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e141 filature - what does gatineau sound like?
Season 4 Episode 141
a bilingual soundwalk with city of Gatineau councillor (Hull-Wright) Steven Moran around ‘la filature’ for radio-hull 2023
TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE (this episode is a mix of English and French, below is the complete English version)
(bell and breath)
Claude (C ): Steven Morin, I invite you to take a sound walk with me.
Steve (S): Excellent. Shall we?
C: So you're a local councillor here?
S: Yes. From Hull-Wright.
C: Me, I'm an artist in residence here at DAIMON then I create works for the radio-hull 2023. Then I decided to take a walk with a friend, you, in French and English. The idea of a sound walk is to pay attention to all the details. For example, our feet are making a rather soft sound at the moment. It just rained here in Gatineau. You can feel all the details of life through sound.
Claude: And it's going to be a bilingual conversation because Gatineau is multilingual and I'm bilingual. In fact, my family, my grandfather lived in Hull at the time. So there are lots of stories that we can tell.
C: I'd start with what you're hearing right now, Steven.
S: I can hear the leaves in the poplar over there. You hear construction because you always hear construction in the city center. I hear birds. I think it was a chickadee. I hear the wind. I hear the wind by itself, I think. I hear the wind in the leaves. I hear the highway and then Montcalm. Someone with a chainsaw, it sounds like.
C: So that's the idea. But what's interesting about the sound walk is that you can also interact with the soundscape. So you listen to it, you perceive it, you're sensitive to... for example, the car that's just gone by. You can perceive all sorts of things with sound. For example, there are bustards ahead. We'll see if they make a sound. We're so used to seeing that our sense of hearing is sometimes a little less developed, so a sound walk is a way of sharpening our...
S: With geese, you can hear them in the sky, but you don't think about them as much when they're on the ground.
C: For example, the building here is interesting. The spinning mill was an old factory, the Hanson I forget the name of.
S: Hanson Mills. Socks, among other things? Yes, among other things.
C: Then it was converted into an artist center in the '80s and now it's AxeNéo7 and Daimon. I find it interesting that there's a cultural center in a former industrial site, that it's a way of giving new life to the building and the neighborhood.
(soundscape of children playing)
S: Ruisseau de la Brasserie was really the center of a whole industrial environment. It was the beating heart of Gatineau industry. The axes were made right there. The distillery was right there and a lot of things happened on the creek. So, when we think of industry and culture, when we talk about places, obviously it's often post-industrial spaces that aren't necessarily suitable for housing, so we use them to make cultural spaces. The spinning mill was a perfect example.
(urban soundscape)
S: But it's clear that in this place, if there was an era. I try to imagine it, and then I hear it in my head: the hammers, the big machines, the saws, and so on. That's not the case anymore. I mean, there's no heavy industry of that kind here. The sounds would be completely different. It's fascinating to imagine what it would have been like back then. Also, you have to remember, just before World War II, there was a big homelessness crisis of what we called the homeless at the time, who were here, who were centered on the West Side. So there would even have been camps. Are those industrial sounds? But it would have been families left in poverty, in this industrial system that left them behind. It would also have been a family place. But not in the same way as now.
(soundscape of children playing)
C: When I came here earlier, th
Published on 2 years, 2 months ago