Michelle
Caron-
Pawlowsky
Projects
About/CV
A collaborative project by Michelle Caron-Pawlowsky and Romy Zaman
Summoning is an ongoing, participatory sound project by Michelle Caron-Pawlowsky and Romy Zaman that uses patterns collected from different natural environments to create abstract musical scores. We record participants as they vocally interpret these scores and we arrange the recordings into immersive sound installations presented through multiple speakers. These sound pieces exist as improvisational choirs and summoning songs that include moments of vocal confluence and divergence, harmony and chaos. They summon landscapes in the minds of listeners, asking audiences to imagine each landscape through the participants’ vocal interpretations of the selected sites.
Summoning (Auld Wives Lifts, 15.11.24), 2025
Sound installation (twelve speakers), 15:11:24
Our first piece was born from Auld Wives Lifts: three large, stacked boulders on the outskirts of Glasgow, Scotland, with hundreds of years of carved graffiti on all sides and centuries of folktales recounting their origin. For this piece, twenty-four participants vocally interpreted two abstract scores created from rock surface and wind patterns recorded at Auld Wives Lifts. The rock score was created by using a portable scanner to record patterns on the rocks’ surfaces, and the wind score was created by capturing wind patterns using a homemade wind recording device (Speculative Wind Oscillation Recording Device, or SWORD). These recordings were then arranged into two abstract visual scores, one representing the patterns on the rocks and one representing the movement of the wind.