For Mark Valcour, “good enough” wasn’t good enough.
With an ear for detail, no pop, no “spikey,” and no static—no matter how small—got past him. If you could do better, he knew it, and he would tell you.
For nearly 30 years, Valcour served as the audio technician for Carleton’s journalism program, mentoring thousands of students, each learning for the first time how to produce a radio story. When it came to radio, he was “the guy.”
“Mark was a real stickler for professionalism. He really hammered that home to us as young students for giving the best possible sound you could,” recalled Ian Mendes, a radio host on TSN 1200 who graduated from the program in 1998.
Mendes said Valcour taught him the value of authentic reporting.
For one story surrounding a bylaw involving dogs, Mendes said he needed to have background sound of a dog barking. So he found a clip on the Internet and put in his story.
“As soon as [Valcour] heard it, he stopped,” Mendes said. “That’s a fake bark,” Valcour told him. “That’s not real. You didn’t get that.”
“You knew that if you screwed up, he’d call you on it. He made you better,” Mendes said. “I was blown away that his ear was that good that he could discern the difference. That stuck with me.”
He had high standards, but also “a heart of gold and the students’ best interest in mind,” Mendes said.
Valcour would always take extra time beyond his schedule to work with students, whether it was helping them edit a piece for class or creating demo reels to show off to prospective employers.
“I don’t recall a sound problem he couldn’t fix,” said Andrew Foote, a reporter with CBC Ottawa who graduated in 2011. “If you were having a hard time you’d just go and say ‘Mark, I can’t quite make this edit work.’ You would even learn just by watching him do his thing.”
Few worked as closely with Valcour as Dave Tait, who teaches the fourth-year radio class which runs Midweek, a weekly current affairs program on CKCU-FM. The two worked side-by-side for about 20 years.
“Mark and I fell into such a perfect partnership with the courses that I worked with him on. It was really as though we were one person doing this stuff because we each knew that we could count on each other,” he said.
Valcour “was very much in control of the shop” that is Carleton’s radio studio, Tait said.
His efforts extended to a similar role at Algonquin College, and he operated his own audio production company, which provided sound at concerts across Ottawa. Mark was also a fisherman and an avid Montreal Canadiens fan in his spare time.
“Mark loved to be busy. It seemed he had the equivalent of three lives going on at the same time and somehow managed to fit them all into one life,” Tait said.
“Mark wasn’t a perfectionist in my mind,” Tait continued. “He was somebody who saw the potential in things and pulled them to the fullest of their potential. He was a realist, but a realist who insisted that things be made as good as they could be.”
Valcour passed away at the age of 60 at his home in Cantley prior to the resumption of classes this semester. His passion for sound lives on in radio studios across Canada.
