Binaural Soundscape Compositions from the Sonic Arts Studio, Queen's University Canada (May 2026)

22 ECHOES

Location: Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Sonic Arts Studio

Work from the Sonic Arts Studio of Queen's University in Kingston Ontario Canada

This is a collection of site-specific pieces produced with binaural processes, for headphone listening. The pieces were created by students of MUSC256, which is based in the Sonic Arts Studio of the Dan School of Drama and Music, a department of Queen's University in Kingston Ontario Canada. Kingston and Queen's occupy territories of the Anishenaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples, and we do all our work keeping foremost in mind the long histories of the people who formerly had villages and burial sites in the area where Queen's is located. Part of thinking about land is paying attention to specific sites over time, and these pieces are the result of a term's engagement with some places on and around the Queen's Campus. For students graduating, they leave behind their sonic traces in this Echoes walk.

Water and Gravel

Waves washing over gravel beach.

1 sound

Queen's Central Heating Plant

1 sound

Water Overview

1 sound

Sanctus Sermons

1 sound

Intersection

1 sound

Dougie

1 sound

Ambient Soundscape for Theological Hall Bench

1 sound

The Pier

1 sound

Tunnel from Etherington Hall to parkade

Based on the sounds heard in a video game called Five Nights at Freddy’s, we created a spooky, yet comical experience using the DearVR Micro plugin. We recorded every sound using a Sony PCM recorder, and spread out the sounds across a 1 minute ambience of the space. It is meant to be played as you walk down the tunnel, ending just before it turns to the left. There is some spoken word, and there are some ambient noises. All the recordings were taken in the tunnel.

1 sound

Miller Hall

This piece used sounds recorded in Miller Hall and heavily edited to sound like phenomenon on Earth, to fit the theme of the geology museum. The piece was esoterically designed to match one way someone may walk through the museum with sounds binaurally placed in a very deliberate way to match where one would find parts of the museum. The piece also follows the partly determined history and future of Earth, the planet, with its creation, long life, and eventual death. It is designed for you to enter through the "front doors" of the building.

1 sound

Stauffer Library

For this composition, I chose Stauffer Library as my location. When thinking about what sounds reminded me of Stauffer, I decided to go sit in the library and listen. I heard chatter, typing on computers, footsteps, and books. I recorded audio of all of these things, aside from the chatter, which I found online, and then I started the composition. By using the dream fm plugin, I was able to pan the different sounds to different places in the soundscape. I feel I was successful in creating an audio project that has different sounds surrounding the listener.

1 sound

Pollution Sculpture by the Lake

This piece is meant to be listened to inside the tube-like playground structure in the grass behind KGH. It was a cloudy, gloomy, rainy say when I recorded some of the soundscapes there, so I wanted to incorporate that feeling and presence into the piece. It uses ambient pads, pulsing synths, and bursts of foley on top of the main audio files from the location.

nb: This sculpture, entitled 'Pollution', was a gift of the Province of Québec to Kingston in 1973 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of French settlement.

1 sound

Intersection of Union and University

The audio was recorded at an intersection with a drain near ARC. The plan was to use white noise as a background, then occasionally interspersed with the sounds of water, traffic, and sporadic human conversations to draw attention. The aim was to convey a feeling of standing at an intersection waiting for a traffic light, briefly lost in thought, or even sleepwalking. The degree of echo was to be increased. While preserving the context of the recording environment, its formality was to be enhanced. My initial concept was to explore the interaction of natural sounds, mechanical noise, and human voices within the same space, and how careful listening alters our understanding of space.

1 sound

Common Ground

As I spend most of my time studying in coffee shops, I thought that would be the most appropriate setting to record this Geolocated Soundscape composition. This soundscape is the sounds of a common ground coffee house located in the ARC. The soundscape is filled with the voices of others, music from the speaker as well as the common sounds that occur in a coffee shop. Some of these include, milk frothers, glasses banging together and orders being called out. I find that coffee shops provide such a unique soundscape as they provide a sense of community just through noise. You can feel the warmth through the soundscape which is rare.

1 sound

Encompass (Tabor Hall)

This sound experience highlights the mixed emotions of being a 4th year student at queens in their final year. the sounds of vibrant student life, the sun, the comfort and pride of school. These are sounds that were so integrated into student daily life for so long. this piece attempts to capture these sounds as fleeing, as sounds that won’t be there forever.

1 sound

JDUC

The recording of the hall was first stripped of some parts that I didn’t like (beeps, harsh sounds). Then I used creative convolution to add some texture. I did some self convolution but also self convolution where the audio was offset from itself a bit which created a ripple/echo type effect. I cut out some of the lower frequencies and hum at parts to be able to focus on other parts as they started to overwhelm everything. I used spectral editing to isolate and emphasize some harmonics. I tried reshaping them at some parts which created some interesting wispy textures. I used some granular effect to fill in some sections with more tonal backing. Then I panned everything around binaurally to try and create a greater sense of space and also add some movement. I left some of the more percussive/ concrete (people talking, footsteps) sounds in at the beginning but cut them out gradually to allow the listener to shift their focus to the sense of space.

1 sound

Isabel Bader Walk

For this assignment I chose the my location to be the Isabel Bader centre, specifically the section of lake in front of Juniper’s café. I chose this location because I often go on walks to the lake by myself, and find it really calming and special. I recorded me walking along the side of the lake and looking at the water after leaving the café, and I walked on various types of surfaces, such as snow, rocks, concrete, and pebbles to create a variety of sounds. I also sat close to the water’s edge to record the flowing sounds of the water. I tried to narrate some of the sounds as I was inspired by a soundscape from a previous class, but I also kept moments without talking to add a variety of sounds and encourage the listener to listen intently to the backing sounds. I also chose this location because there was many background sounds, such as a busy road and the water flowing.

I tried to narrate some of my actions and describe the sounds as well as what I could see to help the listener create vivid imagery in their minds. However, I did not describe everything because I wanted the listener to still use their imagination and encourage every listener to paint a different picture in their minds.

I used the azimuth plugin on dearVR MICRO to move sound between the listeners right and left ears to create the sound of a 3D soundscape. I also added movement from left to right when cars drove path to imitate the change in sound direction as they moved past the listener. For my reflections fx, I chose to use a glass room for the first part of the audio as it made the wave audio sound very crisp. However, I later changed the room sound to brick so the audio sounded more like it was outside. There were no room settings that were outside so I chose these sounds because they also produced less muffled sounds compared to ‘drapes’ and ‘curtain’ room options. I set the focus to the maximum after a fade in at the beginning as I wanted the VR MICRO sounds to have the maximum affects. I also changed the elevation depending on where my position was relative to the water, for example at the end I climbed up some rocks and walked away.

1 sound