Sonde was a music design and performance ensemble based in Montreal who explored the relationship between sound, music, space and time. Sonde members were inspired by Italian composer Mario Bertoncini who taught a Music Design course in McGill’s Faculty of Music in the early 1970s. Bertoncini proposed that composition begin before the instrument, requiring the composer to explore the acoustic properties of materials and structures and invent new instruments as part of the creation of a new composition.
Sonde was formed in 1975 and originally called MUD (an abbreviation of Musical Design). MUD gave their first performance in 1975 at Pollack Hall, McGill University in Montreal. Sonde’s instruments (sound sources) were designed and constructed by members of the group. The original members of MUD were Andrew Culver, Pierre Dostie, Chris Howard, and Charles de Mestral.

Richard Jerome Sommer was born on August 27, 1934, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

He was a Canadian professor, poet, and environmentalist. He was educated at Harvard University (Ph.D.) and was a Professor of Creative Writing in the English Department at Sir George Williams University in Montreal (later to become Concordia) for 34 years. He served three decades as a volunteer game warden in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where he led a citizens' environmental group in a seven-year battle, ultimately successful, to save the Townships' Pinnacle Mountain from developers. Sommer was an accomplished flautist who, in his later years, volunteered in hospitals and personal care homes, playing for the sick and elderly. He published ten books of poems, including "Homage to Mr. MacMullin" (1969), "The Blue Sky Notebook" (1974), "left hand mind" (1976), "Milarepa" (1976) and "Fawn Bones" (1986). In 2004, Sommer, a Buddhist, was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and the verse journal "Cancer Songs" (2011) was an important part of his response to this challenge.

He was married to Victoria Tansey for over forty years. He died on February 13, 2012, in Sutton, Quebec.

Margaret Anne Ganley was born in 1942 in Australia. Her father was George P. Ganley and her mother Gertrude Rowe Ganley. She married Peter Somerville in 1966. She graduated from the University of Adelaide in Pharmacy and the University of Sydney in Law. She continued her education in Canada where she received her PhD in Civil Law from McGill University in 1978. She joined McGill’s Faculty of Law as an assistant professor in 1978, became an associate professor in 1979 and was named as the Samuel Gale Professor of Law in 1989. Concurrently, she held appointments in the Faculty of Medicine as an associate professor in 1980 and as a full professor from 1984. In 1986 she became the founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law.