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Smallish waves / splashing / laughter / conversation behind me from two female voices / incoming plane sound, which gets louder and louder / big crash in the water / big huge splash sound / plane is very loud / lots of surprised gasps / plane sound slowly gets quieter and dissipates behind me |
In one of our storysharing experiments, Ella shared single word images with Kim to evoke the sensory memories and offer contextual grounding before sharing a more fulsome narrative. This question of context was a recurrent question throughout our research-creation:
Ella: "I'm really tempted to give you all the context beforehand".
Kim: "And maybe that's important. . . maybe I need to understand certain things to even be allowed to listen to it".
Wright et al. raise a similar point that arose for them when interacting “with nonhumans at Bawaka[,] attending to presences, absences, silences, and communication. . . In the end, we can only share what we are permitted to share and hear what we are allowed to hear” (Wright et al. 2012, 53).
Ella: "Should I… just say the sounds? […] How about I give you a bunch of sounds in chronological order, and then you tell me what you think happened".
Ella: "I'm really tempted to give you all the context beforehand".
Kim: "And maybe that's important. . . maybe I need to understand certain things to even be allowed to listen to it".
Wright et al. raise a similar point that arose for them when interacting “with nonhumans at Bawaka[,] attending to presences, absences, silences, and communication. . . In the end, we can only share what we are permitted to share and hear what we are allowed to hear” (Wright et al. 2012, 53).
Ella: "Should I… just say the sounds? […] How about I give you a bunch of sounds in chronological order, and then you tell me what you think happened".
False documentaries
We talked about questions of replication, and we sourced documentary footage to recreate these word images.
Ella: Because I can’t go to Montague and get like documentary-level field recordings, I am constructing it. It's also back in time, and so perhaps a fictitious rendition serves a purpose.
Kim: Like it needs to stray, because it’s not that… So don’t try to make it what it’s not.
Ella: Because I can’t go to Montague and get like documentary-level field recordings, I am constructing it. It's also back in time, and so perhaps a fictitious rendition serves a purpose.
Kim: Like it needs to stray, because it’s not that… So don’t try to make it what it’s not.
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Sonic memories
Ella asked and directed her sister, Mariana, to record certain sounds, such as crunchy shells and gentle waves, at Montague. She noted that this would be false documentary footage since the sounds were intentionally triggered or sought out (by a foot crunching), and separated by time and space from her memory (leafless winter and different presence of animals). I remembered recording the sound of a firefighting helicopter a few years earlier while camping in Alberta, which we decided to use as a representative of the plane.
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Shells + waves (recorded Feb 2026 by Mariana at Montague)
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Firefighting helicopter (recorded July 2024 by Kim in Elkwood, AB)
A story of a bay
The first telling of this story was Ella recording a voice memo by herself.
The second telling was Ella broadcasting via voice note to her sister, Mariana.
The third telling was Ella speaking single words to Kim, to evoke the sensory and sonic parts of the memory that stood out to her.
The fourth telling was Kim recounting their impression of the event to Ella using just the information from these word images.
The fifth telling was a dialogue in which Ella shared the story with Kim.
The sixth telling was a combination of these recordings and impressions, which Kim edited together and sent back to Ella to make sure it felt like a good representation.
The seventh telling was Kim sharing the edited version as an installation at the Carleton Music student symposium.
Perhaps this webpage is an eighth telling.
The second telling was Ella broadcasting via voice note to her sister, Mariana.
The third telling was Ella speaking single words to Kim, to evoke the sensory and sonic parts of the memory that stood out to her.
The fourth telling was Kim recounting their impression of the event to Ella using just the information from these word images.
The fifth telling was a dialogue in which Ella shared the story with Kim.
The sixth telling was a combination of these recordings and impressions, which Kim edited together and sent back to Ella to make sure it felt like a good representation.
The seventh telling was Kim sharing the edited version as an installation at the Carleton Music student symposium.
Perhaps this webpage is an eighth telling.
Visualization of Kim passing on their listening of Ella’s stories to you, to be listened to by you: a listening of the listener’s listening. (English 2017)
Symposium Installation
Kim took the opportunity to present a physicalized and spatialized retelling of Ella’s sensory memory at Carleton’s Music and Culture Student Symposium in March 2026. Experimenting with the transition from dialogic, intimate story-sharing to a curated broadcast event, they created an installation with three stations featuring vibrating transducers (small electronics that attach to objects (in this case wooden sculptures) to turn them into resonant bodies, i.e., speakers.) and sculptural elements, and one station with a laptop, where folks could listen to audio via headphones or read written transcripts.
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The narrative element was sent through bone conduction and high-frequency transducers on two wooden panels. The story was barely audible in air, but very clear when leaning intimately against each panel
Sounds of waves and shells were transduced into a soft burl and a bowl of water. The vibrations caused rippling and the recreation of waves in the water.
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The helicopter was sent through a bass shaker into rough-hewn, live edge wood
as well as VibraFusion Lab’s haptic pillows. |
People described the unsanded texture of the wood as poignant to the mediated sensation and generally enjoyed the pillows.
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This dialogic broadcast event helped us explore some more questions...
Story tellings
Ella to self, to Mariana, to Kim (edited by Kim)
Transcript:
Summer of 2006. Well it was, you, me, grandma and mami, when papi and grandpa were driving across Canada.
There was the fire, I believe, that same summer – so I think it was like summer 2006.
My mom and my sister and I stayed with my grandma on Galiano Island. There was a fire on the island that summer. We, on this particular day, were at Montague – Montague park, which is now my favourite place on earth.
I remember… I think the tide was maybe midway… maybe coming in… and there's like, a little peninsula at the edge of the cove that's a bit rocky.
The rest of the beach is, um, crushed seashells because the park used to be a, um like a, like a waste-ground for Indigenous folks in the area, that's where they put all their seashells. Thousands of years of seashells that have been crushed up into kind of a coarse sand.
And I was sitting, on I think it was like mid-tide, so there's like a little, in that bay there's like a – right on the edge – cause we were right on the edge of the bay. Um, there's like this rock formation that kind of jags out in a straight line down into the water and I was sitting on that. I was sitting at the, kind of at the pinnacle of the jagged rock, with maybe chest high in the water.
It was really cold, the water there's really cold. I kind of had a bit of a headache – probably because it was so cold.
I know I had a headache. I know that I, it was so cold that I had a headache. Yeah, that water’s so frickin’ cold. Sometimes it’s like, it hurts your bones, it’s so cold.
And, so we were sitting, and there was waves, my sister was splashing around, I know that her lips were blue… Definitely laughing, my sister and I would have laughed a lot there, and we do laugh a lot there.
My grandma and my mom were sitting up on the beach, probably talking. The waves there are, they’re not that big so it's more like kind of this like lulling back and forth pulling of the, the wave – especially because I was at kind of chest height and sitting. And it was really cold, and I had a headache, and it was really sunny.
And it's not uncommon to have like a small waterplane land to the right of where I was sitting, but because of the fire they weren't just small water planes – they were these big planes that collect water – swooping down, I would say like, like, not very far from us... Collecting up a bunch of water, and then flying over. (sigh) It may have been a helicopter, but I think it was a plane.
I think we watched that happen twice while we were there, but we knew that it was bringing water over to the forest fire that was happening on the island. So there was a bunch of firefighters on the island, and the plane was actually a water plane that like drops water on forest fires (woahhh). Yeah, so it like had been, I think they had, um, I think they had two planes going.
This was 2006, so the like, increased amount of forest fires that we see now in BC every single summer, like that wasn't happening yet. (Right, that’s crazy) Yeah, but yeah, so we watched like, we watched a plane like, scoop up a bunch of water and fly away.
Yeah, I think that's the story I want to tell.
Summer of 2006. Well it was, you, me, grandma and mami, when papi and grandpa were driving across Canada.
There was the fire, I believe, that same summer – so I think it was like summer 2006.
My mom and my sister and I stayed with my grandma on Galiano Island. There was a fire on the island that summer. We, on this particular day, were at Montague – Montague park, which is now my favourite place on earth.
I remember… I think the tide was maybe midway… maybe coming in… and there's like, a little peninsula at the edge of the cove that's a bit rocky.
The rest of the beach is, um, crushed seashells because the park used to be a, um like a, like a waste-ground for Indigenous folks in the area, that's where they put all their seashells. Thousands of years of seashells that have been crushed up into kind of a coarse sand.
And I was sitting, on I think it was like mid-tide, so there's like a little, in that bay there's like a – right on the edge – cause we were right on the edge of the bay. Um, there's like this rock formation that kind of jags out in a straight line down into the water and I was sitting on that. I was sitting at the, kind of at the pinnacle of the jagged rock, with maybe chest high in the water.
It was really cold, the water there's really cold. I kind of had a bit of a headache – probably because it was so cold.
I know I had a headache. I know that I, it was so cold that I had a headache. Yeah, that water’s so frickin’ cold. Sometimes it’s like, it hurts your bones, it’s so cold.
And, so we were sitting, and there was waves, my sister was splashing around, I know that her lips were blue… Definitely laughing, my sister and I would have laughed a lot there, and we do laugh a lot there.
My grandma and my mom were sitting up on the beach, probably talking. The waves there are, they’re not that big so it's more like kind of this like lulling back and forth pulling of the, the wave – especially because I was at kind of chest height and sitting. And it was really cold, and I had a headache, and it was really sunny.
And it's not uncommon to have like a small waterplane land to the right of where I was sitting, but because of the fire they weren't just small water planes – they were these big planes that collect water – swooping down, I would say like, like, not very far from us... Collecting up a bunch of water, and then flying over. (sigh) It may have been a helicopter, but I think it was a plane.
I think we watched that happen twice while we were there, but we knew that it was bringing water over to the forest fire that was happening on the island. So there was a bunch of firefighters on the island, and the plane was actually a water plane that like drops water on forest fires (woahhh). Yeah, so it like had been, I think they had, um, I think they had two planes going.
This was 2006, so the like, increased amount of forest fires that we see now in BC every single summer, like that wasn't happening yet. (Right, that’s crazy) Yeah, but yeah, so we watched like, we watched a plane like, scoop up a bunch of water and fly away.
Yeah, I think that's the story I want to tell.
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all photos by Ella