The ongoing emergence of new media presents both challenges and opportunities for improvisers from around the world. The Improvisation, Community and Social Practice research initiative – in conjunction with Coastal Jazz and the University of British Columbia – presented Sound Lines, a conference on improvisation, text and media, which took place at UBC Robson Square and at the Tom Lee Music Hall, in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, alongside the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

Composer-improviser Barry Guy and animator Michel Gagné opened the conference with a keynote talk about their collaboration Fixed Fragmented Fluid, which also had its world première at the jazz festival.

Vancouver poet Wayde Compton delivered the closing keynote address, on “Turntable Poetry, Mixed-Race, and Schizophonophilia.”

The conference featured presentations by academics and artists from around the world on topics including improvisation in film and theatre, the poetics of improvisation, jazz in the media, community-making and the politics of improvisation, hip-hop and turntablism, visual culture and semiotics, and graphic scores, along with other topics.