Weaving Sounds Course

Sundays
1–3pm EDT

July 12, 19, 26, Aug 2

Virtual
4-week course

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“When I encountered electronic sounds for the first time, I immediately felt they were their own story.....My whole life I’ve not been able to do anything without an initial idea. I always needed to know where I was going, what I wanted, to have some sort of theme.” — Éliane Radigue

Led by sound artist Samantha Simmons, this four-week course explores ambient composition as a practice of listening, storytelling, and sonic worldbuilding.

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Composition is approached as a surrealist, dada-inflected, multi-layered practice to create a sound world. Working with field recordings, found sounds, samples, and synthesis, participants will build immersive sonic stories that unfold gradually, like memory, weather systems, or film.

This course is designed as a workshop for developing sound ideas. I often find it easier to compose when I begin with a story, image, memory, film reference, or sensation. Throughout the course, we will work on shaping sonic narratives by asking questions such as: What does heat sound like? How might humidity be expressed through texture? What moods emerge in a recording, and how can they be translated into sound?

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Through listening sessions, discussion, and demonstrations in Ableton Live, participants will explore techniques including looping, sampling, resampling, microsound, granular synthesis, spatial processing, and creative effects. Alongside technical skills, we will focus on developing a personal approach to composition and attentive listening.

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Weekly assignments encourage experimentation and play, ending in a final listening session where participants share completed work and reflect on their process.

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Open to participants with a basic knowledge of Ableton Live. All sessions will be recorded and made available to registered participants.

Guest session (Aug 2): Slowfoam

On the final session, we will be joined by Slowfoam, the all-encompassing sound project of Berlin-based Madelyn Byrd, working in the porous zones where ambient music loosens its borders and becomes something more tactile and unsettled. Their work drifts between hand-shaped drones, electro-acoustic residue, treated voice and guitar, assembling slow-moving forms that feel suspended between memory, ecology and quiet speculation.

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Rather than focusing on genre, Slowfoam builds environments: intimate yet diffuse spaces where glitched-out leftfield ambient, trip-hop shadows, and folk-adjacent poetry blur into one another. With extensive experience teaching in sonic worldbuilding contexts, they will share approaches to constructing immersive sound environments and guiding compositional thinking through atmosphere, texture, and narrative form.