Each city generates its own soundscapes, and according to a collective of Montreal artists, those of the metropolis, in 2022, are proving to be greatly influenced by the housing crisis. This is why the group launched Reverberations of a crisis. A sound survey on housing in Montreal, Friday evening, at the Casa Del Popolo. This is an ambitious project combining experimental music and podcasts, questioning the effects of the crisis through sound.
“We often hear about the private side of the housing crisis, individual dramas. Obviously, the drama is immense, but the housing crisis is also changing the face of the city as a whole. Neighborhoods and their atmospheres change,” says Hubert Gendron-Blais, author, musician, and postdoctoral researcher at McGill University.
Along with a dozen other artists, Mr. Gendron-Blais held out the microphone to citizens who are victims of the gentrification of their neighborhood. He also wanted to report “the soundscapes of threatened spaces”, he says, by making recordings of ambient sounds from sectors particularly affected by the crisis.
This is how the collective launched, on Friday, an album of experimental music that contains both excerpts from interviews, ambient sounds and original music. The group has also produced a podcast that explores, in seven thirty-minute episodes, various related themes such as gentrification, nightlife politics and Indigenous homelessness.
“We wanted to record sounds that reflected how the housing crisis is destroying affective communities,” explains Mr. Gendron-Blais. His own piece on the album, where we hear recordings from the alley behind the apartment where he lives, in Parc-Extension, corresponds precisely to this approach.
He says he was “renovated” from his last apartment in Villeray, and found himself in Parc-Extension by force of circumstance. “As a young white man educated in such a changing neighborhood, I participate in its gentrification. That’s why I chose instead to have the five or six languages that can be spoken at the same time heard in my alley in the afternoon. My piece is like a tribute to the multiplicity of my alley, which, basically, is threatened,” says Hubert Gendron-Blais.
The sound, more “collective”?
In interview with The duty last September, the acoustician Romain Dumoulin declared that there is “clearly a discrepancy between the visual and the sound” in our perception of the environment. Researchers of soundscapes, like Mr. Dumoulin, thus manage to empirically demonstrate the consequences of various policies — which we do not see — through sound.
Mr. Gendron-Blais rightly explains that the objective of his sound creations is to “make heard realities that are perhaps less audible in individual experience, to touch on something more ambient, collective and diffuse”.
All aspects of the project Reverberations of a crisis. A sound survey on housing in Montrealsupported by the artist-run center Oroboro and the Canada Council for the Arts, are available on the website of the same name.