Background
Active as an arts educator and producer, Ely Lyonblum is the Strategic Research Development Officer at the Faculty of Music, University Toronto. His projects, largely focusing on cultural equity, range from the history of sound recording, American Sign Language performance art, and storytelling through music. Ely trained as a documentary filmmaker at Goldsmiths, University of London, and completed a PhD in Music at the University of Cambridge. He has over a decade of experience curating and co-producing events with not-for-profit collaborators, and contributing to the development of training programs for artists. Ely’s work has been presented and exhibited by the MIT Media Lab, CBC Radio 1, the Smithsonian Institution, the British Library, and have been shown at music and arts festivals across six continents.
Teaching
Sound & Vision: Techniques in Research-Creation (MUS4823) is an intensive graduate seminar offering analysis of and hands-on training in multimedia for researchers, performers and composers. Based on the expanded canon of music documentaries, field recordings, podcasts, as well as participatory and community-engaged multimedia creation, students are introduced to the theory and practice of audiovisual recording. Readings draw from music studies, media studies, sound studies, film studies and visual anthropology.
Students learn how to develop project outlines, storyboards and rough-to-final cuts of audio and video recordings, evaluate community/stakeholder needs and resources required, as well as present multimedia in curated exhibitions. A range of software and hardware training for multimedia creation is offered based on skillset and interests. Students incorporate constructive feedback from Faculty members, independent artist practitioners, Culture Sector leaders, and University staff.
Scholarly & Creative Works
Sustainable pArtnerships: Collaboration and Reciprocity in Creative Cities
This arts-based participatory research project adopts a multifaceted approach to engage with the question, how do we support artists in a precarious sector? Digital and vinyl banner coupons contain and release multimedia creations of thriving realities for cultural workers, as imagined by five commissioned artist-collaborators (Aitak Sorahitalab, Linh S. Nguyễn, Maryam Hafizirad, Olivia Shortt, and Dent). A traveling exhibition shares these imaginings with the community. Workshops with artist-collaborators, cultural designers, and stakeholders crystallize pathways toward sustainable relationships between the cultural and academic sectors. Encapsulated within a digital flipbook and policy report, findings generated through this artist-centered initiative heighten the call for connection, conversation, and change.
Signed Music Project
The Signed Music Project explores signed music as a form of performance art that arises from within the Deaf community and is distinct and evolved from both ASL poetry and from translated signed songs. It may incorporate ASL literary poetic features such as lines, meter, rhythm and rhyme and also incorporates basic elements of music such as harmony, rhythm, melody, timbre, and texture, which is expressed as a visual-gestural artistic form. Creative outputs developed in collaboration with the Deaf Culture Centre include the exhibit and documentary Signed Music: Rhythm of the Heart and The Black Drum, the first internationally touring signed music stage production.
Sounds of Religion/Religious Soundscapes
Sounds of Religion is a Smithsonian Traveling Exhibit that explores how rituals and gatherings of religious communities create a complex soundtrack of religions in America that teaches us how people behave, how they’re different, and how they’re alike. Through QR codes, viewers are invited to listen to eight contemporary recordings that serve as an audio portrait of the rich and dynamic differences that make religious life in the U.S. unique.
Religious Soundscapes is an immersive sound installation first installed at The Ohio University’s Urban Arts Space Gallery in 2022. The exhibition features twenty audio collages played back through a variety of dynamic speaker installations and accompanied by creative interpretive texts that served to make sound accessible to hearing impaired visitors.
