Session 5 Soundwalks, Acoustic Spaces and Field Recordings
Saturday, 13:00 – 14:30, De Balie
How to intensify listening to the environment? What is the importance of raising our awareness of the sounds that surround us? How do we experience and remember spaces and landscape through their sounds? How to work with field recordings, soundscape composition and sound maps?
Hildegard Westerkamp
What’s in a Soundwalk?
This presentation will be a reflection on seven years of public soundwalks put on by the Vancouver Soundwalk Collective within the cultural context of Vancouver New Music’s concert and performance seasons. I will trace how this continuity of soundwalk activities over time and with increased involvement may have shifted and deepened experiences in listening and relationships to space and place. Have they altered cultural, political and ecological attitudes within the Collective, changed and inspired daily life activities, work, studies, creative processes? The presentation will be informed by my own involvement and by recent interviews with members of the Vancouver Soundwalk Collective and will include sound and video excerpts from selected soundwalks.
Hildegard Westerkamp (DE/CA) lectures on topics of listening, environmental sound and acoustic ecology and she conducts soundscape workshops. By focusing the ears’ attention to details in the acoustic environment, her many compositional works draw attention to the act of listening itself and to the inner, hidden spaces of the environment we inhabit.
Edward Shanken and Yolande Harris
Tuning In and Spacing Out: The Art and Science of the Presentness of Sound
A presentation that explores sound and space as modes of understanding environmental phenomena. Drawing on a variety of examples from sound art, visual art, and science, Harris and Shanken weave together extreme ideas from the mythic and scientific significance of marine mammals to the surprising interconnectedness of the sea and
outer-space. A consideration of how ways of experiencing space through sound modulate between fact and fantasy, actual and virtual.
Edward A. Shanken (US) writes and teaches about the entwinement of art, science and technology, with a focus on interdisciplinary practices involving new media. His critically appraised survey, Art and Electronic Media, was published in 2009.
Yolande Harris (UK) uses her performances, installations and instruments to investigate how we use sound to relate to our surroundings, both architectural and ecological. Her current research/practice considers the musical potential of sound worlds outside the human hearing range, through underwater bioacoustics and the sonification of data.
Annea Lockwood
An interview with Annea Lockwood by Arie Altena
Annea Lockwood has been involved in the recording of environmental sounds for a long time, her A Sound Map of the Hudson River (1989) and A Sound Map of the Danube can be considered as classics of the genre. An informal interview with her will touch on her views on field recording, composition, and sound mapping. Hildegard Westerkamp, Edward Shanken & Yolande Harris will also join the conversation.
