In The Soundscape Speaks, composer, radio artist, and sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp turns to her archive of sound recordings, inviting us to listen to the environment across time and space. 

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 Simon Fraser University, Vancouver and first broadcast experiences on Vancouver Co-op Radio in the 1970s gave her inspiration and creative tools to last a lifetime. 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. “For The Soundscape Speaks, I have brought together many of my recordings and compositional approaches in a fluid stream of listening while also softly speaking my mind about issues of soundscape ecology. It is an invitation to open yourselves to the complexities of listening itself and the possibilities it may offer to recalibrating your own relationship to the environment.”

Read more about The Soundscape Speaks, and listen to an excerpt of the piece here.