Since 2017, I have been working on a variety of ethnographic, community-engaged, and arts projects on music, sound, noise, culture, and affordability in Kensington Market. This research has been funded by Social Science and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant and many University of Toronto grants, including the Connaught Fund, School of Cities Urban Challenge Grant, Jackman Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship, UofT Excellence Award, and an award from the Critical Digital Humanities Institute. I am grateful to have worked with an amazing array of talented and dedicated students on this work over the years, and to have partnered with the Ethnography Lab, especially Emily Hertzman and Joshua Barker.

Kensington Market Music Places: Undergrad Research Showcase

In Winter 2026, undergraduate students in my course HMU333: Ethnomusicology of Urban Environments researched the history and present of over 45 music venues, restaurants, bars, and institutions where music has been performed in Kensington Market. Inspired by both A Closer Walk NOLA, the Kensington Market Community Land Trust‘s work on place-keeping, and walking tours about Kensington music led by Jonny Dovercourt (Wavelength Music) and Eugene Slonimerov (KMCLT) this research will form the basis of a number of upcoming projects, including a walking tour for the Kensington Market Community Land Trust in fall 2026. The students did fantastic work. With thanks to students Vito, Rylen, Alejandro, Anna, Jeanne, and Ella.

“Whose Streets, Whose Sounds” Installation

“Whose Streets, Whose Sounds? Streetscapes and Soundscapes in Toronto’s Kensington Market.” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Toronto. November 16, 2023. With Kensington Market Soundscape Study research team members Hannah Brown, Wes Brunson, and Nil Basdurak. The Transmissions/Transitions installation was organized by Leo Cardoso and Alexandra Lippman.

Since 2021, members of the Kensington Market Soundscape Study (KMSS) – a community-engaged ethnographic research team – have documented and participated in making, recording, and discussing sounds in Kensington Market’s public realm. This installation shared a selection of our recordings of Pedestrian Sundays Kensington festival days; community comments about sound collected, a KMSS survey of community reactions to neighbourhood noise, and excerpts of a City Council meeting in which community members speak about the City of Toronto’s proposed plans for Kensington’s permanent pedestrianization. Efforts to control the Market’s sounds and its streets bring a community together and pull it apart.

By manipulating audio controller sliders, users could adjust soundscape and discursive audio by selectively increasing and reducing the volume of various channels. The numbered sliders corresponded to numbered bubbles on the Kensington Market map below, which note where the soundscape recordings were gathered or the locations with which they are associated. The instalment was presented as a sort of wish fulfillment, allowing users to mute, amplify, or otherwise exert a level of control over Kensington’s auditory environment not so easily accomplished in daily life.

“Charting Commercial Change in Kensington Market”

A 2026 visual essay co-authored with Emily Hertzman and featuring beautiful data visualization by Scott McCallum. Supported by the School of Cities Urban Challenge Grant on the theme of data, inequality, and democracy. A collaboration with the Kensington Market Community Land Trust (KMCLT), a community initiative created to protect Kensington Market’s social and economic diversity by collectively purchasing properties for affordable housing, the maintenance of historical eclectic mixed-use neighbourhood profile, and the sustenance of socio-economically and culturally diverse residents and businesses. Our research supports the KMCLT’s initiative to collect and publicly share land and property use data within Kensington Market to help the organization expand their mission of “place-keeping.”

Nassau St. and Augusta Ave. in Kensington Market in 1966. Toronto Star.

“Do You Hear What I Hear? Accounting for Subjectivity in Community Consultation”

A public lecture I gave on my current research project – the Kensington Market Soundscape Study – at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities Knowledge Café, May 2023.

 

Since 2017, I have been involved in a variety of research projects within Kensington Market, a diverse, historically immigrant neighbourhood in Toronto’s downtown core. Research began in 2017 with the inspiration of University of Toronto’s Ethnography Lab‘s Kensington Market Research Project led by Professor Joshua Barker. With Prof. Barker and the Ethnography Lab’s support, I began the Kensington Market Sound and Research Project with a team of graduate students in our ethnomusicology program. Original student ethnography team members were M.A. students and recent graduates Jennie Horton, Jardena Gertler-Jaffe, Dennis Lee, and Ryan Persadie.

In 2018, I received an Insight Development Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to support the graduate student research component. This project is entitled Toronto Music City: The View from Kensington Market and is a collaborative research project that takes the City of Toronto’s 2016 “Music Strategy” rollout as an opportunity to investigate the intersections and divergences of cultural policy, new musical developments and already-existing musical scenes, businesses, and musicians. With a team of student ethnographers, I am undertaking a team ethnographic investigation of music-making in Kensington Market, one of Toronto’s most diverse downtown neighbourhoods, to apprehend the Strategy’s impact on the ground. Many students have worked on this project are Dennis Lee (MA ’18, doctoral student), Jon Wu (MA ’19), Helen Abbott (MA ’20),Kristen Graves (doctoral student), Hannah Brown (doctoral student), Wes Brunson (doctoral student in anthropology), Nil Basdurak (doctoral student), Travis Van Wyck (MA student in cultural geography), and Bernice Hoi Ching Cheung (doctoral student). A website showcasing much of the research is here. 

In 2020, UofT ethnomusicology graduates Jennie Horton, Jon Wu, and Helen Abbot, current graduate student Dennis Lee, and I shared our research into music and urban development in Kensington Market at the Society for Ethnomusicology’s annual conference. The research appears in two panels:

1. The Sonic Life of a Neighbourhood: A Team Ethnography of Toronto’s Kensington Market This panel is comprised of four single-authored papers growing out of a team ethnographic study of the sonic and musical life of a single urban Canadian neighborhood: Toronto’s Kensington Market (KM). Located in Toronto’s rapidly developing downtown core, KM is notable for its narrow streets populated by private homes, and low-rise apartment buildings; a great variety of small storefronts, restaurants, cafes, and music venues; its history as an immigrant market district; and its reputation as a countercultural, anti-corporate pocket in a downtown increasingly characterized by newly constructed glass and steel condominium towers. KM also boasts a rich but little-studied sonic life, including many full-time music venues and short-lived “DIY” performance spaces; even more restaurants, bars and cafes regularly featuring live music and DJs; recording studios and record stores; a lively busking scene; and a rambunctious, competitive collection of community organizations. Research in KM with diverse constituencies (musicians, community activists, music bookers, shopkeepers) and locations (a puppet theater workshop, street corners, a Chinese Canadian association, a punk and metal music venue, and the Market’s virtual presence in social media) creates a vibrant portrait of contemporary urban sonic and musical experience. Taken together, this research elicits multi-perspectival insights into local dynamics and the major forces in contemporary urban sonic-musical life: the displacement and online iterations of musical scenes, gentrification, festivalization, and the struggle to be heard and recognized in a diverse, increasingly unaffordable city in which music is treated as economic resource.

• Coalition TO: Local and Translocal Scene Formations in Toronto’s Punk and Metal Underground, Dennis Lee
• The Sonic Dimensions of Placemaking: An Urban Street Festival on the Ground and Online, Helen Abbot
• Voice and Silence in an Urban Canadian Context, Jonathan Wu
• Negotiating Sound and Noise in the Gentrifying City, Jennie Horton

2. Fieldwork at Home: Local, Ecological, Canadian Perspectives Tending the Urban Musical Ecosystem: Cultural, Economic, and Scholarly Cultivation in Policy and on the Ground, Farzaneh Hemmasi

Also in 2020, I was honoured to receive a Connaught Community Partnership Research Award to fund a new collaboration between the resident-led activist organization Friends of Kensington Market (FOKM), the Kensington Market Business Improvement Area (KMBIA), the University of Toronto Department of Anthropology’s Ethnography Lab, and the University of Toronto’s Ethnomusicology program in a two-year ethnographic project called Keeping Kensington “Kensington:” Value, Affordability, and Culture in Toronto’s Kensington Market. 

As of 2023, the research team and I are working on the Kensington Market Soundscape Study. 

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Canadian Music Week, May 2018

In 2018, I had the chance to moderate a fascinating panel at Canadian Music Week’s Music Cities Summit called “How Public Spaces can Contribute to Scenes and Strategies.”   Read more and see a video of the event here.

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Music and the Marketing of Kensington Market

The original KM team and I were delighted to speak in the Ethnography Lab’s Methodological Extensions speaker series. I talked about the musical ecosystem metaphor as it appeared in my conversations with KM residents and city policy-makers. Jennie Horton spoke about Toronto’s vanishing venues crisis as it appears in Kensington. Dennis Lee talked about his research at the now defunct Coalition music venue. And Ryan Persadie spoke about Round Venue’s queer people of colour burlesque scene.