Sign Waves

Artist Biographies

• Darren Copeland
• David Eagle
• Tania Etienne
• Rob Godman
• Bentley Jarvis
• Nicholas Longstaff
• vivienne spiteri

Darren Copeland

Darren Copeland is a soundscape composer, radio artist, sound designer and concert producer. He has studied electroacoustic composition under Barry Truax (Simon Fraser University) and Dr. Jonty Harrison (University of Birmingham). His concert works have received mentions in competitions (Vancouver New Music, Luigi Russolo, Hungarian Radio, La Muse en Circuit, and Phonurgia Nova) and appeared on compilation CD releases (Storm of Drones, Radius #3, DISContact I & II, Lieu - Non Lieu, and Soundscape Vancouver). Rendu Visible, a CD devoted to his work, is available on the empreintes DIGITALes label.

Other works combine his electroacoustic and theatrical backgrounds to break open disciplinary boundaries between electroacoustics, radio art, and theatre. Highlights include the adaptation of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play (first radio drama at CBC conceived for broadcast in Surround 5.1), the soundscape documentaries Life Unseen and The Toronto Sound Mosaic, and a DORA nominated soundtrack for Samuel Beckett’s That Time.

As a producer and administrator, fond memories lie with Wireless Graffiti, a live-to-air radio extravaganza co-produced by RumbleTheatre and Vancouver Pro Musica. After active histories with Vancouver Pro Musica, the Standing Wave Ensemble, and the Communauté électroacoustique Canadienne/Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC), he now serves on the board of the Canadian Association for Sound Ecology (CASE) and is the Artistic Director for New Adventures in Sound Art.

David Eagle

David Eagle composes chamber, orchestral and electroacoustic music and in recent years, has explored computer applications to composition, improvisation and multimedia. He teaches theory and composition and is Director of the Electroacoustic Music Studio at the University of Calgary. Born in Montréal in 1955, he studied music at McGill University the Hochschule für Musik, Freiburg, Germany, and at the University of California, Berkeley (PhD 1992).

Performances in Canada and abroad include Sound Travels, Arraymusic & New Music Concerts (Toronto), New Works Calgary, Calgary Philharmonic, Vancouver New Music, Windsor Symphony, Canadian Electroacoustic Community ‘Perspectives’ (Montréal), Computer Music 90 (Tokyo), Glenn Gould Conference (Toronto), Tuning of the World (Banff), Calgary International Organ Festival, Computer Music Conferences (ICMA) 95 & 96, International Society for Electronic Arts 95, the 2nd International Conference on Music and Multi-media at Fu Jen University, Taipei, Taiwan.

In Ensemble Resonance, he performs the aXiØ, a new digital instrument designed to allow greater expression in interactive electroacoustic music. A recent project is ‘one thousand curves, ten thousand colours’, a collaborative multimedia concert integrating live acoustic and electroacoustic music with computer-generated images. In August 2001, Ensemble Resonance performed the work again, this time with choreography at the Cantai Festival in Taipei Taiwan.

With Sound Travels, David Eagle performed the aXiO at electroacoustic festivals in Denmark (MIX.01 International Festival for Electronisk Musik, Dansk Institut for Elektroakustisk Musik (DIEM), Musikhuset Aarhus) and Rome (Musica Scienza 2001, Centro Ricerche Musicali). Currently he is working on a sound installation/performance called Paths for New Adventures in Sound Art in Toronto, 2002.

Eagle’s work can be heard on New Concert Discs, Clef, UNICAL and isodart recording labels.

Tania Etienne

Tania Etienne is a scenographer whose self-produced work integrates artistic disciplines to create contemporary forms for storytelling. Tania also designs sets and costumes for theatre and dance. Her installation The Walls Are Still Weeping is scheduled for a future Sign Waves event in the Fall, 2002.

Rob Godman

Rob Godman is a composer working extensively with digital technology. Much of his music explores the relationship between sound and the other senses - can you ‘see’ a sound or ‘hear’ visually?

His acoustic and digital works have explored the musicality of ‘everyday’ speech. In 2000 he was awarded a Year of the Artist Residency (Prema Arts Centre and DA2 - the digital arts development agency). The installations explored how we regard scale, perspective and proportion and how we perceive our surroundings. By using sounds specific to particular regions of Gloucestershire it outlined a location, allowing the listener to travel through it, controlling their own acoustic spaces.

The Roman Architect Vitruvius has had a great influence on Rob’s work, particularly the remarkable similarities (as regards function and possibly purpose) of the Vitruvian bronze resonating vessels placed in Roman theatres and his own use of effects units in fixed spaces. This has led to a natural continuation of the ‘evolving acoustic’ ideas as well as simultaneous research into Greek and Roman music and architecture. In 1998 he was awarded a Combined Arts Research and Development Award from the Arts Council of England to look into these ideas further in combination with digital technology exploring the use of ‘Max/MSP’ software to control ‘virtual spaces’ - the creation of acoustic spaces that are capable of evolution with potential for responsive control.

Rob has received performances from artists such as the Siobhan Davies Dance Company, The BBC Singers, Evelyn Glennie, Gemini and the Sackbut and Cornett Ensemble QuintEssential. He had works performed in the UK, USA, Croatia and Spain last year. Last year, he completed a project with Video Artist Carolyn Black for the Sidmouth Folk Festival, UK (East Devon District Council Commission) and also a new work for Nina Pope (‘A Public Auction of Private Art Works’, Kimbolton School, UK, Commissions East).

Most recently, he completed a new work with Simon Ryder and glassmaker Colin Reid for an exhibition at Prema Arts Centre, Uley, UK this July. ‘Solid’ is an imaginary exploration of the resonance of a piece of glass, heard from within, rather than outside in the air. What might happen if we are inside a solid, moving through the molecules and listening to how they relate to each other?

Rob is Associate Lecturer in Music Composition at Coventry University and also a Lecturer in Programming at the University of Hertfordshire, emphasising an artists’ use for technology.

Bentley Jarvis

Most of my work has been an attempt to integrate visual and sonic material. Over the last thirty years I have worked with choreographers, theatre designers, and visual artists to make multi-media performance works. In my recent work, I have been doing the visual part myself, making sound sculpture and video.

My sound sculpture is an investigation of the relationship between how objects look and how they sound. First I design and build highly resonant structures then I compose electroacoustic music to be played through the structures. My video work is of two kinds - installation and performance.

The installation pieces are multi-monitor works which are like slowly evolving paintings with electronic sound. The performance videos usually have one or more live musicians interacting with the video, either projected when in large spaces or on a monitor when in small spaces.

I have been teaching electroacoustics at the Ontario College of Art and Design for 18 years and live in London Ontario with my wife Susan Davies (a psychologist who acts as my personal brain care specialist) and children Anna and Simon (who often perform my music for me and also act as roadies)

Nicholas Longstaff

Nicholas Longstaff's aural explorations range from the composition of music for stage, screen and stereo, to audio art installations. He has created music, set and sound designs for theatre productions in London (Ontario), Richmond (BC), and Toronto. He has also created performance, video and interactive works for the Norah Vaughn Gallery, OCAD Gallery, and Trinity Square Video. Recent credits include "The Dance of the Dead" (D.O.A. Productions), "Orpheus Descending" and "Feelers" (Alumnae Theatre), "Killer" (Toronto Fringe) and "Sometimes They Take You Places" (Buddies in Bad Times). His score for the short film "The Store" (Sudden Storm) will air on CBC & WTN in 2002-2003.

"The I Project" is the logical progression from the immersive and interactive works Nicholas completed while studying at Ontario College of Art and Design, for which he designed his own circuitry and interfaces. He has already been invited to install this new work in London Ontario this fall for the inauguration of the Edinborough Theatre and he plans to take this work to the Festival of the Sound (Parry Sound), Mutek festival (Montreal), and eventually to a series of festivals in Europe.

vivienne spiteri

vivienne spiteri’s desire is to give music wing, and to transcend that collection of notated papers called a score. music is what we experience "when we look up from the page." her creations are dances of sound and silence in air- space and time, and it is to these, to Music - not to ink on

paper or to someone else’s ideas behind them - that she owes her fidelity and devotes her energy. this responsibility to listen autonomously, and to create music through her own inner ear and imagination, annihilates not merely the term, but the very notion of "interpreter" (and of "composer").

in vivienne spiteri’s world there are artists, only. vivienne spiteri has no desire or need to, and no interest in playing what she considers to be the stale, hypocritical, hierarchicial 19th century role of puppet-surrogate to score-writers. " vivienne spiteri is not just an artist in her own right. she is a superior and powerful artist." bp.

vivienne spiteri is trying to escape tyrannies, including that of tradition, human time and human space. she was born on the 13th day of the 7th lunar month of the pearl and the rose in the year of the serpent, in 1972, 1976, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995 and more recently in 1999, 2000, 2001.

vivienne spiteri, whose work and ideas have been termed iconoclastic, finds herself setting precedents, a fact not displeasing to her. she has a horror of institutions, which, in her view, forge a destructive path towards the choking and annihilation of the individual voice.

vivienne spiteri is an individual. she is an independent artist, unattached to house, spouse, state, profit or non-profit organization . she is intensely and entirely committed to sound-composition, to music.

vivienne spiteri ‘s supreme teacher is the microphone, her main musical inspiration, glenn gould.