pandemic 

After a year and two lockdowns in Belfast, Northern Ireland, I was able to return home to Montreal, Canada for a short period of time. During this time, I wanted to expand on my research practices of Covid-19_Belfast City and take a soundscape recording approach to the lockdowns in some areas of Downtown and Old Port Montreal. The entirety of Quebec faced different zones of lockdowns; Montreal was in its second lockdown since September 2020 with a home curfew being ordered in early January 2021.

I kept the same recording constraints of only capturing five minutes of audio and composing two-minute listening experiences. Places were chosen by a similar approach of using the VisitBelfast Tourist Map while in Belfast, whereas in Montreal this was the Carte Touristique Officielle/Official Tourist Map 2019-2020. Locations focused on touristic places, hospitality sectors, retail sectors, educational areas, and public urban spaces. Parts 1 and 2 focus on the same three crossroads along the famous Saint-Catherine St in Downtown Montreal, Part 3 on Old Port Montreal, and Part 4 on the Quebec Home Alert for the curfew put in place.

For this project, the points of interest are:

Guy Street
Crescent Street
Peel Street
Le Petit Dep on Saint-Paul
Notre-Dame Basilica of Montreal
Place Jacques Cartier
Marché Bonsecours
Promenade du Vieux-Port
Saint Catherine Street
Quebec Home Alert – Used Laval City Hall as map location

Additional Contributions

1- Sounding Montreal During Covid-19

This project reflects through an auditory and sonic art perspective how the city sounds like without the presence of humans or the normal amount of human density in popular areas in public spaces of Montreal.

This project is accessible via Echoes (Geolocated audio tours & experiences): https://explore.echoes.xyz/collections/Q6FztVnFMhtOzHoO


2- Cities and Memory (https://citiesandmemory.com/covid19-sounds/)

This sound map is part of Cities and Memory: #StayHomeSounds is a global field recording & sound art work that presents both the present reality of a place and an alternative, reimagined sound world – remixing the world, one sound at at time.

Scroll to Montreal, Canada and you will see all files I have recorded.

3- Radio Aporee – Soundscapes in the Pandemic: (https://aporee.org/maps/work/projects.php?project=corona)

The platform radio aporee is online since about 2000, the project radio aporee ::: maps has started 2006. it is a global soundmap dedicated to field recording, phonography and the art of listening. it connects sound recordings to its places of origin, in order to create a sonic cartography, publicly accessible as a collaborative project. It contains recordings from numerous urban, rural and natural environments, disclosing their complex shape and sonic conditions, as well as the different perceptions, practices and artistic perspectives of its many contributors. this makes it a valuable resource for art, education and research projects, and for your personal pleasure.

In addition to aspects of collecting, archiving and sound-mapping, the radio aporee platform also invokes experiments at the boundaries of different media and public space. within this notion, radio means both a technology in transition and a narrative. it constitutes a field whose qualities are connectivity, contiguity and exchange. concepts of transmitter/ receiver and performer/ listener may become transparent and reversible. 

https://georgiosvaroutsos.com/covid-19_montreal-city-lockdowns/