With SoundBites, the Canadian multidisciplinary artist is using streaming, short-form attention and new technology to build his way back toward something decidedly old-fashioned: human connection.
By Kimberley Dooshima Jev
Roger Mooking has spent much of his creative life moving between music, food, television, writing, photography and visual art. Ask him about the music business in 2026, though, and he is not particularly interested in pretending everything is fine.
“I honestly don’t believe that there’s an industry anymore,” he says. Mooking is not suggesting that music has stopped making money. His question is who can access that money and whether the infrastructure underneath the biggest artists still works.
“I think there is a method of monetizing music that’s reserved for a very elite class,” he says.
He points to fewer spaces for emerging artists to perform, consolidation in the live sector, social media saturation and streaming platforms that distribute enormous amounts of music without necessarily producing meaningful income for artists.“You play with the streaming infrastructure, and there’s no money,” he says. “So, for artists, I don’t really think that there’s an industry.”
His response was not to chase the algorithm harder. He made SoundBites.
The project grew from a question familiar to anyone making creative work now: how do you hold someone’s attention when nearly everything around them is designed to make them move on?
Mooking describes contemporary creative life as chaotic. His practices, including painting and photography, require time and patience while the surrounding environment rewards speed. He compares the experience to being “a fish swimming in bleach, thinking it’s water.” Still, he sees creative possibility inside that chaos. “Really amazing things come from chaos,” he says. “Chaos really is the brink of organization.”
That thinking shaped SoundBites.
The project contains 19 compositions. The shortest lasts eight seconds, and none runs longer than 90 seconds. Mooking did not treat the format as a collection of disposable clips. Instead, he treated time as a creative constraint.
“The first question an architect and a designer asks you is, what is the form factor?” he says. Once the size is established, “you work backwards.”
Ninety seconds gave him enough space to communicate an emotion while acknowledging how people now consume media.The challenge was maintaining the standards he already had for songwriting inside that smaller container.
“The challenge was I have to get people very quickly into the emotion and the sentiment and the thought and the feeling and the texture and the mood,” he says, “and get them out equally as quickly before they go into the next thing.”
The compositions are organized across three movements, The Learning, The Living and The Leaving, with the music becoming more complex and then more reflective as the life represented in the project progresses. The short format does not mean the ideas are small.
SoundBites also grew far beyond an album. It became a book, visual art, a gallery exhibition, a retreat, a festival and a series of physical activations. That expansion helps explain Mooking’s relationship to technology.
He is not trying to eliminate digital platforms. He wants to change their job.The SoundBites book contains a QR code that leads listeners to the album. Social media can tell part of the story. Streaming can distribute the music. None of those platforms has to define the work’s value.
Mooking says he has not made “one penny off Spotify” from the project.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Instead, the digital infrastructure can direct people toward museums, books, galleries, workshops, retreats and other places where they can experience the project physically. “I’m actually connecting with people directly in a very visceral way,” he says.
Streaming, in that model, becomes infrastructure rather than destination. This becomes more important as Mooking considers what artificial intelligence may do to creative production. He predicts a “bifurcation” in which large amounts of commercial creative material are produced quickly and cheaply, increasingly with AI.
He calls it: “the hamburgers of fast food of the creativity world.”
At the same time, he believes work made slowly by people may become more valuable precisely because somebody invested time and skill into making it.His own preference is clear.
“I love slow things.”
Mooking describes spending too long on a word because it does not feel right, or working with acrylic paint, making a mistake and having to wait before trying again. “I live in a world of slow things,” he says. “It’s another form of meditation.” That creates an interesting contradiction at the centre of SoundBites: an artist defending slow creative practice while sometimes making songs that last only seconds.
The difference is between shortening the experience and cheapening the process. Mooking changes the container without abandoning the craft. A short composition can still require careful writing and production. It can also move into another form entirely, becoming a book, an artwork, an exhibition or a gathering.
When Mooking talks about where music might go next, he eventually arrives at something much older than Spotify: the campfire. He imagines someone playing guitar around a fire. Someone else notices that person is good. Perhaps 50 people gather next time, then 100, or perhaps it simply becomes a larger campfire.
The image pushes against a creative economy obsessed with scale. Music existed as a social practice before it became content. Discovery existed before recommendation engines. People heard someone play and gathered again.Mooking may believe the music industry no longer functions as it once did, but he does not sound worried that people will stop making music.
“Nature always wins.”
His answer to a faster, cheaper and increasingly automated creative economy is not to race it. It is to keep making things carefully and find ways to bring people back into the room.
Exhibition Information
Roger Mooking: SoundBites is on view at Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax from September 11 to November 8, 2026. The exhibition brings together music, visual art, moving image and text across three movements: The Learning, The Living and The Leaving.
Admission is free. Dalhousie Art Gallery is located on the lower level of the Dalhousie Arts Centre at 6101 University Avenue, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
For exhibition details, programming and visitor information, visit artgallery.dal.ca.