SSXXII Installations!
Mechanical Hymns
by Anju Singh
July 15th-18th, noon onwards *with artist talk July 17th, 6pm
LSPU Hall Second Space
Mechanical Hymns is a project that repurposes machines and mechanical elements into instruments, sound sculptures, and interactive installations using machines, industrial materials, and other media.
Mechanical Hymns interrogates our assumptions about the nature of noise, machine sounds, music, and mechanical silence.
Anju Singh is a media artist, composer, musician and sound artist with an interdisciplinary practice that infuses her composing and music work into video art, installation, sound sculpture, theatre, and film forms. She experiments with texture, dynamics, contrast, and articulation in her practice as a multi-instrumentalist, performer, visual artist, illustrator, sculptor, and instrument builder. Anju deconstructs and reanimates materials and plays with dynamics and boundary-stressing elements in her work.
She has toured, and presented her work across Canada, in Europe, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, and the United States and has been commissioned/presented by Two Rivers Gallery, NAISA (New Adventures in Sound Art), VIVO Media Arts Centre, New Music Concerts Toronto, New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA), Vancouver New Music, Canadian League of Composers, Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre, Bard on the Beach, CEM in Saguenay QC, Suoni per il Popolo Festival, Le Vivier, and Continuum Ensemble. Anju plays in a number of bands and has an experimental violin project called The Nausea. Anju also works as a curator and is the Director of independently organized festival Vancouver Noise Fest (12 editions).
Night Shift Orchestra
by Luc Bonin
July 15th-21st, 10am-4pm
Anglican Cathedral
Night Shift Orchestra is an immersive installation that presents an original score and audiovisual work by composer and musician Luc Bonin aka Urbain Desbois, performed by a peculiar orchestra that explores the boundary between directed musical composition and natural phenomena. This project features an orchestra of nocturnal butterflies interacting with musical instruments—vibrating strings, percussive surfaces—creating a unique sonic material captured on video and edited to perform the score composed by Luc Bonin. The resulting installation offers an enveloping sensory experience where light, sound, and the movement of living creatures intertwine to form an unprecedented score. The installation is designed around a setup of eight synchronized video screens, each assigned a dedicated sound source, creating an immersive spatialized audio experience. Currently in the composition and editing phase, the work will be ready for presentation in the spring of 2026. Its premiere will take place in May 2026 at the Festival International de Musiques Actuelles de Victoriaville (FIMAV)
Luc Bonin, also known as Urbain Desbois, is a multi-instrumentalist, director, author, composer, and performer. Since the 1980s, his musical journey has been marked by an exploration of diverse genres, ranging from punk rock to reggae, by way of jazz and experimental music. Although Urbain Desbois is known for his songwriting—and for some fifteen years enjoyed a string of concert tours and album releases—composing has always been central to his life. He has worked in this capacity for theatre, television, radio, and film. His exploratory work in music (in collaboration, as an improviser, or as an accompanist for poets) informs his artistic output.
Harbour Horizons
by VibraFusionLab
July 16th, 18th, 21st, 11am-3pm
Harbourside Park
Harbour Horizons is about experiencing water as a multi-sensory medium offering access to the underwater resonances of the Halifax harbour through aural, visual and haptic encounters.
The installation at Harbourside Park will consist of independent hearing, feeling and seeing stations. Employing small speakers, pans of water and vibrotactile cushions, participants will experience both pre-recorded and live underwater recording of sounds emanating from under the surface of the St. John’s harbour offering a unique immersive experience for the senses.
David Bobier is a hard of hearing and disabled media artist whose creative practice is exploring multi-modal means of art making. His work focuses on developing accessible vibrotactile technology as an artistic and experiential medium that lead to the establishment in 2012 of VibraFusionLab. The Lab is a multi-sensory creative research centre now situated in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada that has an international reputation as a leader in accessibility for the D/deaf and Disability Arts movement.
His career includes nearly 30 solo and two-person exhibitions and over 30 group exhibitions in Canada and internationally.
Bobier has served in advisory roles in developing D/deaf and Disability Arts Equity programs for both Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, was an invited participant in the Canada Council for the Arts – The Arts in a Digital World Summit and a presenter at the Global Disability Summit in London, UK. He has also been an invited juror for both the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council and in 2024 was nominated by the Canada Council for the Arts for a Governor General’s Innovation Award.
Intimate Aquatic
by Nick Bendsza
July 17th and 20th, 4pm and 4:30pm
The H.G.R. Mews Centre Swimming Pool
Intimate Aquatic: Music for the Public Pool is a sonically and physically immersive sound art installation created for swimming pools. Audience members are invited to float silently while two different narrative ambient soundtracks are being played – one above the surface of the water, and one below.
Artist Nick Bendzsa composed this 30-minute work for both quadraphonic speakers above the water’s surface, and a submerged speaker under the water. Audience members hear something completely different depending on whether they are above or underwater.
Presented as part of Sound Symposium XXII, there are four opportunities to take in this unique new work: Friday July 17th at 4:00pm or 4:30pm, and Monday July 20th at 4:00pm or 4:30pm during the Everyone Welcome swim at the H.G.R Mews Centre. Open your ears, pull on your swimsuit, and join us for this one-of-a-kind sensory experience!
Nick Bendzsa is an artist, songwriter, composer and audio engineer born in St. John’s, Newfoundland and based in Montreal, Quebec. Oscillating between the worlds of emotionally driven pop music, and a familial tradition of sonic experimentation, Bendzsa creates ethereal audible environments, extracting emotive timbres from synthesis, contorted acoustic materials and sampling. Seeking to blend something introverted with something fantastical and ethereal, Bendzsa takes pleasure in the experience of creating something new, and presenting his art in immersive and unique ways.
Living Room
by Luke Blackmore
July 19th and 20th, 5:30pm
MUN School of Music Instrumental Room
Living Room is a large-scale interdisciplinary electroacoustic percussion work that explores the familiar titular space as a site of artistic exploration. The work merges contemporary classical music with theatre and dance to explore themes of isolation, identity, and control within the cultural and social context of the living room.In this piece, transducers are attached to furniture, allowing the space itself to come alive with sound and join the performer in examining our connections to our living spaces. Is the living room a space of isolation or connection? How do we express ourselves in these spaces, and how they affect how our identity is shaped outside of them? Do we have agency over our living rooms, or do they control us? Living Room is dedicated to Nikki Huang, who commissioned the piece, and was instrumental in the composition and realisation of the work. Nikki’s enthusiasm for collaboration and willingness to explore has made Living Room real.
Luke Blackmore is a Canadian composer, sound artist, and saxophonist based in Toronto.
His current artistic practice centers around works that explore acoustic and electronic spaces, and he is interested in exploring the connections and divisions between these two sonic environments. Luke’s work seeks to investigate how these boundaries can be exploited, assured, and otherwise manipulated in order to subvert the collective expectations of audiences. His music explores the tenacious relationship between technological innovation and human performance practice.
Luke holds degrees from the University of Toronto and Memorial University, and has studied under Gary Kulesha, Kotoka Suzuki, Eliot Britton, and Andrew Staniland, among others. He is currently pursuing his Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Toronto.
Luke is the recipient of numerous awards and commissions, most notably the SSHRC CGS-M grant for his ongoing creative research into computer-controlled instrument systems and two SOCAN Foundation Young Composer Awards. His music has been performed and recorded by multiple performers and ensembles such as the JACK Quartet, the Alkali Collective, Josh Rubin, Ryan Scott, Mark Fewer, and others. Luke’s compositions have been performed from coast-to-coast in Canada and abroad, in venues ranging from dive bars to concert halls.
Nikki Huang is a Taiwanese percussionist based in Toronto, whose work moves fluidly between contemporary performance, storytelling, and interdisciplinary collaboration. She is drawn to music that explores character and narrative, often working across original compositions, jazz vibraphone, children’s musical theatre, and workshop-based practices. Her artistic approach is shaped by a deep interest in collaboration and performance as a shared, imaginative space.
As an active performer, Huang has collaborated with ensembles and artists including Esprit Orchestra, New Music Concerts, Tapestry Opera, Women From Space, The Happenstancers, Coexisdance, and Ensemble Intercontemporain through the ULYSSES Platform for Young Musicians. She was selected as an artist of HappLab 2025, and has held artist residencies at the Banff Centre and the Westben Centre. Huang holds a master’s degree in Percussion Performance from the University of Toronto, where she also worked as a research assistant in the Technology and Performance Integration Lab.