Nathan Stretch on Listening, Public Space & Community Connection

May 12, 2026

Nathan Stretch is a musician, artist, researcher, educator, and community development practitioner whose work explores how music can shape relationships between people and the places they share. A singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, installation artist, and filmmaker, he is also Senior Manager, Community Development and Insights at Kitchener Public Library.

His work in the community brings together inclusive service design, community engagement, fundraising, and evaluation, with a focus on expanding access to creative resources such as recording studios, filmmaking tools, public programming and events. Previously, Nathan spent over a decade at The Working Centre, where he supported employment, youth programming, and integrated housing initiatives, working closely with people facing homelessness, poverty, and barriers to public participation.

This experience continues to shape his approach to community music, which he understands as a form of shared practice grounded in access, participation, and reciprocity. Rather than treating music as an added cultural offering, Nathan explores how it can function as a form of attention and encounter within everyday public spaces.

Nathan is a PhD candidate in Community Music at Wilfrid Laurier University and a Junior Research Fellow with the Laurier Centre for Music in the Community. His dissertation, In-Flux: The Ethical Significance of Music as Nonrepresentational Art in Public Space, examines how site-specific sound can act as an ethical resource in shared environments.

His research centres on three binaural works experienced along a downtown Kitchener sound walk, where participants reflect on how listening shapes their awareness of place, time, and others. Drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, he considers whether such encounters can interrupt habitual perception and foster more attentive, responsive relationships.

Combining arts-based inquiry with qualitative and quantitative methods, Nathan’s research seeks to develop clearer ways of articulating music’s value in communal contexts—particularly in environments where competing priorities can make its impact difficult to demonstrate.

His newly funded project, Sounding Vera’s Garden, extends this work beyond the PhD. Developed with the Veritas Garden Collective and supported by the Laurier Centre for Music in the Community and Waterloo Region Community Foundation, the project will create a site-specific binaural installation within a community-built sensory garden in Kitchener. Through participatory music-making and public engagement, local musicians, neighbours, and community groups will contribute to a work shaped by the garden’s social and environmental life.

For Nathan, community music includes not only participation in music-making, but also the conditions that make participation possible. His work brings together artistic practice, community development, and research to explore how music can deepen attention, support connection, and help people encounter shared spaces—and one another—differently.