Jarrett Cole
Jarrett Cole is the Director of the Winnipeg School of Communication, as well as the Editor of its journal, Winnsox. Born and raised, as they say, in Winnipeg, Jarrett has a wide spectrum of experience with media. After graduating high school, he decided to pursue audio engineering as an occupation. Because this was in the late 90s, he witnessed first-hand the wholesale abandonment of analog tape machines in the modern recording studio—his first studio was by necessity and design a digital audio workstation. Later he opened the commercial recording studio Dreamscape Recording and was one of the first engineers in Canada to augment his arsenal of analog gear with Chandler’s TG-2 mic preamps which were based on Abbey Road’s proprietary in-house circuit designs (think Dark Side of the Moon, Abbey Road, and Band on the Run).
After a number of years as the studio manager and chief audio engineer, he left Dreamscape Recording to pursue a new venture in web design, in essence, the very medium that was challenging the hegemony of the music industry’s major record labels. No stranger to the precarity of making a living in the digital arts, he decided to renew his formal academic education and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Winnipeg, majoring in English. While there, he developed an interest in Fairy Tales, Folklore, and Psychology, and was selected as the recipient of the Perry Nodelman Scholarship in Children’s Literature for the Fall/Winter 2018–19 academic year. Carrying on in the family tradition, he decided to give in to his passion for teaching and completed his Bachelor of Education degree at the University of Winnipeg in June 2020. For the past seven years he has worked in radio and film production while finishing his academic studies. He also held the position of News Director at CKUW 95.9FM, the University of Winnipeg’s campus and community radio station (2017–2020).
An avid guitar player with a taste for the ambient and atmospheric, Jarrett spends his free time creating new sonic textures by layering guitar tones in the studio and has developed a recording philosophy that he calls “painting with sound.” With two decade’s worth of experience in music and broadcast media production he strives to share to his creative sound design techniques with his students to better aid them in navigating their everyday acoustic space, both in the classroom and at large. Recent teaching experience includes English, Theatre, and Film at the secondary level. He currently teaches in the English and Drama departments at R.D. Parker Collegiate.
