About the Artist
Born in Vancouver and trained at the Vancouver Academy of Music, Lisa Walker left her classical violin studies to explore a broad range of styles and traditions, including Jazz, Folk, Blues and Celtic.
Dreamtime Sanctuary, her premiere CD, chronicles a journey from India to Italy, incorporating sounds she captured on a Dat recorder while travelling throughout various regions of each country: a call to prayer from a mosque on the Ganges, Mass at St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome, the rhythmic rattle of a railcar.
From 1995 - 1997 Lisa was invited to be an artist in residence at Simon Fraser University's Graphics and Multimedia Research Lab - a position which entailed working with alternate midi controllers such as light beams, Gforce accelerometers and Electromagnetic Fields (a la Theramin) with which she created her Midi Violin. She was also worked with LifeForms animation, an software package that replicates the human body in virtual space.
From 1996 -1998 Lisa was invited to join a research team in southeast Alaska studying the Humpback Whale. Lisa was drawn to the humpbacks of southeast Alaska by their intriguing acoustic behavior, and as a musician, was able to recognize subtle patterns in the acoustic activity of the whales that were not readably evident to the scientist.
In her role as sound consultant, she spent many months at sea, traveling and camping in remote wilderness locations, to locate the whales and record their sounds. The violin has the same qualities and timbre as the Humpback's voice, and can mimic the call to a point where even the best ears are fooled. This became the inspiration for her second album, The Grooved Whale in which Lisa combines recordings of her violin (recorded underwater with the help of a special speaker) with the actual sounds of the whales to create terrains of her own imaginings.
Current projects include working with producer Gary Morgan on Grooved Whale 2, to be released on Earthworm Records, November 2001. Walker is also working with Orca researcher Paul Spong to produce an album of orca sounds, gathered from over 25 years of recording archives.
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