Board of Directors

Carol Ann Weaver is a celebrated, highly prolific American/Canadian composer whose music is heard live and on the air throughout North America, Europe, Africa, South Korea and Paraguay, often featuring her as pianist.
Her genre-bending music ranges from classical to jazz, folk, world, creating new fusions of art and roots music, often colored by her passion for African music. She composes vocal, choral, chamber, solo, orchestral, multimedia music, works with electric instruments, dancers, turntablist, gamelan, incorporating visuals, electroacoustic and soundscape textures. Her music is described as “adventurous, imaginative, passionately connected with the earth.” Commissioned by American and Canadian performance groups – Arraymusic, Blue Rider Ensemble, Hemispheres Orchestra, Ardeleana Trio, Gallery Players, Cincinnati Arts Festival and many more more – she has produced eight CDs where she also appears as pianist: Songs for My Mother, Paraguay Primeval, Every 3 Children, Thistle & Jewel, Awakenings, Dancing Rivers – From South Africa To Canada, Journey Begun, and Daughter Of Olapa. She is Chair of Association of Canadian Women Composers, Secretary of Canadian Association of Sound Ecology, and has directed Sound in the Land Festival/Conferences, most recently environmentally themed, with R. Murray Schafer as keynote speaker, attracting international attention. She has done hundreds of natural field recordings from Canada, Africa, and the USA, and has presented her work at various sonic ecology, ethnomusicology, and women’s music conferences. As Professor Emerita of Conrad Grebel University College/University of Waterloo, she holds a DM in Composition from Indiana University, studying with composers John Eaton, Bernard Heiden and Juan Orego-Salas, and with pianist Gyorgy Sebok.

Wendalyn Bartley
Treasurer

Wendalyn Bartley is a composer, voice performer and writer living in Toronto whose artistic practice is dedicated to the awakening of the feminine voice. Her compositions are rooted in the contemporary chamber and electroacoustic music traditions, extended vocal practice and soundscape studies with influences from eco-feminist thought, mythic story and wholistic healing modalities. She has collaborated with artists from the fields of visual arts, video and film, radio, music-driven theatre, opera and community arts, and her works have been performed and broadcast internationally. She received her MMus in composition from McGill University. The music on her most recent CD entitled Sound Dreaming: Oracle Songs from Ancient Ritual Spaces was created from vocal improvisations made in Malta and Crete at sites that have held the ancestral wisdom of the feminine. Her current project is entitled Rivers Revealed, a laptop performance piece focused on areas where original creeks of the Toronto watershed now buried in pipes underground emerge into the daylight. The piece combines soundscape and vocal recordings with live voice performance. She currently writes a column on contemporary and experimental music for The Whole Note and is working on a memoir that weaves together personal story, myth and her creative engagement with the voice.

Julie Andreyev
Secretary

Julie Andreyev is an artist-activist, researcher and educator in Vancouver, located on the unceded, traditional and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish people, including the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations, as well as the unceded traditional territories of nonhuman animals and plantlife including bears, deer, raccoons, eagles, ravens, crows, hummingbirds, cedar, fir, salal and others. Her multispecies studio called Animal Lover explores more-than-human creativity to develop kinships with local lifeforms and ecologies. She has a PhD from Simon Fraser University, and is Associate Professor in the Audain Faculty of Art, Emily Carr University of Art + Design where she teaches New Media + Sound Arts, and Critical Studies courses. One of her favourite things to do is hiking with her canine companions Zorra and Heroe, paying attention to the liveliness of the animals, trees and plants, and Earth forces. She is currently working on creative co-productions with birds (Bird Park Survival Station), and sound art experiences within old-growth forest ecologies (Branching Songs). Her book is Lessons from a Multispecies Art Studio: Uncovering Ecological Understanding & Biophilia Through Creative Reciprocity. Intellect Books, 2021.

Leonardo Cabrera
Member at large

Leonardo Cabrera is a Biologist from the National University of Mexico (UNAM) with a Master degree from the same institution in Ecology and Environmental Sciences. For more than 20 years Leonardo has explored the causes of landscape conservation and degradation by using transdisciplinary approaches to integrate ecological and social dynamics of cultural landscapes of Mexico, Central America, Australia and Canada. In his PhD research (McGill University, Montreal, Canada), he worked with ancient pastoral communities of Central Mexico’s high mountains to understand local traditional grassland management practices, land guardianship, and power relationships shaping a vibrant cultural landscape of high conservation value. Since 2007, Leonardo has been with Parks Canada as Ecosystem Scientist to lead ecosystem monitoring and habitat restoration projects, manage human wildlife coexitence situation, and coordinate scientific research. He has been implementing acoustic bird monitoring projects, has obtained diverse certifications on nature sound recording, and has led academic thesis on Indigenous Soundscapes. He currently leads the project as member of the Canadian Association for Acoustic Ecology “Documenting the soundscapes of Canada’s National Parks: a baseline to recognize current acoustic condition, change, and motivate action”.

Milena Droumeva
Project Director and Academic Liaison

Milena Droumeva is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Glenfraser Endowed professor in Sound Studies at Simon Fraser University specializing in mobile technologies, sound studies and multimodal ethnography, with a long-standing interest in game cultures and gender. She has worked extensively in educational research on game-based learning, as well as in interaction design for responsive environments and sonification. Milena is a sound studies scholar, a multimodal ethnographer, and a soundwalking enthusiast, published widely in the areas of acoustic ecology, media and game studies, design and technology. Her current SSHRC-funded project is called “Livable Soundscapes” and it explores best practices for soundscape design in cities and civic participation approaches to storytelling with sound. She is co-editor of a newly published edited collection “Sound, Media, Ecology” with Palgrave Macmillan which updates practices and theories of acoustic ecology through the work of contemporary researchers. Milena has been working on sonification for public engagement since 2015, crossing over cultural studies of sound and data representation.

Mickey Valley
WFAE Representative

Mickey Valley currently serving as the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Sound Studies at Athabasca University, finds his academic journey driven by a curiosity about the interplay between sound, technics, and the environment. With a Ph.D. in Music from the University of Alberta, his multidisciplinary path has led him to explore the complex relationships that sound recording technologies and listening technologies forge with the natural world. This exploration has culminated in his contributions to respected journals, chapter contributions, and two monographs focusing on the changing dynamics of sound and listening over time. His research is broad in scope, spanning the history of sound recording, the philosophy of sound recording, acoustic ecology, and bioacoustics—a space where sound and music resonate with diverse multispecies inhabitants. He co-founded the Posthumanism Research Institute at Brock University and is on the Board of Directors for the Canadian Association for Sound Ecology and is the Canadian representative for the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. Currently, he is engaged in a multispecies ethnography within a wildlife corridor in southern Alberta, exploring improved human-wildlife relations and the emergence of novel natural contracts through their shared sonicity—a pursuit he refers to as sonotechnics.

Aaron Liu-Rosenbaum
Web Manager

Aaron Liu-Rosenbaum is Professor of Music Technology and Director of the Certificate Program in Digital Audio Production at Laval University’s Faculty of Music in Quebec City. He is a composer and researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT, McGill University) and at the International Observatory on the Societal Impacts of AI and Digital Technology (OBVIA, Laval University). His general interests involve the application of sound technologies in artistic creation, pedagogy and research, with a particular interest in acoustic ecology and technologies that facilitate later-life musicking.

Simone D’Ambrosio

Bio to follow

Claude Schryer
Former member of the board

Claude Schryer believes the arts, in the context of decolonization, can play a much more impactful role in shaping our collective future and has dedicated the rest of his life to this vocation. He is a franco-ontarian sound and media artist and arts administrator of european ancestry. He holds a MM in composition from McGill University and was actively in involved in the acoustic ecology and electroacoustic music communities in the 80’s & 90’s in Montréal, Banff and across Europe. From 00 to 20 he held management positions at Canada Council for the Arts in Inter-Arts, partnerships and as a senior strategic advisor. He currents produces the conscient podcast on art and the ecological crisis (season 4, ‘Sounding Modernity : weekly 5 minute sound mediations’ runs from 1 January to December 31, 2023). He describes his artistic aesthetic as ‘an exploration of the liminal space between reality, fantasy and spirit’. He is also an environmental activist who volunteers with the Sectoral Climate Art Leadership for the Emergency (SCALE)(currently chair of the board and member of the Mission Circle) and regularly gives workshops, facilitates meetings, and participates in panels and presentations on art and sound and the ecological crisis. He is grateful to the Gesturing Towards Decolonized Futures collective and the Facing Human Wrongs course for guidance in his learnings and unlearnings. He is a daily qi gong practionner, swimmer, e-biker, son of artist Jeannine and (late) pathologist Maurice Schryer, husband of artist Sabrina Mathews, father of earth science student Clara Schryer and history student Riel Schryer.