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Nancy Tobin (Born in 1964) is a sound designer who creates audio designs for theatre and dance performances in Montreal. She specializes in vocal amplification using unusual loudspeakers to alter sound qualities of her work. In her twenty years of experience, she has worked with choreographers, performers, designed museum installations and participated in international festivals and sound events. Her work for theatre productions has appeared in the Festival TransAmériques, the World Stage Festival, the Festival d’Avignon and the Edinburgh International Festival.

Work
In the early 2000s she began collaborating with choreographer Danièle Desnoyers with the work Bataille. A 2003 residency at the Musee d’Art Contemporain de Montreal produced Duos Pour Corps et Instrument, a project which utilized the museum space as an ideal place to bring together sound and body. There Tobin's "sound design was very connected with visual art." Desnoyers brought in contemporary dance performers AnneBruce Falconer, Sophie Corriveau and Sioned Watkins, in a project which explores “the relationship between the language of dance and acoustic experimentation, in a choreography in which the body is closely connected to the sound environment.” The connection between the movement of the dancers and Tobin's sound was a literal one: "Tobin outfitted each of the three women with a station that includes a speaker/microphone, which was attached to one leg, a distortion pedal, a pitch pedal and an amplifier." Each dancer belonged to an individual sound station, producing a cacophonous visual and audio performance. Tobin and Desnoyers have collaborated to produce several other performances: Concerto Grosso pour Corpse et Surface Métallique (2001), and Là où je vis (2008), bringing together anew the visual arts with designed sound to create a unique performance.

Her designs for multimedia installations have also been presented at the Montréal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media. In the context of Périphérique, a project under the direction of Nicole Gingras and produced by GIV, she created the website RESTAREA in 2000, which was presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City and earned her the distinction of “Excellent Artist” during the Art On The Net competition organized by the Machita City Museum of Graphic Arts in Tokyo in 2001.

She was nominated by the Académie qébécoise du théâtre in 2004 for the Masque de la conception sonore (the sound design prize) for her production work in Le Procès, staged by French-Canadian director François Girard. Tobin has collaborated quite frequently with sound artist Martin Tétreault in duo TÉTO, the TURNTABLE QUARTET and for the SUPERHEART performance.

Her work as a solo audio artist includes commissions for the group ARTIFICIEL at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, as well as at international festivals and sound events: MUTEK (Montreal), immerson (Montreal), NAISA (Toronto), Tone Deaf (Kingston), B-312 Art Gallery (Montreal), DHC/ART Foundation (Montreal), Avatar (Québec) and, La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse (Montreal), among others. Her work has been featured at the ODD gallery (2012).

In 2016, Tobin began collaboration with Canadian choreographer Benoît Lachambre in projects including his solo Lifeguard and Fluid Grounds in 2018, which was a production of Par B.L.eux and Sophie Corriveau associated with Agora de la danse and Festival TransAmériques. Other recent work of hers includes involvement in the Théâtre de l’Avant-Pays's 2017 production of Partout ailleurs, a shadow puppetry performance, a sound design guide released in 2018.