Notice:
This event occurs in the past.
Healthy Cities | Listening Critically in the City: Music, Sound, Power and Identity in Ottawa
Tuesday, October 28, 2025 from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
- In-person event
- Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre , Ottawa , ON , K2P 0G6
- Contact
- Emma Fraser, emma.fraser@carleton.ca
Location: Woodside Hall, Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre, 290 Lisgar Street (parking entrance)
In our highly visual culture, we sometimes forget that the city reverberates with sound and music that provoke emotional responses and provide the rhythm to our daily lives. What kinds of soundmarks (distinctive sounds akin to landmarks) characterize Ottawa? How does music mark celebration, protest, and cultural identity in our city? And how might listening help us to think about how we experience place, history, power, and politics in the city through music and the soundscape?
This event will also launch a new project of the Research Centre for Music, Sound, and Society in Canada. Created by Gale Franklin and Allyson Rogers, “Sounds like Canada” is a self-guided soundwalk through Parliament Hill and surrounding areas via a phone app, that invites people to pause, listen, and reflect. Through narrative dialogue and place-based audio clips, the soundwalk encourages participants to consider national soundmarks, and to listen critically for sites of erasure, contestation, and resurgence. From the resonant bells of the Peace Tower to protest chants, military rituals, and moments of silence, this immersive experience explores how these soundscapes and soundmarks shape Canadian national identity. Register below.
Gale will lead a public soundwalk with the “Sounds Like Canada” app on Saturday, November 1, on Parliament Hill.
Panelists
Ellen Waterman is Professor and Helmut Kallmann Chair for Music in Canada at Carleton University. Her interdisciplinary research in music and sound studies engages with improvisation, community-engaged research-creation, Deaf and disability-led music, and participatory sonic arts for social change. She is also a flutist/vocalist specializing in creative improvisation. Ellen is founder and director of the Research Centre for Music, Sound, and Society in Canada, dedicated to exploring the complex and diverse roles that music and sonic arts play in shaping Canadian society.
Gale Franklin (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Canadian Studies at Carleton University. Her dissertation, Listening to White Supremacy: Race, Space and Belonging in Ottawa, explores the sounded dimensions of whiteness in Canada’s capital city. Her work encourages scholars across multiple fields to listen to the sensory, spatial, sounded, and embodied dimensions of white supremacy and develop strategies for listening towards more anti-racist futures.
Jaime Morse is a Cree-Métis cultural dancer, curator, and storyteller from Lac La Biche, Alberta, with roots in the Buffalo Lake Métis Settlement. Based in Ottawa since 2000, she is the founder of Indigenous Walks and the National Gallery of Canada’s first Educator of Indigenous Programs and Outreach. Her practice spans Métis jigging, fish scale art, and visual storytelling, weaving together community, family, and Indigenous knowledge.
Tonya Davidson teaches sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. Her research focuses on monuments, public memory, various forms of public nostalgia, and Ottawa. She regularly teaches Introduction to Sociology, and a first-year seminar called “the Sociology of Ottawa.” She has most recently published Tours Inside the Snow Globe: Ottawa Monuments and National Belonging. (2024) and Seasonal Sociology (2020 and co-edited with Ondine Park). Seasonal Sociology won the 2021 American Association of Publishers award for best textbook in the social sciences. Tonya is currently working on a book project with David Dean, which will offer analyses of all of the monuments in the National Capital Region.
Peter Coffman is an Associate Professor in the School for Studies in Art and Culture. Since starting at Carleton, he has made efforts to explore the history, meaning and social significance of the built environment, and how it both reflects and shapes human circumstances. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Peter found himself unprepared with only poorly recorded versions of lectures that had been designed for classroom delivery. As a result of his determination to create a quality online course for his students Peter created two asynchronous courses for his students utilizing a combination of material such as lectures, podcasts, weekly discussion forms and other asynchronous engagement tools.
Allyson Rogers (she/her) is a scholar whose research is situated at the intersection of music, media, and politics, with a focus on Canadian cultural industries, institutions, and policies. She received her PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University, and is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow (2024-26) in the School for Studies in Art and Culture (Music) at Carleton University, supervised by Dr. Ellen Waterman. Her postdoctoral project examines the politics of jazz and complexity of race relations in films produced by the National Film Board of Canada’s (NFB) French-language unit during Québec’s Quiet Revolution. She is co-editor of a forthcoming volume, Music and Antifascism: Cultural Resistance in Europe and North America (Routledge, 2026), and co-author of They Shot, He Scored: The Life and Music of Eldon Rathburn (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019) with Carleton professor Dr. James Wright.