Samuel Thulin’s practice combines sound and mobility. Over the past seven years, the artist has developed methods to create and disseminate sound compositions. Through a process of moving in space, listening and composition in situ, Thulin strives to approach a location’s acoustic, social, physical and historical qualities. He continually explores new approaches to composition and new ways for the public to experience a variety of soundscapes.
Compositional Routes of the Magdalen Islands
By moving his research from the urban context to the singular context of the Magdalen Islands, the artist, attentive to the peculiarities of places, intends to develop two avenues: the “situated composition” and the “musical journey.” Thulin will also conduct a series of wandering compositions created exclusively on foot (outside the studio) and from field recordings. Then he will hold group and individual listening tours, disseminating compositions using, for example, portable speakers. One thing is certain: these sound routes will not oppose a mobile artist against a fixed landscape. For Samuel Thulin, a place is not an inert thing, but “a constellation of process.” For him, the Islands will be open, multiple and mobile, traversed by a multitude of temporalities and speeds.
Samuel Thulin is a media artist, musician/composer and researcher originally from Nortondale, New Brunswick, currently carrying out postdoctoral studies in Lancaster, UK. His work investigates intersections in sound, mobility and place, paying particular attention to emerging mobile media practices, and experimenting with mobile and locative technologies. Thulin’s use of found sounds and field recordings as compositional materials stems from his experience growing up in rural New Brunswick, where he began recording songs in the attic of his childhood home while sounds from his environment—pots and pans clanging downstairs, cows and birds calling in the surrounding farmlands—combined with the music he was creating. Thulin’s works exist variously as punctual performances and installations in physical spaces, as online creations and as geolocated compositions that rely on movement through places in order to be activated. He has shared his work in Canada, the US, South America and Europe.
Songlines 