This year’s Dialogues Festival is about interfaces for sound and music, we’re calling it ‘facing sound.

Our 24th Festival shows artists pulling matters that may seem beyond music into the sonic and into an experience of listening. For example, the Festival starts with a concert of entirely new audio-visual material propelled into being by information pulled from Twitter in real-time. [Reticulations] is conceived and led by Louis McHugh and features sonic artists (and ECA alumni) Dara Etefaghi and Nani Porenta.

On Thursday 20th October we’ll be exploring sound as it is heard across sites of great tension with panel discussions around themes such as the “acoustic conditions of detention” or the “delerium in the ICU” at our preparation day for the UNESCO week of sound 2023. In the early evening, Joshua Weitzel, Li Li (KSA) and Sam Tsao will present TanBone (Sound Pot), an art installation showing the results of research into noise as a gesture of protest and solidarity amid the recent military coup in Myanmar.

The Festival ends with entirely new interfaces for sound in a concert by Montreal’s foremost instrument builder, composer and installation artist, Jean-François Laporte. Laport brings his extraordinary air compressor-powered instrument, the Babel Table to ECA’s West Court on Friday 21 October at 7pm.