Why Should We Cry?

One of the biggest challenges of this project to date, is to find people who would like to share their songs of lamentation.  For instance, both of us have talked with individuals from the Middle East (e.g. Algeria, Palestine, Lebanon, Nubia) with great respect for their musical traditions and compassion for their experiences of forced displacement.  These individuals are curious about what we are doing, asking questions that always lead to provocative conversations.  They tell us about the songs they could imagine sharing with us but choose not to because they are associated with memories they would rather forget…  And yet they recognize that the memories still exist and their tones cannot be controlled.

After three lessons we can now identify different orders of experience within each session.  They include four communication processes that act in similar and different ways: storytelling and the sharing of personal experience related to displacement and home; group toning exercises (free flow vowel articulations that often form beautiful harmonics); informal conversations over food; the more formal structures of learning new songs and singing them together. The effects of these communication processes are wide-ranging and implicate affective and cognitive - both emotional and thought-based - processes.  Equally, they engage the senses while addressing issues within social and philosophical frameworks as we  try to make sense of and create meaning about the possibility for affirmative and generative responses to coerced migration and the potential for a new internal and external experience of home.

On September 13, we visited Andrew in his sound studio to hear the different microphone tests we made earlier in the week.  For us, this was a crash course on the different capabilities and sensitivities to the three set-ups he had tried in Cabot Square.  Were we interested in a very focused pick-up of one singer at a time, i.e. a Shotgun, or did we want a microphone that could pick up a variety of situations, such as the XY or MS options?  After listening to various clips through the prism of each particular set-up, we chose the MS microphone as it allows for a full stereo pick-up.  Singing voices were rich and complex, the traffic’s constant hum was clear but not overpowering, with the birds’ varied songs also a part of the sound textures.

Next step: trying to find the appropriate microphone and kit to rent… 

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Today’s meeting was primarily devoted to gathering sound data in order to test out a variety of microphones. Andrew Harder arrived in time to set up a number of different possibilities. We recorded some conversation and singing outdoors in the park (alongside the gallery’s trailer) and then moved ‘indoors’ to the entry-way of the Atwater Metro Station where we encountered a young man who is currently living in Montreal who offered to sing for us as a test. Without any preamble, this young man began to rap in French about displacement, the loss of home and the challenges of being accepted as the son of an Algerian born in France. He could not have sung anything more appropriate even had he known something of our project!

Amongst the other things we discussed was how to frame the questions that we would work with in the reading sessions related to this project. So far we have identified a core set of three questions and are looking to add an additional two or three before posting them all on this site.