Using wind and breath as content and focus, Wind Studies (2019) is a project designed to organize and expand a set of parameters, tools and practices for composing through three interrelated forms: an ongoing participatory website, an intimate participatory audio installation and compositions for ensemble and breath/voice choir.

Wind Studies is a continuation of periodic wine explorations undertaken through field recordings, soundwalks, listening practices, sonic meditations and composition. It links to a life-long preoccupation with the mechanisms, sounds, rhythms, states, and practices of breathing, and their applications in composition and performance. The project intends a looping triadic reciprocal relationship between an intimate visceral function (breath), a biospheric element (wind), and the digital/networked manipulation and presentation of material.

The project as a whole reflects a desire to sense, inwardly and outwardly, the long, slow, vast, interconnected biospheric changes that are now occurring within the increasing ecological anxiety we are swimming in. It supposes that the cellular memories of humans can be charged through breath, voice, performance and other means in a kind of artmaking that longs for an atunement with biological and elemental forces.

Wind Studies brings data about changing wind patterns and the evolving ingredients of shared breathed air into a field that is both internalized (by participants and performers) and demonstrated (through a creative approach to sonification). Rather than using field recordings of wind, all sounds in the resulting works will be derived from recorded human breath and voice and/or live instruments responding to invitation scores and sonic meditations.

Wind Studies is a project of Tina Pearson, with technical assistance from Dave Riedstra, Kirk Schwartz and others.

Stay tuned for updates, website information and audiovisual materials.

Wind studies is funded by The Canada Council for the Arts / le Conseil des arts du Canada and the British Columbia Arts Council.