Combining sound and art, local podcast producer and retired music composer Claude Schryer is reinventing the podcast medium with the fourth season of his climate-themed podcast, conscient.
In the podcast’s new season, titled “Sounding Modernity,” Schryer reflects on sounds in his everyday life. From the dripping of his tap to the heating system in his house, he explores various sounds in relation to their impact on climate change while addressing feelings of climate anxiety approximately 40 per cent of Canadians experience daily.
“I call it a personal learning journey,” he said. “I’ve decided to learn out loud and to use the medium of podcast to reach people.”
Using funding from a Canadian Council for the Arts grant, Schryer will be releasing a new, meditative, five-minute episode every Sunday in English and French for the rest of 2023.
Schryer said he chose to keep episodes short so listeners could make time in their busy lives to regularly engage with the podcast.
“I find that five minutes is a reasonable amount of time to ask for people’s attention,” he said. “I try to make something meaningful happen in those five minutes.”
Within this timeframe, Schryer discusses themes such as modernity, which he defined as “the combination of extractive capitalism, overconsumption, systemic racism, white supremacy and separation from nature.”
However, Schryer said he encourages listeners to look beyond the definition’s negative connotation and to reflect on strategies to “move beyond the destructive elements of society,” particularly in relation to climate change.
Schryer poses a question at the end of each episode, inviting listeners to reflect and provide a response on the conscient website’s discussion forum.
“It’s one thing to listen to a podcast, it’s another thing to actually reflect and write what you felt about it,” he said. “I enjoy conversations, and as an artist, I am always interested in having feedback on my work.”
In the new season’s fifth episode, titled “rope,” Schryer asked listeners to reflect on how the sound of a rope holding a boat to the dock at Toronto Harbour made them feel.
“Time seemed to slow down significantly. It had a calming effect,” sound composer Hildegard Westerkamp wrote in the comments.
Jessica Ruano, conscient publicist, podcast listener and local artist, said she enjoys engaging with Schryer and reflecting on the contents of the podcast.
“[Schryer is] making this small offering that he hopes will be a drop in the water that will ripple out, and those ripples will be the conversations that arise from this,” she said.
Ruano added she appreciates the opportunity to engage with art that uses sound as a medium.
“What Claude is sharing with us are just moments and bits of life,” she said. “As an artist, I would liken it to writing a haiku and encapsulating a small but important and distinctive idea in very few words. He is doing that in a … handful of sounds and just letting you take that and run with it.”
She added conscient has enabled her to step back and analyze the role of sound in her life.
“It’s funny when you start to notice those smaller things that you might skip by in your life like what your house sounds like [or] what your walk to work sounds like. It’s put me in a much more observational state, which I think is a good place to be,” she said. “It’s just another way of seeing the world.”
While conscient addresses difficult and important issues, Schryer said his goal is to provide “a bit of relief” from climate anxiety and modernity by encouraging listeners to step back, listen and reflect instead of always actively searching for solutions.
“Some of it is very uncomfortable,” he said. “It’s hard to face up to what we’ve done to ourselves [and] our environment, but we need to do that. But it doesn’t have to be all pain. We can go slowly at some of the core issues and eventually face the truth and find ways to live that are good and joyful, but not as destructive as the ways we live now.”
Featured image by Claude Schryer.
