Kaitie Sly
Artist in Residence
August-September 2021
Kaitie Sly is a composer, songwriter, sound artist, performing musician, and music educator. For over 25 years, she has worked as a session, touring and performing musician in Canada, the USA, and the UK.
Some performance highlights include performing with the Motown Superstar, Martha Reeves; and performing at renowned venues such as the Cavern Club in Liverpool, UK. Kaitie was formally trained in music at the Musicians Institute in Los Angeles, where she spent many years backing artists, doing session work, and developing herself as an artist. She also obtained her Masters in Music from the University of Victoria, specializing in music technology, where she established herself as a soundscape composer, and researcher in the field of acoustic ecology.
As a music educator, Kaitie has published a series of 6 method books for the electric bass, and she designed the bass path for the highly successful online music lesson platform, Fender Play. She was an artist-in-resident at Lobe Studio in 2021, and has been accepted to the artist residency programs at both the Spatial Sound Institute in Budapest, and MONOM in Berlin. She has received numerous awards and accolades for her work, including most recently two BC Arts Council grants. She continues to perform and record regularly with her afro soul group, Serengeti; her experimental rock project, Syreim; her solo project, Kaitie Sly; as well as for other artists.
Traversing the Mind
Traversing the Mind was created at Lobe Spatial Sound Studio using 4DSOUND technology. This piece is a hybrid between a musical composition and a sound journey. I aimed to bring elements and instrumentation of sound healing and meditation into this piece, to go along with Lobe's mandate of using spatial sound immersion to assist in cognitive-behavioral therapies, meditation practices, and somatic therapies. This piece features performances on singing bowls and gongs by sound healer, Bonnie Starcevich; and Mongolian/Tuvan throat singing from internationally renowned throat singer and sound healer, Matthew Kocel.
To experience the piece, a listener puts on an EEG headset device, which stands for electroencephalogram. An EEG device records electrical activity that is being produced by your brain activity. This device analyzes the listener's brainwave activity for the amount of alpha [relaxation] and beta [concentration, gamma [peak focus], theta [meditation], and delta [sleep] frequency ranges. Brain waves in these frequency ranges are mapped to different elements of the soundscape and control/manipulate these elements based on fluctuations in these frequency ranges. Certain frequency ranges manipulate certain sounds. The result is a literal and figurative journey through the mind, as we hear the soundscape being manipulated directly from the mind of the listener. The piece starts off in the external world, then dives into the internal world of the mind where the listener is taken on a sonic journey through the darkness and tranquility of the mind, and everything in-between. The truth is, when we meditate, the process is not always pleasant. Sometimes, our thoughts are racing, sometimes things come up - thoughts and emotions that we have to face. When you meditate, there is no longer anything to distract you from your true thoughts and feelings. And so you have to learn how to sit with your own mind. That’s why they call it a meditation “practice.” You will of course, encounter moments of tranquility sometimes too and that’s what this music reflects. But the world of the mind is infinitely complex and this composition takes a deep dive into the world of the mind. Thus there are elements of dissonance and consonance. Peace and hostility.