Story Trees by Don Hill

STORY TREES is an interactive installation that serves as a tool for listening & learning -- how we listen -- to echoes from an era that is open to reinterpretation. While digitizing old reel-to-reel oral history interviews, Don Hill was surprised by how things were said at the time in northern Ontario, Canada and how many gestures of speech are no longer heard in common day-to-day parlance. It wasn’t the content of the conversations that first caught his ear; it was the little asides, the nuanced bits of intonation, inflections of speech, as if northern Ontario had a different dialect way back when. As the towns and the province grew, he heard a shift in the patter. He also heard something - an emergent literary voice, a kind of wisdom - that wasn’t accounted for by words alone.

Sound artist & designer, writer, broadcaster, musician and interactive media producer, Don Hill is a former national host of CBC Radio One’s Tapestry. His newest work STORY TREES is a modified ‘responsive architecture’ & interactive online exhibition. Don’s prior investigation of psychoacoustics of ‘place’ inspired his augmented reality app Edmonton Soundwalks, a 3D audio guide for mobile phones. Special Places: Writing-On- Stone is an immersive 360 video presentation that scales from full-dome screens to VR (virtual reality) headsets. In residency with the UK’s renowned Blast Theory he made WRGO (what’s really going on), a surreal 3D audio narrative.