Georgios Varoutsos

Sonic Artist
Canada, United Kingdom (residence), Canada (citizenship) °1991
research interests: Soundscapes, soundwalking, urban space, immersive technologies, acoustic ecology, auto-methodologies, covid-19, field recording, field research
affiliation: SARC: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Sound and Music | Queen’s University Belfast
en

Georgios Varoutsos (b.1991) is a sound artist and researcher from Montreal, Canada. He is completing his PhD at Queen's University Belfast with SARC: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Sound and Music. He received a Master's in Research in Arts & Humanities with a concentration in Sonic Arts from Queen's University Belfast, passing with distinction. Additionally, he earned a BFA with Distinction in Electroacoustic Studies and a BA in Anthropology from Concordia University in Montreal.

 

Georgios bridges past and present history through sound and other mediums, offering audiences a variety of perspectives and lenses through his artistic endeavours. By inviting people to listen and be informed by the transformative potential of sound, he creates major links across different historical times and narratives. This has been accomplished through various initiatives presented globally through concerts, installations, exhibitions, soundwalks, and conferences. Various sources inspire his works, including field recordings, digital recordings, amplified sound materials, audio processing, synthesis, archival materials, video recordings, and experimental procedures. Projects have spread across fixed media, animation soundtracks and effects, performances with CLOrk, cross-collaboration with Sonorities + Space21, and other aspects of sonic research. Signature works encompass an unorthodox depiction of audio manipulation in mind of engendering tension and emotional reactions.

 

He is presently interested in research and practice involving urban arts, spatial audio, sonic arts, socially engaged arts, and themes around sounds, places, and spaces.

research

research expositions

  • Documenting Sounds in Urban Places: Belfast During Covid-19 Lockdowns 1 and 2 (2023) author(s): Georgios Varoutsos published in: Journal for Artistic Research
    Government-regulated business closures, social distancing from people, and stay-at-home orders emptied the urban environment of the presence of people. This effectively created new sonic relationships between natural and urbanised sounds within our built society. As Covid-19 instilled a state of abandonment from our urban spaces with each variation of lockdowns, there was an opportunity to document these changes through a sonic-journalistic approach. The research is developed through artistic practice-based creative projects that capture the transitional events of Lockdown 1 and Lockdown 2 between March and October 2020 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Fifteen locations and forty-one audio-photographic files were captured during this period, focusing on perceptions and observations of Covid-19 and the sonic effect on urban spaces. This collection of material acts as a documentation of place through sensory information and has been distributed onto online platforms such as soundmaps (soundwalk apps or browser maps), which allow for revising our understanding and reflecting on changes instilled by the pandemic. The creative projects provide a timeframe of how each lockdown changed our relationship with urban spaces during a global pandemic due to the regulations and distancing from others to combat the virus. This exposition discusses the immediate planning and procedures for capturing material during the events of Covid-19, with a review of certain soundscape compositions based on the sonic relationships of urban spaces.
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