My intention with this piece was to create an audio account of three modes of industry/transportation/technology that were, and are important to the livelihood of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. The emphasis is on the vehicular – waterborne (dorys and the Bluenose II), and airborne (aeronautical composites manufactured at the Stelia Aerospace North America plant in Lunenberg).
Graham Meisner is a Vancouver based composer working mainly in the field of electronic music. As well as producing his own music/video works he has contributed sound and music for video artists such as Matilda Aslizadeh, David Clark, Randy Lee Cutler, Marina Roy, and Jeremy Todd. His interest in acoustic ecology stems from his studies at the fine arts department of Simon Fraser University, where he was introduced to the soundscape work of R. Murray Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Barry Truax. He completed a Bachelor of Music at Vancouver Community College where he studied with Peter Hannan, David Duke, Ken Morrison, and Giorgio Magnanensi. Graham was a sound artist and main collaborator on a multi-media SSHRC-funded web-art project from 2004 to 2009, resulting in Sign after the x signafterthex.net. A selection of his satirical, topical electronic 'pop' songs can be found at (https://www.youtube.com/user/bstedu). Graham is originally from Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia.
The audio for this postcard was recorded over twelve days on the beach at Bere Point in July 2015. I went there daily, attempting to catch sight of the Northern Resident killer whales that come to rub their bellies on the pebble shoreline. Beach rubbing is a rare behaviour unique to this particular population of orcas, and Bere Point has one of the few rubbing beaches in the world. Orcas, like most whales, use sound to communicate, hunt, and navigate. In an ocean increasingly polluted by the noise of marine traffic, Bere Point is an oasis of quiet.
Leah Abramson is a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, writer, sound enthusiast, and instructor. As a songwriter and musician, Leah has received international critical acclaim and toured extensively throughout North America and Europe. Her new work includes creative non-fiction and a song cycle containing Northern Resident Orca vocalizations.
The audio postcard Clock Bells, Toronto Old City Hall was recorded at 6pm on Sunday, September 20, 2015. Traffic, people and seagulls mingle with the bells echoing off high-rise glass buildings.
Sandy McLennan is a Media Arts graduate of Sheridan College. After thirty years as audio-visual/computer technician in schools he is now a full-time artist creating photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings, installations and performance. In 1981, he recorded the premiere of R. Murray Schafer’s “Princess of the Stars”. Sandy has a collection of sound from Muskoka, begun upon moving there in 1986. At that time, he received an Ontario Arts Council grant to teach pinhole photography. Having long been a recorder and creator, he is thrilled to be back working with analog media and equipment, including handmade pinhole cameras and a portable darkroom. In his home darkroom he makes gelatin silver prints and hand processes small-gauge motion picture film for projection. Employing relatively lo-fi tools (analog and digital), McLennan loves the hands-on process of projects. One idea leads to an action, leads to a revelation. Creativity lives, and gives life.
Recording frogs allows me to connect the Aboriginal teaching to the amphibian, thus acknowledging their critical role in sound ecology and audio storytelling.
Crystal DJ Kwe Favel (Cree & Métis Nation) is an Awarding-Winning Multidisciplinary Aboriginal Sound Artist who has won two consecutive First Peoples’ Cultural Council Aboriginal Arts Development Awards for her motivational digital audio storytelling. She also won “Best Audio Work” at imagineNATIVE Film & Media Arts Festival 2015. Her evocative music composition and sound design inspired innovative audio works of art in order to preserve oral traditions and ancient languages. After 17 years in the music industry she has refined her skills, and has become the 1st Aboriginal Female to turn professional Music Producer – Vinyl DJ – Independent Record Label Owner in Canada. Her production style can be described as "remixing with respect" - acknowledging and validating the enriched cultural teachings of our community. Her mission - to contribute to the solidarity of her Peoples by carbon dating her music through sound ecology, audio anthropology & vinyl sovereignty.
I find the sonic narrative of public and private spaces fascinating. In #YEG Waiting I sought to combine four mundane, droll, and anxious happenings that I recorded in Edmonton, Alberta. Each time I was waiting to perform music at some well-documented public event, and I felt impressed to record the sounds I was listening to beforehand. 
Andrew Scott Israelsen is a composer, educator, and sound artist residing in Anaheim, California. His musical oeuvre includes handmade instruments, computer music, sound art, and chamber music. His creative output is highly diverse, often challenges the status quo, and he does not hesitate to be absurd or humorous.
Five Roses is a small audio postcard showcasing the urban soundscape of Montreal. Five Roses explores and juxtaposes multiple acoustic realities revealing the urban life of the city throughout its four seasons. 
David is a composer from Montreal interested in acousmatic and visual music, electronic music and soundscapes, mixing various mediums that can express meaningful and immersive experiences. His work has twice been awarded the Jeux des Temps Times Play, organized by the Canadian Electroacoustic Community, and it has been showcased internationally in over five countries. David has studied composition at Université de Montréal under the direction of Jean Piché, Robert Normandeau and Martin Bédard.
The natural soundscape is rich with color and nuance beyond imagination. It is from this sonic metaworld that I draw inspiration for my projects. My motivation for composing music stems from an insatiable love of sound and the nature of sound itself.
Richard Bitting is an artist, composer and teacher residing in Cincinnati, Ohio. 
The rhythmic sound of wood being chopped is an acoustic artifact of fall – a time when leaves turn from green to gold and chimneys emit sweet plumes of smoke. At our house, several cords of dry, white birch gets split and stacked each October before the snow flies. The long, cold days of winter are tolerable - even enjoyable - when the wood stove is roaring with activity. But firewood is about more than comfort. Firewood is synonymous with survival. Many Dene of the Northwest Territories learned to chop wood as children and continued swinging an axe long into adulthood. In the absence of electricity, firewood provided fuel to boil tea, bake bannock and dry meat. The relationship between firewood and survival is akin to how people experience their environments. Just as a campfire or cook stove depends on wood to produce heat, humans depend on words, sounds and thoughts to make sense of the world. Nature has its own language. It continually speaks to us, even if we don’t hear it. One day it might be through a glorious sunrise. Other times it might be the sound of an axe slicing through wood. By mixing ambient sound with spoken word, Woodchop creates a conversation about the hidden intersections between human and non-human organisms while considering history and culture.
Kirsten Murphy attended the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York in 2015 where she received the G&J Moss Scholarship for her photo essay about a seniors’ synchronized swimming team in Harlem. Kirsten’s work focuses on the hidden intersections between people and their environments. She is interested in themes of ritual and resiliency. She is a former CBC journalist and flight attendant. She lives in Yellowknife with her husband and two dogs.
On a damp morning in early March of 2015, I stepped out of my house to the sound of a woodpecker feverishly pounding away at the telephone pole towering above my backyard. The house is located just a few blocks south of Nose Hill and with many trees in the area makes it a relatively quiet spot nestled in the sprawling city of Calgary, AB. As I pulled my trusty Zoom H6 out of my bag, I couldn’t help but notice that the evenness, precision, and incisiveness of the woodpecker’s rhythm exceeded that of even the most accomplished percussionists. 
Ethan Cayko is a sonic artist, percussionist, researcher, photographer, and part-time farmer. He obtained a B.A. in Music Technology from Montana State University. There he performed as principle percussionist for many of the university’s top ensembles, wrote scores for student films, and composed works for the Spirit of the West Drumline and MSU’s Sunday Night Multimedia Series. He is currently pursuing a MMus in Sonic Art at the University of Calgary where his work focuses on multichannel sound-based music and network music performance. His network music research has been performed internationally between Canada, China, and USA and was recently demonstrated at the International Computer Music Conference. His interest in the art of sounds stems not only from his background in percussion but also from a deep curiosity about the physical world cultivated by his childhood on a farm in rural North Dakota.
Hornby Island, British Columbia, is well-known for its healthy bald eagle population and an "eagle nest cam" which has attracted a lot of online attention. This recording was made in early morning on the rocky flats of Little Tribune Bay, focusing on two adult eagles sitting in the scraggly bare branches of a tall pine tree on the cliffs above the rocks (with young nearby). At 0:15 we hear the eagles leave the tree and fly together, their wings producing a pronounced pitched tone. At 0:45 we hear their piercing calls traded back and forth. A fly zooms past the microphone at 0:57. Crows and other birds are also heard, against the background sound of the wind in the trees, and little trickles of water in the low tide zone.
Matt Rogalsky works in the areas of live electronic music and sound installation, as well as the study and recreation of late 20th century live electronic music works by other composers. He teaches at Queen's University Kingston, where he is Director of the Sonic Arts Studio and leads courses in electroacoustic and radiophonic composition, 20th/21st century music history, musical acoustics and interdisciplinary collaboration. His work has been performed and presented broadly across Canada, the USA and Europe, most recently as part of the Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium with a new multi-loudspeaker concert piece exploring the acoustics of Kingston Penitentiary.
This audio was recorded while in Victoria for an artist residency with the Seattle Phonographers Union at Open Space in 2010 http://www.openspace.ca/node/984). During the residency, I led a series of workshops on phonography and improvisation with unprocessed field recordings. I took the opportunity to explore Victoria’s rich soundscape and collect material for the workshops and resulting performance with the newly christened Victoria Phonographers Union. The Johnson Street Bridge stood out as a unique sonic landmark of the neighborhood and I made numerous recordings of the bridge. The current bridge is being demolished and replaced with a new bridge, and so having this recording be a part of this exhibition preserves an element of Victoria’s unique soundscape.
Steve Barsotti is a Seattle-based sound artist, phonographer, and educator. As an original member of the Seattle Phonographers Union, a group of field recording wielding improvisers, he has been responsible for many of the group's activities. The Union is described as "moving beyond the habitual experience of sound to uncover what is foreign in the familiar and familiar about the foreign." They have been performing together for 12 years. He is also a member of Mimeomeme, a record label that disseminates unusual sound art made by an eclectic collective of artists involved with phonography, no- and low-fidelity recordings, raw digital data, plunderphonics, primitive analog synthesis, noise, infrasound, tape cut-ups, as well as other oblique, not-yet-classified sonic epiphenomena.
His two solo cds, Along These Lines and Say “tin-tah-pee-mic”, contain improvisations with object recordings, location recordings, phonography, and electro-acoustic processing. His work has been described as “quite cinematic and unsettling”, and as “ushering the listener across an ambient divide”.
This postcard consists of an untreated binaural field recording made on the shores of Toronto’s Lake Ontario during an extremely hot, late-summer day. 
Michael Trommer is a Toronto-based producer and sound artist; his experimental work has been focused primarily on psychogeographical and acoustemological explorations via the use of field recordings, infra- and ultrasound, as well as multi-channel installation and expanded video techniques.
Students in the streets! A Montreal spring, a reawakening, a protest march against increasing university tuition fees. Media reports outside Québec tell of potential dangers, but this soundscape reports the order, camaraderie and that particular joie-de-vivre found in Canada’s francophone province. The enactment, again, of a rite of passage.
Kevin Austin is a Montreal-based composer and teacher. He started working in the studio at McGill University in 1969 and recorded his first soundscape material in May 1970. In 1976 he organized a large exposition of Montreal area soundscapes. His work in acoustic composition has included chamber music, vocal pieces, multi-ensemble work, and improvisation. In electroacoustics he has composed fixed media, soundscape, multi-media, mixed and improvisational pieces. His current work in soundscaping includes binaural and four-channel recording. Since the early 2000’s, he has composed pieces for Chinese instruments, and Chinese instruments with fixed media.
He is noted for having co-founded the Canadian Electroacoustic Community, CEC, in 1984, and the Concordia University Electroacoustic Studios in 1970. While having taught in almost all areas of music, currently as a Full Professor, he continues to teach first-year electroacoustics courses at Concordia University in Montreal. Photo credit: Brian Campbell.
On a hot Sunday morning at the end of August, I set up for a walk along Leslie Street Spit, recorder in hand, to escape the heat of the city. Leslie Street Spit is an accidental wilderness on a man made headland in Toronto’s lakeshore, originally intended as an outer harbor for the city in the late 50s. Still a landfill site, the Spit is open to the public at weekends. Walking along one of the pedestrian trails off the main entrance, the oldest section of the Spit, one could forget its man made origin. The rubble, hidden below a thick layer of vegetation, has been rounded off at the shore of the Spit by the action of the water. Here I immersed myself in nature and its sounds; but sound was also the reminder of where I was, within the realm of the city. Sound blurred the entangled natural and cultural boundary of the Spit. Footsteps, voices, the sound of planes taking off and landing, mixed with the chirping of the crickets, the birdsongs and the waves, providing a rich and somehow relaxing soundscape to listen to. I took sound recordings and photographs along that walk. Whereas the photographs capture many features of the Spit, it is sound that showcases its richness by bringing the invisible into proximity. This audio postcard aims to grasp the essence of the Spit as both man made and natural, and transport the listener to that hot Sunday morning. 
Usue Ruiz Arana is a landscape architect, artist and PhD researcher at Newcastle University, UK. Usue was based in Toronto for a year in 2015 where she carried out a number of creative practice projects for her research inspired by the city and the long established practice of sound ecology in Canada. 
My piece for the Audio Postcards exhibition is a field recording from Days Beach, situated on the east side of Jackfish Lake in central Saskatchewan. This location was where our family would take summer holidays when I was growing up, close to a provincial park and two bird sanctuaries. I was visiting my parents a few years ago, and on one particularly windy afternoon there was an unusual, periodic humming sound inside of their house. I discovered that the gusts coming across the lake were entering the roof structure of the building through holes where the soffits were missing, apparently torn off during a previous storm. Effectively the structure of the house acted as an instrument for the air currents, creating an aleatoric composition of sorts. Waves lapping on the shore and the wind as it blew through the leaves of nearby trees can also be heard in the soundscape.
Constantine Katsiris has been a composer of experimental electronic music for over two decades. An avid phonographer, he has conducted field recording expeditions around the world from urban settings like Prague and Paris to more remote regions such as the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. His compositions have been broadcast to listeners around the world from Concertzender Nederland to MTV Brazil. Katsiris has brought his live performances, installations and fixed media works to many notable venues, such as La Société des Arts Technologiques [Montréal], Whitechapel Art Gallery [London], Brut Konzerthaus [Vienna], and SESI Art & Cultural Center [São Paulo]. He is also passionate about showcasing, broadcasting, and disseminating sound works as a curator of exhibitions and concerts for festivals and galleries, as a programmer on community radio, and as the director of the Panospria record label for sonic experimentation. Having lived in five Canadian provinces, he calls Vancouver his home since 2008.
Coleman is a small town in the Crowsnest Pass, just east of the border with British Columbia. Founded in 1903 with the opening of a new coal mine, the town was a bustling mining town for decades. Since the mines have closed, Coleman has become a cozy and quiet small town nestled in the mountains. When the composer was younger, he never used to understand why his parents would always drag him away from the city to visit this apparently boring small town every weekend. But as he's grown up, he has come to appreciate the chirping grasshoppers and burbling creek, and all the other sounds that are drowned out deep in the city. This audio postcard is an acoustic snapshot that captures the composer's experience of the town's soundmarks and its overall character and feeling. The sound of the wind—in the trees, in the grass, blasting against the side of the house—is ubiquitous in the Pass. While it is only presented as is at the end of the piece, there is a sense of its characteristic presence throughout the postcard. Each sound seems to breeze from one into the next, taking the listener through the town one gust of sound at a time. Coleman, Alberta was composed to share the sound of the Crowsnest Pass, but perhaps also to preserve it in the composer's memory, since the drive is a bit longer from his current home in Montreal than it used to be from Calgary. 
Jazz pianist turned electroacoustic laptopist, Travis West is a multidisciplinary composer-performer and life long learner. Fascinated by algorithms, instruments, and the soundscapes of every day life, Travis is interested in composing musical interactions, and interacting with musical compositions. His research explores electronic musical performance from the lowest level bits and bytes of digital musical instrument design up to the most abstract control over compositional structure. His compositions have been performed in festivals and conferences across North America such as the Young Songwriters Intensive in Calgary and N_SEME 2016 in Oklahoma. Travis is currently studying his BFA at Concordia University's department of music with his major in Electroacoustic Studies.
Dear Listener!
What is an Audio Postcard?
Audio Postcards Canada is a curated exhibit of sounds from across Canada, and reflections on those sounds. The online exhibit features 16 exceptional pieces of audio art selected from 87 eclectic works submitted to Canadian Association for Sound Ecology. Just like postcards sent through the mail, these Audio Postcards are short explorations and celebrations of the varied soundscapes found in Canada. Text-based reflections from curator Andrea Dancer and guest commentator Hildegard Westerkamp bring the listener deeper into the exhibit.
With this project, CASE invites heightened listening awareness through multiple means: the use of the microphone, the sense of place, the audio narrative, and also artistic expression. Audio Postcards Canada showcases pieces that create an intimacy between the artist and the listener in unanticipated ways.
If you are captivated by these sounds and the ideas they present, we invite further creative, educational, festival, exhibition, presentation, as well as artistic investigation and production. For information about how to access or use these sounds in these ways, please email postcards@soundecology.ca. For more information about the Canadian Association for Sound Ecology, how to contact and join CASE, visit www.soundecology.ca.
The Audio Postcards Canada Team
Carmen Braden – Project Lead
Andrea Dancer – Curator
Matt Griffin – Web Developer
Andrea Schmidt - Web Designer, A-Schmidt.com.
Eric Powell – Audio Mastering
Randolph Jordan – Technical Advisor
Sarah Brown – Promotion
Raylene Campbell - Administration
Moderator Carmen Braden sat down with each Audio Postcards Canada adjudicator to discuss their process in choosing the final 16 compositions out of 87 submissions. The conversations are insights into how different acoustic ecologists, sound artists, and electroacoustic composers think about sound and how they engaged with the audio compositions. 
Tyler Kinnear is a PhD candidate in musicology at the University of British Columbia. His work focuses on contemporary sonic art, with particular interest in conceptualizations of nature, soundscape documentation and composition, modes of listening, and alternative performance spaces. Tyler has contributed to the Ecomusicology Newsletter, Music & Politics, Organised Sound, and Soundscape. In his spare time, Tyler organizes public listening walks and performs and composes with the sonic environment. 
Stephanie Loveless is a Montréal-born artist who works with sound, video, film and voice. She makes soft-speakers out of paper cups, performance prescriptions for audience-identified ailments, and sound works that channel the voices of plants, animals, and musical divas. Her work has been presented in festivals, galleries, museums and artist-run centers worldwide. She holds MFAs from Bard College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a certification in Deep Listening. www.stephanieloveless.ca
Since the early 1970’s, Charlie Fox has created and exhibited audio art, experimental film, video art and multimedia installation artworks in Canada and abroad. As a multidisciplinary artist, he has also been integral to theatre, dance and music productions and performances, directed arts documentaries for broadcast television, curated art exhibitions and, through his artistic practice, has developed internationally prominent research in immersive sound. Photo Credit Loretta Paoli 
Neutral Moderator and Interview Host Carmen Braden is a composer from Northern Canada, who has lived most of her life in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. Many of her works incorporate environmental elements that reflect the sub-Arctic environment. Carmen’s works have been performed throughout Canada by internationally-acclaimed performing ensembles including the Elmer Iseler Singers, the Gryphon Trio, the Land’s End Trio, GroundSwell and the Penderecki Quartet. Carmen is the vice-chair of the Canadian Association for Sound Ecology.
