Bio
Elizabeth Haig is a multi-hyphenate artist with a wide range of award-winning experience in music, creative writing, dance, visual arts, and theater. When not working directly in the creative act, she is a children's librarian, where she is able to share her passion, skill, and resources with a diverse range of patrons. As a Teaching Artist, she aims to rekindle our awareness of the physical and emotional properties of sound and provide critical thought, tech skills, and the confidence to create and blend sound into an intimate auditory experience.
Sound gives power to even the quietest voice. It is a medium that circumvents the translation needed for other art forms (e.g. visual art, dance, spoken and written language) and is universally recognized, no context required. Even for the neurodivergent, Hard of Hearing, and Deaf, it is a sensory experience full of information. Though often reduced to background noise, the medium is so potent that anyone can create—and experience—an entire world through sound.
While sound plays a vital role in evolution—our wide-spread ears give us the directionality to discern and locate danger—it is also linked to emotion and memory and leads us to the magic and power of storytelling and music. A single sound can be the microcosm of an entire story.
Can you mentally recall what your doorbell or ringtone sounds like?How does that sound make you react? How do you feel when you hear a cat purr or a baby laugh? What's the one song that epitomizes your high school years?
Now imagine what an individual could share if they harnessed the sounds, samples, and songs that resonate within their own body, their own life, their own world. That is a landscape of sound: a soundscape.
Soundscapes blend an individual's choice of sounds to portray their own memories and feelings. Then we enhance it with musical structures, like rhythm, organized pitch, and repeating ideas. What results is a journey through a rarely explored medium. And each creation brings us into an immersive world, purely auditory, transporting us where we could never otherwise travel.
Potential Residency Project
My proposal is to work with students to create their own soundscapes. The quick version of this project proposal breaks down as such:
- I present on the power of sound, from a single noise to a full soundscape, with video and sound examples of what we'll be doing.
- We invite the group to journal and find or create recordings of significance to them, on their own and over the course of a few days.
- I teach students to place their sounds into the software, (re)arranging them, and getting comfortable with the tech.
- We provide time to continue independent work.
- Students submit or present final drafts for feedback.
- We provide one more opportunity to finalize soundscapes.
- We publicly display posters for each creator's soundscape that include blurbs about them and their pieces, plus a QR code that links to their recording.
The broader scope of teaching soundscapes takes into consideration our creators' ages and abilities, access to technology, the skills and bandwidth of the leadership I work with, and a trauma-informed approach to self-expression
Please reach out if you'd like to know more about or collaborate on my proposal.