Today’s Relevance of Environmental Sound as Compositional Language, with Hildegard Westerkamp

By presenting some of her soundscape compositions and discussing her compositional approach in working with environmental sounds, Hildegard Westerkamp will raise the larger questions of acoustic ecology, humans’ relationship to the environment and nature, and how composers nowadays can address urgent issues such as the climate crisis, social justice, human rights, and more. Conscious listening and conscious awareness of our role as soundmakers is an inseparable part of such work, as it deepens our understanding of relationships between living beings and the world around us. The question is, how can soundscape composition enhance such environmental listening awareness? Can it play a role or have a voice in inspiring change and transformation in human behaviour? Can it raise listening awareness in an already overloaded sound world? What is the ecological stance that we take through our compositions both as listener and composer?  

Hildegard Westerkamp came from Germany to Vancouver in 1968 and has lived on these ancestral lands of the Coast Salish peoples ever since, gratefully acknowledging that her career as composer, radio artist, educator and sound ecologist blossomed on these lands. Her work with the World Soundscape Project at SFU and first broadcast experiences on Vancouver Co-operative Radio in the 1970s gave her inspiration and creative tools for a lifetime. She is a founding member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and was chief editor of its journal Soundscape between 2000 and 2012. Westerkamp’s pioneering musical works and writing at the intersections of environmentalism, acoustic communication, radio arts, listening practices and soundwalking activate an awareness, that sound is a decisive dimension of the world, an idea that underpins contemporary thinking across social, political, artistic and scientific practices of environmental respect and concern.