Working with youth from Parkdale Collegiate Institute (located in the Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto), new-media artists Jessica Thompson and Pamila Matharu undertook an extensive investigation of the sound environments of the Parkdale neighbourhood in Toronto. The students researched, recorded, and reinterpreted the local sound-environments, creating short audio pieces.

The interactive results of their research were presented at the Toronto International Art Fair in the fall of 2008, bringing the aural soundscapes of Parkdale to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. While there, the students continued their field recordings on-site, capturing the flavour of the fair through ambient sounds and comments, conversations, and commentary of Fair participants.

In the following months, the students continued to work with the collected sounds, adding to the mix with new recordings in Parkdale, creating a whole new set of recordings which brought TIAF back to Parkdale. The first set of recordings were presented on the Audio Out speaker of the AGYU over the course of the Winter 2008 exhibition of Daniel Borins and Jennifer Marman. The second set was presented alongside the spring Communism of Forms exhibition.

This artist-led education project was led by Jessica Thompson (Buffalo/Toronto) and Pamila Matharu (Toronto). Sounding Out the Neighbourhood was made possible by the generous funding of the Hal Jackman Foundation.