The Sound Studies Institute at the University of Alberta hosts regular events that enrich our contribution to the educational and sonic community. This page lists the events coming up in the next month. In the 2021-22 year, we will initially continue to host our lectures as online events, but we are working to move to a hybrid model for the winter term (live in-person combined with live streaming).

For an up-to-date listing of current activity, please check out our calendar.

Want to check out previous events?
Click the link below:

Wednesday, October 20, 2021
7:00 – 8:00pm MST

Becoming a Hadrosaur: Musical Instruments as a Window into Natural History

Presented by Courtney Brown

Lambeosaurine hadrosaurs are duck-billed dinosaurs known for their large head crests. Researchers hypothesize these large crests were resonators for vocal calls. My work Rawr! A Study in Sonic Skulls and Dinosaur Choir bring these calls to life as singing dinosaur musical instruments. Musicians and participants give voice to these dinosaur instruments by blowing into a mouthpiece, exciting a larynx mechanism and resonating the sound through the dinosaur’s nasal cavities and skull. In a sense, they fleetingly experience being a dinosaur. In doing so, they and this work open up new ways of thinking and research about the ancient past and how it informs our present. While science is one way of knowing the world, my work explores how a musical instrument can also produce knowledge.

Courtney Brown is a composer/performer, software developer, and tango dancer. She creates new musical interfaces in which the act of creating sound is transformative in some way. People become dinosaurs by blowing into a hadrosaur skull, creating their own roar. Social dancers become musical ensembles. Her work has been featured and performed in North America, Europe, and Asia including Ars Electronica (Austria), National Public Radio (NPR), Diapason Gallery (Brooklyn), CICA Museum (Korea), New Interfaces for Musical Expression/BEAM Festival (London), ACM Movement and Computing Conference (Italy), the Telfair Museum (Savannah, Georgia). She received her D.M.A in Digital Media and Performance from Arizona State University and her M.A. in Electroacoustic Music from Dartmouth College. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Center of Creative Computation, Southern Methodist University

October 20-22, 2021

Research-Creation in Urgent Times

A three-day symposium event that includes performances, sound works, panels and public talks by artists and researchers from across disciplines and geographic locations.

All events are free.

Full details including in-depth event descriptions, panelist + moderator biographies, and more can be found on our website:

https://www.spar2c.ca/research-creation-in-urgent-times

Accessibility notes: Panels + events with Live Captioning and/or ASL interpretation are noted as such in their individual event descriptions.

Research-Creation in Urgent times is co-hosted by Shifting Praxis in Research/Research-Creation (SPAR2C), the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLaboratory (CoLAB), the Sound Studies Institute (SSI), and Just Powers.

This event is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Kule Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS), and the Faculty of Arts of the University of Alberta.