Positions available:1

Our Company

Banging Rocks creates Virtual Reality for positive impact, with an emphasis on transdisciplinary arts.

Space Shanties

Space Shanties is an interdisciplinary exploration of what life on a Mars colony ship and colony would be like, centering on a musicological / performance based approach, with the extrapolation of historical trends in folk music interwoven into the narrative arc of Mars colonists as they apply, train, journey to and settle on Mars.

The setting for Space Shanties is a series of Virtual Reality scenes depicting these phases of the journey, with the interactive, immersive VR environments serving as backdrop for the heart of the project: speculative folk music that extends real folk traditions into new circumstances and stories. Phase I of Space Shanties is the creation of a proof of concept: A pseudo-historical tour of a Mars Colony with musical interaction points throughout.

Key to this project is “Speculative Folk Music” - this is “hard musicological sci-fi” - as accurate as possible a representation of how folk music evolves and of the context for its evolution that would be provided by a Martial colonization project. Details will be incorporated ranging from the likely back-stories of the crew to the background sounds and aural cues that would inform the sounds mirrored musically.

As a colonization effort of this type would draw in a crew from around the world, it provides a great opportunity to explore a wide range of folk music traditions.

This Riipen project centers specifically on fiddle music traditions.

The Project

This project centers on the variations of fiddle tradition as found in Canadian folk music. The successful applicant will research at least two traditions of folk fiddle music - potentially including Ontario, Irish, Celtic, Maritime, Appalachian or other styles. This research will lead to composition of at least one piece of music in a selected style which will be included in a Virtual Reality experience. The successful applicant will also create one research paper on their findings and a small series of blog posts related to their work.

The Student

The student selected should have a strong background in music, with both a skill at fiddle playing and a knowledge and interest in its traditions. The ideal candidate would have a grounding in philosophy and an interest in science fiction, suitable to help them extrapolate from historical folk music into a Martian context.

Students will be added to the Banging Rocks Slack, with a dedicated support channel for the project. We will ensure any messages or emails with questions on the project are answered within 24 hours, and will provide opportunities for students to ask any questions about both the project and any other aspect of Banging Rocks’ work (from the technical to administrative to strategic) that they are interested in.

Where appropriate, we will introduce the student to members of our community that are relevant to their work.