Sound & Vision

ACCOUNTS & RECORDS is a media arts company, but that doesn’t really explain what we do. We like to say that we create sonic worlds for others to experience and enjoy, which can be anything from a podcast to the audio component of an art installation, a radio play or the audio walks that we have worked on in collaboration with the Koffler Centre of the Arts. We did a walk called The Slow Now, inspired by Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces. People can download the file and listen as they walk College Street between Manning and Montrose. It’s part podcast, part poetry reading, with a lot of references to the physical environment—both what is there now and what used to be there. We’re really interested in preserving the history of our public spaces: the stories, the buildings, the environments.

The creative, storytelling aspect of what we do drives most of our work, but we also care a lot about sound and quality from a technical point of view. We’ll spend days making sure one small detail sounds exactly as it would in real life. There’s a whole technical component to having certain sounds go in one ear versus the other; that’s how you can, for example, deliver the audio impression of a bus passing by you. We’re both self-taught—a lot of trial and error and YouTube tutorials.

We’ve definitely benefited from the audio renaissance that’s been happening over the past few years. When we first started in 2013, we would be trying to explain to people what a podcast is, and then there was Serial and now everyone wants to talk about whatever they’re listening to. Another big game-changer for us was the massive Pokémon Go fad from a couple of years ago. That game had nothing to do with audio, but it was about layering a simulated environment over an actual environment, which is what a lot of our work is about.

INTERVIEW BY COURTNEY SHEA

PHOTOS BY REGINA GARCIA