Carol Ann Weaver
Chair

Carol Ann Weaver is a celebrated, highly prolific American/Canadian composer whose music is heard live and on the air throughout North America, Europe, Africa, South Korea and Paraguay, often featuring her as pianist.
Her genre-bending music ranges from classical to jazz, folk, world, creating new fusions of art and roots music, often colored by her passion for African music. She composes vocal, choral, chamber, solo, orchestral, multimedia music, works with electric instruments, dancers, turntablist, gamelan, incorporating visuals, electroacoustic and soundscape textures. Her music is described as “adventurous, imaginative, passionately connected with the earth.”  Commissioned by American and Canadian performance groups – Arraymusic, Blue Rider Ensemble, Hemispheres Orchestra, Ardeleana Trio, Gallery Players, Cincinnati Arts Festival and many more more – she has produced eight CDs where she also appears as pianist:  Songs for My Mother, Paraguay Primeval, Every 3 Children, Thistle & Jewel, Awakenings, Dancing Rivers – From South Africa To Canada, Journey Begun, and  Daughter Of Olapa. She is Chair of Association of Canadian Women Composers, Secretary of Canadian Association of Sound Ecology, and has directed Sound in the Land Festival/Conferences, most recently environmentally themed, with R. Murray Schafer as keynote speaker, attracting international attention.  She has done hundreds of natural field recordings from Canada, Africa, and the USA, and has presented her work at various sonic ecology, ethnomusicology, and women’s music conferences.  As Professor Emerita of Conrad Grebel University College/University of Waterloo, she holds a DM in Composition from Indiana University, studying with composers John Eaton, Bernard Heiden and Juan Orego-Salas, and with pianist Gyorgy Sebok.

Aaron Liu-Rosenbaum
Vice Chair, Web Manager

Aaron Liu-Rosenbaum is Professor of Music Technology and Director of the Certificate Program in Digital Audio Production at Laval University’s Faculty of Music in Quebec City. He is a composer and researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT, McGill University) and at the International Observatory on the Societal Impacts of AI and Digital Technology (OBVIA, Laval University). His general interests involve the application of sound technologies in artistic creation, pedagogy and research, with a particular interest in acoustic ecology and technologies that facilitate later-life musicking  

Clare Price
Secretary

Clare Price is a MA student in the Connected Human and Natural Systems (CHANS) Lab at UBC’s Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability, studying urban soundscapes. Her research explores the relationships between birdsong, anthropogenic noise, and perceptions of nature. She aims to understand how our sonic and built environments interact, shaping our sense of kinship with nature and more-than-human others.

Doug Friesen
Treasurer

Doug Friesen is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Queens University, a teacher and musician based in Toronto. Over the last 15 years, he has worked with teachers, students, and musicians about how listening and sound can engage creativity and agency. He is continuing work on a PhD in sound and listening pedagogies, and has taught public secondary and postsecondary music courses at different schools, including the University of Toronto. As a musician, he has played with many artists, including Selina Martin, Kael Reid, and Paul Linklater.

“My Mennonite grandparents fled religious persecution in the former U.S.S.R. and finally ended up settling in Manitoba on Treaty 1 territory: the land of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, Dene, and Métis Nations. I grew up helping farm land that was stolen and I have many privileges because of this.”

Lauren Knight
Newsletter Editor

Lauren Knight is a sound artist and Ph.D. candidate (SSHRC CGS-D) at the University of Toronto in the Faculty of Information. Her research interests include acoustic ecology, cultural sound studies, media history, and research creation. She has published her written work in various journals including the ‘Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media’ and the ‘Journal of Urban History’, and has produced several podcasts, sound art, and documentary films with some of her documentary work licensed by CBC for national broadcast and streaming distribution (CBC Gem).

Mickey Valley
WFAE Representative

Mickey Valley currently serving as the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Sound Studies at Athabasca University, finds his academic journey driven by a curiosity about the interplay between sound, technics, and the environment. With a Ph.D. in Music from the University of Alberta, his multidisciplinary path has led him to explore the complex relationships that sound recording technologies and listening technologies forge with the natural world. This exploration has culminated in his contributions to respected journals, chapter contributions, and two monographs focusing on the changing dynamics of sound and listening over time. His research is broad in scope, spanning the history of sound recording, the philosophy of sound recording, acoustic ecology, and bioacoustics—a space where sound and music resonate with diverse multispecies inhabitants. He co-founded the Posthumanism Research Institute at Brock University and is on the Board of Directors for the Canadian Association for Sound Ecology and is the Canadian representative for the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. Currently, he is engaged in a multispecies ethnography within a wildlife corridor in southern Alberta, exploring improved human-wildlife relations and the emergence of novel natural contracts through their shared sonicity—a pursuit he refers to as sonotechnics.

Leonardo Cabrera
CASE/Parks coordinator

Leonardo Cabrera is a Biologist from the National University of Mexico (UNAM) with a Master degree from the same institution in Ecology and Environmental Sciences. For more than 20 years Leonardo has explored the causes of landscape conservation and degradation by using transdisciplinary approaches to integrate ecological and social dynamics of cultural landscapes of Mexico, Central America, Australia and Canada. In his PhD research (McGill University, Montreal, Canada), he worked with ancient pastoral communities of Central Mexico’s high mountains to understand local traditional grassland management practices, land guardianship, and power relationships shaping a vibrant cultural landscape of high conservation value. Since 2007, Leonardo has been with Parks Canada as Ecosystem Scientist to lead ecosystem monitoring and habitat restoration projects, manage human wildlife coexitence situation, and coordinate scientific research. He has been implementing acoustic bird monitoring projects, has obtained diverse certifications on nature sound recording, and has led academic thesis on Indigenous Soundscapes. He currently leads the project as member of the Canadian Association for Acoustic Ecology “Documenting the soundscapes of Canada’s National Parks: a baseline to recognize current acoustic condition, change, and motivate action”.

Simone D’Ambrosio
Semaine du son du Canada rep

Simone D’Ambrosio, based in Montreal, is a sound artist and musician researching the manipulation of environmental sounds and the integration of spatial components in composition processes. As a member of Audiotopie since 2015, he designs and conceives polymorphic projects ranging from podcasts to sound walks and sound installations.

Julie Andreyev
Research

Julie Andreyev is an artist, researcher and educator in Vancouver, located on the unceded, traditional and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish people, including the  xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations, as well as the unceded traditional territories of more-than-human life including bears, deers, raccoons, eagles, ravens, crows, hummingbirds, cedars, firs, salals and others. Her multispecies studio called Animal Lover explores more-than-human creativity to develop kinships with local lifeforms and ecologies. She has a PhD from Simon Fraser University, and is Associate Professor in the Audain Faculty of Art, Emily Carr University of Art + Design where she teaches New Media + Sound Arts, and Critical Studies courses. One of her favourite things to do is hiking with her canine companions Zorra and Heroe, paying attention to the liveliness of the animals, trees and plants, and Earth forces. She is currently working on creative co-productions with birds (Bird Park Survival Station), and sound art experiences within forest ecologies (Branching Songs). Her book is Lessons from a Multispecies Art Studio: Uncovering Ecological Understanding & Biophilia Through Creative Reciprocity. Intellect Books, 2021. Julie is co-director of the Basically Good Media Lab at Emily Carr University.

Ellen Waterman
Research

Ellen Waterman holds the Helmut Kallmann Chair for Music in Canada and is a Professor in the School for Studies in Art and Culture at Carleton University. Her interdisciplinary research in music and sound studies engages with improvisation, performance ecologies, listening, d/Deaf and disability-led music, community-engaged research-creation methodologies, and social change in Canada. Her early work examined the environmental music dramas of R. Murray Schafer, and she is currently editing a collection of critical essays re-examining his legacy across acoustic ecology, environmental composition, and experimental music pedagogy. Waterman is also active as a flutist/vocalist specializing in creative improvisation, a practice that informs her research-creation. Her instructional score Bodily Listening in Place (2022), commissioned by New Adventures in Sound Art, explores an expanded concept of listening across different sensory modalities. With Rebecca Caines, she co-facilitates the Listening to Social Transformation through Engagement Network (LiSTEN), a multidisciplinary project exploring the potential of listening and creative arts to affect social change. In 2021 Waterman founded the Research Centre for Music, Sound, and Society in Canada, dedicated to exploring the complex and diverse roles that music and sonic arts play in shaping Canadian society.

Malte Leander
member

Malte Leander is a Swedish-French multidisciplinary artist currently residing in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada. Primarily working in sound and performance, his sonic explorations and artistic research often revolve around various natural environments, from urban spaces to coastlines and ocean ecology. He seeks to engage audiences through multisensory experiences around the topics of non-anthropocentric listening, deep listening practices, ecological performance, soundwalks and soundscape composition.

In this approach around ecologies, Malte explores shifts of perspectives when interactions and overlaps between the human and the non-human occur, serving to challenge the understanding of timescales and hierarchies within these systemic classifications. Malte also combines his practice in sound with experimental analog video production and DIY electronic projects in both installation and live performance.

Malte also works within a number of community-oriented initiatives and projects. Throughout his work with various collectives, non-profit organizations and art institutions, he has taken on roles such as programming coordinator, podcast host, audiovisual tech and project manager when organizing large scale events such as a two-day mini-festival, a song-writing camp, and an international sound art residency exchange program, to mention a few. His creative efforts across disciplines and communities have led him to present artworks and organize various projects in both Canada and internationally, spanning across Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Mexico and the United States.

He is currently working as the coordinator at LePARC (Performing Arts Research Cluster) at the Milieux Institute at Concordia University in Montreal, alongside carrying through contractual freelance work and developing his own personal artistic projects.

Claude Schryer
Former member of the board

Claude Schryer believes the arts, in the context of decolonization, can play a much more impactful role in shaping our collective future and has dedicated the rest of his life to this vocation. He is a franco-ontarian sound and media artist and arts administrator of european ancestry. He holds a MM in composition from McGill University and was actively in involved in the acoustic ecology and electroacoustic music communities in the 80’s & 90’s in Montréal, Banff and across Europe. From 00 to 20 he held management positions at Canada Council for the Arts in Inter-Arts, partnerships and as a senior strategic advisor. He currents produces the conscient podcast on art and the ecological crisis (season 4, ‘Sounding Modernity : weekly 5 minute sound mediations’ runs from 1 January to December 31, 2023). He describes his artistic aesthetic as ‘an exploration of the liminal space between reality, fantasy and spirit’. He is also an environmental activist who volunteers with the Sectoral Climate Art Leadership for the Emergency (SCALE)(currently chair of the board and member of the Mission Circle) and regularly gives workshops, facilitates meetings, and participates in panels and presentations on art and sound and the ecological crisis. He is grateful to the Gesturing Towards Decolonized Futures collective and the Facing Human Wrongs course for guidance in his learnings and unlearnings. He is a daily qi gong practionner, swimmer, e-biker, son of artist Jeannine and (late) pathologist Maurice Schryer, husband of artist Sabrina Mathews, father of earth science student Clara Schryer and history student Riel Schryer.