Who is That Woman with the Microphone?
Victoria Fenner is a radio producer and environmental sound artist living in Hamilton Ontario, Canada
Victoria's sound art works are informed and influenced by the
Canadian school of soundscape composition which grew out the pioneering work in acoustic ecology by the eminent composer
R. Murray Schafer. She is a past president and board member of the Canadian Association for Acoustic Ecology,
a coalition of Canadian individuals and institutions who are concerned about the sound of our communities.
This group includes many artists who strive to listen to the soundscape as musical composition and use
environmental sound as the basis of their artistic works.
In addition to her career as a sound artist and documentarian,
Victoria has worked in all aspects of radio for over twenty years. She has worked as a producer,
journalist, documentarian and sound engineer for CBC Radio and also at community stations in Canada
and the United States. In recent years, she has focused increasingly on teaching workshops in sound
and community art making, and helping people share their creations on radio and the internet through social media.
In Victoria's own words....
“My web site invites you to listen.
To listen to the world around you and to hear the world in new ways.
It is also about creating the kind of sonic world that we want, expressed in the rhythms,
words, textures and harmonies which enhance our spirit’s growth.
I like to draw from real sounds but combine them in new
ways which move beyond traditional documentary narrative style. I also am a journalist,
but I try to break out of the confines of “objective” reality. A good way to explain
this is to imagine what would happen if a journalist and a poet were sent to a place and
had to produce one story together. The reporter's treatment would be fact-based and objective,
the poet would be subjective and based on personal impressions. My work is a blend of the two approaches ...
sometimes it's journalism, sometimes it's poetry, sometimes it's both. And sometimes it's neither.
What I do is sometimes described as electroacoustic music Or Acusmatic music. Radio Art or Audio Art.
There's not just one name for it.”
Why “Magnetic Spirits”?
“I searched for many months for a name for this web site,
trying to find something which spoke of poetic, metaphorical nature of sound,
not just its physical reality.
And like all good ideas, the title came from an unexpected place,
in a moment when I wasn't looking for it. I was sitting in the studios of WMMT, a community radio station in Whitesburg,
Kentucky, listening to a recording that I had made. As my eyes wandered about the room
I spied a handwritten sign on the window that said "Please erase your tapes on the other
side of the glass wall to appease all the sensitive magnetic spirits in our studio".
Magnets make audio recording possible. At least in the analog days.
Today, we are working more and more in the digital realm, but magnets are still a big part of the technology.
I honour those magnetic spirits. Not just because my microphones are made of them.
I honour what the microphone does, in a larger sense -- a magnet brings together two elements across time and space.
It helps make communication possible, uniting people and ideas in new creation.
In the words of American author Brenda Ueland (1891-1985) "Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force.
When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other.
We are constantly being re-created".