Sound Walking with the University of Waterloo’s University Colleges; Spring 2025
This spring, Grebel turned into a space for listening, wandering, and discovering the sounds of the medieval past through a chant-inspired soundwalk. Conrad Grebel University College, in partnership with St. Jerome’s University at the University of Waterloo, participated in the Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission Project (DACT) Soundwalk: “Singing Musical Fragments: Waterloo.” The soundwalk invited visitors to explore and listen to medieval chants originating from many different time periods and locations. The DACT Project is a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Project led by Jennifer Bain, PI, and many co-investigators across Canada and around the world. DACT collaborators Kate Helsen, Debra Lacoste, and Kate Kennedy Steiner, created the DACT Soundwalk as an activity for the annual conferences of the Canadian University Music Society (MUSCAN) and the Canadian Society of Medievalists held at UWaterloo in May 2025.
The soundwalk featured twelve visual markers placed across the campus that displayed medieval chant graphics and manuscripts. With the DACT mobile app, the visual markers became interactive. Designed to sing, the markers were matched with an audio recording that played automatically for visitors as they experienced the soundwalk. The chants were recorded by several people involved with the DACT project.
DACT is a 7-year partnership project with a $2.5 million grant from SSHRC. The aim of the project is to collect, analyze, and trace the transmission of plainchant through time and place, beyond Europe and the Middle Ages.
Kate Helsen, the DACT Team Lead, inspired and directed the Soundwalk project. Helsen is an Assistant Professor at Western University in London, Ontario and a Co-Investigator on the DACT project. After finding audio history walks on the Internet, she proposed a similar activity with fragments of chant manuscripts, where anyone with a smartphone would be able to see and hear chant “in the wild.”
Debra Lacoste is DACT Project Manager and is based at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has been Project Manager of Cantus: A Database for Latin Ecclesiastical Chant, currently funded through DACT, for over 25 years, and she also oversees the Cantus Index. Lacoste teaches trumpet studio at the University of Waterloo.
Kate Kennedy Steiner is the DACT Team Lead for the "Manuscripts and Fragments: Central and Eastern Canada" portion of the project. Steiner is an Assistant Professor of Music at Grebel and UWaterloo. Her research on medieval chant, polyphony, and liturgy in the British Isles has been published in Plainsong and Medieval Music and the Journal of Musicology.
Additionally, Music major and co-op student for the DACT project and DRAGEN lab at St. Jerome’s University, Olivia Jin, supported the Soundwalk and provided valuable input through the lens of a student participant.
The Soundwalk was an invitation to slow down, to listen, and to experience a living connection to the past.
By Audrey Whitman
