I grew up immersed in jazz records and learned to play piano by ear. The biggest influence on my playing was Dave McKenna, a family friend, who played solo jazz like a one-man band and organized sets thematically around words in song titles. In the 1990s, I performed solo jazz piano in New York City with a long-running gig at the cocktail lounge Ciel Rouge. My introduction to electronic music came around the same time; I learned to program synthesizer in a ’70s-funk cover band, and was inspired by the house music I heard on dancefloors. After setting up a home studio I released several albums and tracks on compilations like Le Tigre‘s Remix 12” and Move D’s Source Records/Germany. I founded the Pink Noises project in 2000 and have led audio workshops for women and girls at Ladyfest festivals and elsewhere. I continue to compose electroacoustic music with piano and other instruments, and perform live sets of house and techno occasionally.
In 2006, I earned an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media at Mills College, working closely with Maggi Payne, Fred Frith, and Chris Brown, and taking courses with Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Curran, and Annie Gosfield. My recent compositions use the programming language SuperCollider to map large-scale patterns of dynamic systems, such as migration flows and weather patterns, in multichannel digital audio. I also work with translations between sound, video and photography, where the form of one medium shapes that of another. In these pieces I explore how synthesized sound can represent landscapes differently than more conventionally representational field recordings. My sound installation art has been presented at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), the Western Front (Vancouver), and Eyebeam (NYC).
In both my art practice and my academic research, I am interested in how dynamically-generated synthesized sound can serve as a metaphor for forms of life. I recently completed my PhD in Communication Studies at McGill, working with Jonathan Sterne. Currently, I am researching a feminist history of synthesized sound. Based on archival research of acoustics textbooks, inventors’ correspondence, and synthesizer product manuals, this project examines how cultural notions of identity and difference are expressed in the technical language and visual iconography commonly used to represent electronic sounds.
Photo: With the Moog IIIP at the Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College, 2009