapes and sizes. The result of this is heard through an array of speakers in the ceiling and floor, in the form of a shifting sonic landscape with no fixed perspective, other than that of the listener standing in any given area of the space.
After receiving an introduction to the 4DSOUND software on my first day, I was given free run of the space to experiment. I played with positioning some existing pieces in the space (including a recently finished ambient track created especially for Anthracite Collective’s front page), using sources and sound entities, which are used for building the sound holograms. The process was surprisingly intuitive. It helped that 4DSOUND runs through Ableton Live, so I was able to apply my usual Ableton workflow to my experiments.
On a personal level, my introduction to 4DSOUND and experiences in Lobe’s spatial sound space felt like a natural next step in my creative development. It felt exciting to take on the challenge of learning a new technology and building on my existing skills to do so. This was also my first time being awarded grant funding, which felt like an acknowledgement of the importance of going deeper with my creative practice.
The two weeks flew by, and I made a lot of discoveries and generated some inspiration for things I’ll be sharing more about in the coming months. Thanks to some additional funding from the Canada Council, I was fortunate to be able to extend my residency by another two weeks, to begin next week. I’ll go into more detail about my further explorations in a future update.
Til then,
xx RV
This residency was made possible by the support of the BC Arts Council.