NAISA Sound Byte 19 - Anju Singh explores machine noise in Material Transmissions
Interview with Vancouver artist and performances on her electromagnetic sound sculpture
In this video Anju Singh talks about the origins and motivations behind making her sound sculpture Material Transmissions. Interspersed throughout are improvisations on the sound sculpture by Singh and audience members who attended the exhibition opening on January 8, 2026 at the NAISA North Media Arts Centre in South River. The exhibit continues until March 30.
Through the sound sculpture visitors explore the sounds of a sewing machine through electromagnetic pickups and contact mics. A set of four tactile transducers playback whispered vocals in the exhibition space that are emitted through a series of four suspended hand-made dresses. Material Transmissions is part of Anju Singh's MECHANICAL HYMNS project, a series of works exploring the relationship between machines, industrial materials, and mechanical elements through sound, noise, and transmitted audio.
Transcript of video
Anju Singh: So, Mechanical Hymns was a project that I technically started in 2010, and it started with the showing of a modified sewing machine that was using tape loops in an exhibition that was curated by Brady Cranfield at Surrey Art Gallery. At the time I was actually working a lot with re-modifying objects to become sound objects and instruments, and so I had worked with other machines, typewriters and, you know, metal and other types of materials to try to create instruments, but it felt like it was time to work with a sewing machine. And that piece was called Work as Worship, and at that time I was really exploring the idea of these soundscapes that I had grown up with around my parents working in factories, and the idea that these humming drones that were happening in the factories from the machines really reminded me a lot of the types of drones that we grew up with, you know, in the temple and stuff like that.
And, you know, as a kid I always had these, I was always really surprised at how mechanical religion felt. Like, it felt like this, like, really drony mechanical thing, and I remember when I was young and in the temple and I’d watch people around me pray and sing, I always thought everyone was kind of like robots, like I actually found it very machine-like. And that’s not to say a negative thing, it’s just that it reminded me a lot of the machines.
And, yeah, so then, you know, ten years or so more passed, and what actually happened with that piece was it was not robust, because I had used tape, and I didn’t realize at the time, I don’t know how I didn’t realize that the tape wouldn’t have lasted an exhibition length, and it was not, it broke pretty fast. So I was a little bit disappointed with my own progress on the piece, so I kind of put it down, and then I came back to it, and I decided to revisit the piece. And since then, I’ve been really putting a lot of commitment into the project to see it show up.
So now it’s had four different iterations so far, all under different names, but the overarching project is mechanical hymns. Yeah, I mean, so I did revisit the tape loops when I did the next iteration of it, and the tape loops were actually quite a bit longer. I decided to go, because it broke so fast, so the first piece that I built, the tape loop was, you know, the tape kind of sat above the machine, and then the tape went underneath the needle.
And as it went underneath the needle, you can imagine the length was only about whatever it was. I decided that if I’m going to reuse tape loops again, I’m going to actually push to see how far I can get them. So I made really, really long tape loops, which I think is in some of the photos that I had sent you, where they were going from the ceiling, from the lighting grid, down to the machine, and all the way to one of the walls, back to the machine.
And I was using the motors of the machine to kind of move the loops around. And we ran it for quite a while, and it actually survived, so it was kind of cool. And I guess that for me, the considerations for it in an installation setting, I mean, robustness really matters.
Which I actually am even questioning because of things like disintegration loops. Like you can imagine an installation where tape is degrading over time, and it’s part of the piece, and I think it could be part of this piece to do that. But I do think that if the tape just breaks completely, that’s difficult.
And for an installation setting, like asking gallery staff to replace a tape loop - anyone who’s worked with tape loops knows how what a pain it is. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to replace, so I was kind of thinking about that. And because they’re such long loops now, it’s not like just like a little tape loop cassette. It’s the full analog tape as well. And so that’s a big difference, and so turning that into an installation means thinking about how it’s going to last. And then I think it’s also thinking about how a user who’s not familiar with playing music and stuff like that is going to respond to it.
So for example, you know, we have experience playing with sounds. I’m a musician, and a lot of people that I have in my communities, in my world, we all are very, very used to things like this. And so for outside folks, any visitor being able to sit behind it and being able to perform it is important to me.
And it’s actually one of the kind of principles of instrument design that you think about, which is whenever you build an instrument, you need to think about level of virtuosity required to perform the instrument. So if I build something that’s going to require a lot of, I don’t know, skill, then I have to think about who’s going to engage with it and interact with it. And I wanted something that anyone could use because the concept itself is based in working class culture that I grew up in.
And so the idea of virtuosic application of skill seemed to me not appropriate. Whereas when I perform things and play my own instruments, or build instruments just for me to play, I tend to prefer things that require bowing skill. So I build, you know, instruments out of sheet metal and stuff like that and other materials and bowing is maybe my favorite movement as a musician and sound artist.
And I actually have witnessed that for people who aren’t used to bowing things, it’s actually quite difficult and it becomes discouraging and they’ll tend to step away from it. So yeah, so I’ve been thinking about that a lot, which is like, when are things bowed? When is there an option to bow or do something else?
And in the case of this piece, it was really all I wanted was to be able to have someone hold something, right? In this case, the electromagnetic microphone I built, which the size even was intended to fit in your palm. It was not meant to be delicate and it’s something that you can move around and hold.
And I guess also that’s another thing. One thing I really love about sound and noise is that as a player, I’m used to touching things and feeling a response. Like I feel like there’s a really physical aspect of sound and music.
And I think that what I liked about the electromagnetic microphone and stuff like, especially being in the palm of your hand, like the size, if you recall, it’s like hockey puck size, right? And what I liked about it was that as you approach something, you can feel like the power of the electricity and the sound in your hand. And, you know, even the hand position makes you feel like you are fully commanding the sound.
And I think that’s really exciting for a visitor to feel like they’re commanding the sound because then they really do feel like they’re playing. They really do feel like this is an instrument.
Darren Copeland: Is it part of the work to try to bridge that gap and get people to being thinking about playing sound rather than just being a consumer of it through, you know, through listening consumption on devices and so on.
Anju: Yeah, I think that’s really important to me. I think I really strongly believe that there are not artists and then audiences. I actually think everyone who witnesses something, like I think all humans have in them, well, we know all humans have and has the ability to make art.
And we all have the ability to make music and to make sound. We’re all creative. And so whenever we go anywhere and we witness anything, like I feel it.
I have so many opportunities to make music and art. I have my own studio. I have my own instruments.
And even when I go witness something, the most impactful feeling I have is like, oh, I want to go do that. That’s the feeling I get when I watch something. And I’ve actually had these like really awkward moments where I’ll watch someone perform and I’m like, I just want to go up there.
I just want to join them right now. And it would be totally inappropriate, but it’s like that feeling. And so I feel like, yeah, it’s cool to watch someone do something, but it’s even better to go in and make it and participate.
So I think the participatory nature of art is important to me, not from this totally community art lens, but more so from like an individual right to make art. Like each and every one of us has the right to participate. And I think that’s interesting to me.
So it’s a little bit less of like, you know, forcing people to participate and more so like giving them the space to participate. And so the piece is built, as you know, with the idea that you could come in and you can listen to a version of it. You can listen to someone else engage with it and you can enjoy it.
But you can also create sound with it.
Darren: And what is the, I mean, prior to it being set up here in South River, what were some of the responses you’ve had from audiences with your installations versus your performance performances? And that what that level of autonomy and physical participation, what that brings out in people’s responses?
Anju: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. So I think that when we get people participating, they’re often surprised. Like they’re often like, oh, I didn’t know that I could make this sound.
I think a lot of people are really surprised that they’re actually quite a bit more creative with it. I’ve always felt like the best sound artists are ‘non sound artists’, because they hear things and they they hear things that we as sound artists who practice this every day have decided are like overdone or that we are like, yeah, yeah, whatever. I’ve done that before. I’ve heard that before. Like we’re not listening with fresh ears. And so people who don’t work with sound regularly, they’re bringing out things that I forgot are like really amazing and cool sounding.
And they’ll tend to get hung up on it. And so you’ll get people like doing cool rhythms or trying to pull out things you wouldn’t even think of. So I think that the responses immediately are just that people are like really excited about sound.
I think the electromagnetic waves in particular, because they’re already so non musical in some sense, it’s just electricity. It feels like people have given themselves more permission to just like go for it. I was surprised that people were not more turned off by the volume and the noise aspect of it. I think that we underestimate audiences and visitors of works. We assume that people don’t want noise. They need things to be musical. They need things to be in a particular structure, but actually they’re way more open to those things. And texture, I think really speaks to people. I think when I perform it, it kind of feels like it kind of feels like all my other performances, like it feels like people are watching it and they’re kind of like, oh, cool. But it keeps it in that realm of being unattainable or they’re doing something like there’s almost like there’s not that connection between the sound and the person in the same way. And it gets treated like something that is that they can’t do. And so that’s why it’s so important to me that people actually activate and interact. Because I think I think it builds an interest in sound art.
I mean, I’d love to like ask sound artists if they would even care about sound art if they weren’t making it. I just don’t know if it’s possible to care that much as much as we do about this without being part of it. You know, when you’re doing a soundscape recording, if you’re not recording it in the space and witnessing and hearing later what you’re doing, that relationship is important.
And so I feel if we want audiences to care about sound work, I think that we need to really show share that experience that we have and not just keep it for ourselves. That that experience needs to be open to others. And I think that if we’re the way that music to me is a little different than sound art, because music to me falls in the realm of, it’s almost like storytelling.
And so I think that with music, there’s like, you’re expressing a story or a perspective. With sound art, it’s an experience. So when you’re not having that experience, I don’t know if you can have the same relationship to it.
Darren: You mentioned your background being around garment factories, and that there’s a whispered text in the piece. And I was wondering if that refers to that experience or expands on that in some way.
Anju: Yeah, I mean, the whispering came up with the work that you and I did as we were building the piece and really trying to resolve this interesting box. I love boxes, like I love limitations. And there was this limitation in this box of the fact that NAISA in South River is based in a space that is shared with a cafe. And so the cafe is a space, and the cafe is awesome. It’s like great food. It’s very affordable. It’s a space that people will use. And there was something about having a piece that didn’t blend with the space. That didn’t fit well with me. So I wanted, I had sounds in mind I wanted for the piece, but once I entered the space and I got a feel for it, I realized that it needed some state that was harmonious with the environment and the space it was in.
And so when we talked about it, and the idea of something quiet coming up was conceived, I realized that conceptually whispers were super appropriate for the piece. And that was because the piece has voices in it, which we didn’t incorporate into the NAISA version exactly, but the piece, Mechanical Hymns as a concept, is a soundscape made up of drones from machines or from religious instruments and music. It could be either machine sounds, electromagnetic waves, and mechanical sound sources, either vibrations or otherwise, like the geophone we used, I’ve used contact mics and stuff like that.
And then the final sonic element is voices. And so these voices were done in multiple languages, in my case, South Asian languages that were reciting different phrases from feminist texts. But then realizing we needed a quieter sonic palette for, you know, the regular cafe state, the whispering became appropriate because I realized that the voices in the piece, the way that I had it, were functioning to be loud, because what would happen is in the factories the women would speak while they’re working and they would be like shouting over the machines.
And I found that super interesting as a kid, because you just didn’t hear women in your community talk so loudly, and especially the content of what they were talking about in this private space was really radical and something you just didn’t hear culturally in places like the home and the temple and whatnot. But they were loud. What I found exciting about the loudness of the voices was, first of all, they were in competition with the machines and they won, like, they could get their voices louder than these machines so these gigantic big industrial machines that took up tons of space made tons of noise, their voices could could move above that.
The other thing I found interesting is that their voices and the machines would drown out this religious music. And for me the religious music kind of represented some of the cultural oppression that I was feeling, some of the cultural impositions I was feeling. I appreciate the culture I’m from, but I also grew to understand after a while that those things started to represent specific things for me as a young woman growing up in those cultures.
But then also, finally, what was also interesting was that these voices with all the different languages became their own type of noise or cacophony where you heard a bunch of voices, but in the end it was just a really nice texture. So the soundscape for me was exciting, but the whisper I realized was a different soundscape that I had not considered in the piece before of this installation, which was the soundscape outside of the factory. So I was so focused on the soundscape that happened in these environments that I didn’t reflect on what happened when you leave those environments.
And so when you leave those environments, the voices of women get quieter in public space, in the homes, and in other spaces, the voices of these women, which were these women meaning like my mother and people from, you know, from that community. And I recognized eventually that they would always be like whispering to each other, and anything they were saying that was against the culture or that challenged the sexism or the experiences we had, they were always said in these whisper voices, and they were kind of spoken quietly in the kitchen. I remember even just like when we’d have guests over and I would be trying to talk and my mother would whisper to me and I’d be expected to whisper back.
And so the whispers became really interesting. And with the electromagnetic sound element of the work, I realized also that those electromagnetic waves, especially when we were first getting them quietly, they’re actually kind of like whispers themselves. So the machine, the whispers of the machines are in the forms of electromagnetic waves. And when we amplify them, when we add them to the machine running, they get louder. So the louder, as you know, the louder you run the machine, the louder those sounds get, but at the beginning they can really be whispers. So these whisperings of the electricity and the movement and the voices for me became a really important element of the piece.
And I just really enjoyed experiencing the piece that way and hearing that. Because that was a later edition, and I’m not very fluent in the languages myself, I did all of that recording myself and I did it all in English. But because of the way that they’re designed, the sound design of them, still keeps them undecipherable. So it still allows for that sense of that like, textural palette that I was looking for. But I guess if you go closely up to one of the speakers, you can probably make out what I’m saying.
Another element is that the speakers themselves were built out of textile. I wanted what I’m calling textile speakers. All it is is transducers added to hardened textile objects. I didn’t know what I wanted the shape of the objects to be. All I knew was that I wanted them to be hard on top and soft on the bottom, which to me also reflected the experiences of women where we have a hard shell and soft inside or a soft outside and a hard inside and what socially we’re expected to be in terms of being hard and soft. And so these textile things, as we hung them, we started to recognize just in that NAISA installation that they started to look like disembodied figures, which was not intentional at first. Maybe it was subconsciously intentional because that shape did matter to me, but having the whispers come out of those figures was really important as well.
Darren: I was interested… there’s a kind of meeting point between language and aesthetic experience and noise and function, like all those things kind of collide together into the same sounds often. You were mentioning earlier on how you found the religious services to be mechanical, yet they’re performing a ritualized activity. And, and then there’s mechanical sounds that you appreciate their aesthetic beauty of, you know, or aesthetic interest in them. So I was just interested in how these things, these levels intermix. And I was wondering if the part of the interest in making installations is that’s more
apparent than it might be in an album on Bandcamp, or a performance even.
Anju: Yeah, I think, so the communication sounds are new. I’ll speak to that last, because that’s really new for me. The mechanical sounds and the noise are, have been a part of my practice for 25 years plus. I’ve always been interested in mechanical sounds and noise I think that the mechanical industrial sounds are just a deep part of noise subculture, noise music, industrial music, power electronics, all these genres have always used mechanical sounds, machines, and further in genres like harsh noise and noise. It’s this, the relationship of source to sound is actually kind of a big thing. Like, it’s very rare for me to do a noise performance, and to not have my sound source available, and to drive from it. And conceptually, we will often do concepts based on the sound source. So my sound sources have been metal, chain, machines, for many, many years. And I think that those are, you know, as a noise artist, those are exciting sound options, because they really, they have the ability to bring out like these really exciting textures, which is like where noise really is focused, I think, on texture. And, and so that’s kind of been a big part of my practice the whole time. And I think that when it comes to things like religious drones and machines and mechanical things, I think that’s more my interest in understanding how we operate socially in the world. I’m really, really, really intrigued by this.
I’m writing a play that I showed in 2023 or 2024. I showed an early workshop of it. And the play is called The Coward. And it’s basically a play about two beings that are LARPing as humans. And I’m still trying to figure out who they are. But I think they might be humans LARPing as humans. And that’s how I feel like we’re moving through the world. I feel like we’re just like, you know… I’m waking up in the morning, and I’m pretending to act like how a human acts, even though I’m a human. And so I think the machine nature, when humans start to act like machines, I feel like we’re doing exactly that we’re trying to, we’re trying to understand being human through doing it in a really mechanical way, and then showing back up this way. So those sounds are interesting to me. And you know, you hear those, those sounds in a lot of industrial projects - you go think about a project like Laibach where they draw a lot of inspiration in their music from the industrial environment that they’re around. But there’s something so human about mechanical moves, and, you know, like brushing your teeth. And working out, and it just feels like we’re just machines pretending to be humans. So that’s always been kind of this obsession of mine.
So for me, it’s like a way these sounds are a way to ask questions about why we are the way we are. And whether there’s another way for us to be, I guess that’s the other thing is like, how do we get out of it? Like, if we can understand it first, maybe we can find our way out. The musical beauty. I mean, I love musical things. So I have a solo experimental violin project called The Nausea .And The Nausea is entirely these very sad violin songs that disintegrate into harsh noise or that start with harsh noise and then turn into these violin riffs. And to me, that’s again, asking those questions and trying to figure them out. I mean, The Nausea is obviously very clearly a Sartre reference. And so I’m already asking those questions. And what I’m really interested in is understanding how do we move between these like very emotional moments these very human aesthetic musical moments into these noise moments.
But then the bigger question behind that is which of those are actually more human. So something that’s like very, very musical is very manipulative, like I think of film scores, and when it’s a very, very emotional score, it’s completely manipulating us. And so we have to push back on manipulation we have to push back on being emotionally manipulated, aesthetically manipulated. And so to me, the answer to that is to break it all into noise to break it down to its elements to really find out what it is we are feeling and what we are thinking. So by having a project that like, really brings in these beautiful moments that we can then destroy, gives us the opportunity to have that freedom. And so I guess in this piece, because I did make a minor chord out of the hum. And so I was like, okay, here’s the musical thing, you can have the musical thing. But I was curious how long people would hang out on the musical thing when they interact with it. And because you can get it to sound very musical, you can get that chord, it can sound totally how you want it to. But then, you know, you can easily pull away from that. And I was during our talk during the opening, I was actually really intrigued by the fact that so many people were, were actually not hanging out so long on that minor chord, they were they were ready to move into the texture.
And so I guess that the installation provides the opportunity for me to do a little bit of research, and data collection, and investigation into who we are. Because, you know, sometimes it feels a bit lonely to have some of these thoughts. And I’ve had people tell me, oh, you think too much or whatever. And it’s a bit lonely. And so the thing about an installation is that I can like without having to talk about it, witness people going through those experiences in their own way. So I guess that’s also why at the opening, I was kind of like, oh, everyone should just kind of play a set. And it was because I kind of wanted to see everyone like use the instrument and give their interpretation, because I was curious where they’d land, what kind of sounds they gravitated towards. Again, we assume people want things to be musical, we assume people, people want narrative, we assume people want things like that. The reality is, is that people have their own imagination and their own creativity, they can create their own narrative out of anything. And they can create their own sense of beauty out of what they need from the sounds they get.
And the communication and the voice sounds are new to me. So I’ve been, as a sound person, I’m very afraid of words, like horrified, I hate words. And in fact, until I started writing that play in 2024, which is through Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre, it was like, they accepted me into this writing program, and I’m not a writer, and it was really intimidating. I actually hated writing before that I would not want to put things into words, I express myself more comfortably with sound. And with music, I can tell a story through a violin piece. And I could not write or type it down. But as I’ve been working with text, I’ve been more comfortable with approaching writing, it was easier with these voices for them to be South Asian languages I didn’t understand, because then I could still use them as sound objects. And I didn’t have to face the text. But even in this piece, doing the whispers in English, I had to confront that. And it was not easy, but I think a really important experience. So communication, voices and sounds are becoming part of my practice. I also have more voice and vocals in my music projects right now than I’ve ever had. And a lot of text that’s coming through that I’m writing or that I’m finding.
So yeah, and I also think that with material transmissions, it being part of the Deep Wireless Festival, I really wanted to honour this idea of transmission art being a core part of the festival. And so I took the opportunity to really deeply consider transmission art. So I listened and I researched the area of work quite a bit. And one thing that I noticed that I really liked was a recurring theme was these voices that would come in and out, because of so much radio art being part of it, in transmission art. And so I think that the whispers for me also kind of met some, I guess, quote unquote ‘genre tendencies’ for transmission art. And so I like that the voices come in and out I think there’s something very interesting about it. And just learning about electromagnetic waves and how some people who research using those sounds are really interested in how we can connect to other realms potentially through it. And there are some spiritual sides of it that are really interesting. To me, voices are part of that. It’s like, yeah, and I think machines have voices, like I feel there’s something in them. And when I build instruments, I really prefer found objects, because I do feel found items have their own voice they bring. Something new (objects) just doesn’t have that. But the found objects, they have a story, and it comes out so that the voices are also coming out through the machines.
Darren: You mentioned genres, and I thought maybe just with the time we have left, whether you could speak a little bit about that, because you’ve worked in many different musical genres, and an installation maybe is like another genre, and the transmission art context is yet another genre. And I want to know if, because through all that, you are exploring noise in these different genres. And so I was interested in how that comes across in different contexts. And maybe there’s aspects of ways that we hear noise that we take for granted or don’t recognize.
Anju: Yeah, just even like what, Pauline Oliveros and Hildegard Westerkamp, Barry Truax, all those important people from sound art history in Canada have pointed out, is that the listening aspect, the deep listening of the environment around us is, to me, that was a noise thing. Like, I remember taking Arnie Eigenfeldt’s classes at SFU in electroacoustic music, and I walked away thinking I had just learned about noise. I think my colleagues who were in my classes with me walked away thinking, maybe different things, but that’s what I took away from it. I basically saw it as like noise study. And, and so to me, noise is a very broad thing. It can be those really quiet sounds that stay quiet against the loud nothing, against the loud silence, and it can be the very, very loud, which I actually do an entire festival dedicated to like, the loudest sounds possible. And so, yeah, to me, I think noise is just this thing that just exists everywhere. My biggest, my biggest questions about noise right now is like, people’s hatred of it, people’s anger towards it. And it’s, to me it’s interesting, you go to suburbia, and it’s like eerily quiet. And it’s demanded to be so. no one around me should make any noise. And yet, you go to any densely populated place, and there’s noise everywhere. Like, you don’t really go live in, like, Tokyo and not expect there to be, well, actually, Japan’s a bad example, because it is actually pretty quiet. But you don’t go to some really densely populated place like New York or Toronto, and expect (in) downtown Toronto that everyone around you is just going to be quiet. And so to me, noise became something to really celebrate, because noise to me represented that there’s life, that there’s things happening, that people are doing things, that people have family, people have work, people have, and if they have work, that means that they have a way to feed their families. It meant, it meant that people are like living. And I think that the sense of entitlement to quiet is a little bit odd. I love going to the forest and being in the quiet. But I also feel like we need to celebrate the sounds of life.
I remember being in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and I actually got a recording of this market. It was so loud. And it was just a normal day. And I was thinking about like, what it would be to be, how it feels to be someone who experiences that level of like, sonic density as part of your everyday life, versus someone who never hears that. And, and what that means for us. And what that means for tolerance for sound. And when I think of people who, like I think of what’s happening in the US, there’s a lot of anger towards communities that people don’t understand. And when you, like, when you think about it, when you don’t understand what someone’s saying, when you don’t understand the languages, it is a form of noise, it’s something that you - it just becomes this texture, right.
And that’s the point of the languages in my piece was specifically to use languages I don’t know. Like, as I mentioned, a language called Kannada that I hadn’t even heard of, Kannada, sorry, Kannada it’s pronounced, a South Asian language, and I don’t understand it. And, you know, it’s just sounds. And so I think there’s something that we have to think about when we, when we hate the sounds of things we don’t recognize that we aren’t familiar with that we call noise, we immediately denote them as like, negative, or bothersome. And I think that if we can build a new relationship to things that, that we aren’t used to hearing, we might actually start to have more fulsome experiences in our lives, right.
So I think that to me, noise is, it means a lot of things, it’s revolution, it’s acceptance, it’s peace, like being able to find that peace in yourself, despite what’s going on around you. And then yeah, deep listening, like, what they’re trying to teach us, what the sound artists have been trying to teach us deep listening, how do you sit and you really just hear the soundscape for what it is. And so when you walk down the street, if you actually just listen, and the way the cars like whizz by you and the way that people’s conversations come in and out, and you start thinking about how it’s like panned and how it’s spatialized, all these sounds have a new place in your brain.
Anju Singh is a Vancouver media artist and noise musician. Along with industrial materials she uses space, volume and texture as the main tools in her sound palette. She pushes extreme dynamics and unconventional sonic applications to build installations and compositions for immersive sonic experiences.
New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) is a sound-based media arts organization near to Algonquin Park. NAISA presents sound sculptures, transmission art, electroacoustic music, videomusic, new art, and the art of sound, through performances, exhibitions, broadcasts, and three annual festivals: Sound Travels, Deep Wireless, and SOUNDplay. Operating since 2001, NAISA is partially funded by Ontario Arts Council, The Canada Council for the Arts, and The Department of Canadian Heritage.