Soundwalking (link)
By Hildegard Westerkamp
originally published in Sound Heritage, Volume III Number 4, Victoria B.C., 1974
Revised 2001
Jul 112011
Jul 102011
“There are some fundamental principles regarding the construction of an acoustically healthy society, one where we can exist within the sounds of life. Respect towards voice and words, sonic awareness, the awakening of the sense of hearing. To preserve the sounds that tend to fade out, while remaining open to the sounds that spring out of each technological stride. To build an aural idiom that interprets its own symbolism. To accept the silence, enforcing it in the due moments. And, above all else, to listen.”
Jul 052011
Exomapascape
by Fernando Corbal
(From Brasilia Soundscape Compositions)
This composition was created in a workshop in Brasilia led by the sound artist and acoustic ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp. The local participants who created the soundscapes ran the gamut from those with musical, recording and composition experience, to those who had very little or no experience at all working with sound.
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Fernando was a musician and performer. He composed this piece with the explicit purpose to preserve the realism of the soundscape. It is a short and effective journey through the day of a middle class person in Brasilia. Leaving the quiet of the home, through the sound of a metal gate, entering the car, the work world with all its hectic, intense rhythms, finding recreation and stimulation later on the playground and in the gym with children, and finally ending up in the calming soundscape of a natural environment.
The idea of transferring the country’s capital away from the coast has existed since the second half of the eighteenth century, as a way to populate, develop and secure Brazil’s vast interior (James Holston, p. 17). In the mid-fifties during the presidential campaign of Juscelino Kubitschek it was finally proposed as a concrete project and was realized shortly after, in the 60s, Brasilia is a very young city.
This city has exactly what other, not so consciously designed cities have – a lot of traffic noise. Meanwhile at the nearby lake one can find serene silence. It is obvious by now that Brasilia is a place of sharply contrasting soundscapes: traffic noise and natural sounds. There is very little in between. Human social contexts, like cafes or restaurants, appear in small isolated clusters, dotted all over the city, connectable only by car. That which defines a community acoustically is mostly lacking: the regular street, the small alleys, little squares, shady old trees, market places, neighbourhood cafes, those hidden corners that develop over time as a city becomes older. It is in those more intimate places where community develops, where culture first occurs, where people in their social interaction are protected from the larger noise of a city and can create small islands of undisturbed communication, a type of inner voice or village voice of urban culture and social life.
- from the website of Hildegard Westerkamp
Jul 052011
Sarah Peebles
Walking through Tokyo at the Turn of the Century
Shinjuku Station (south entrance) – Ticket vending machines, telephone, wicket beeps, train arrival/departure music.
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More a documentary than a composition, Sarah Peebles’ release is nevertheless perfectly capturing the soul of a city that’s world famous for its messy life. But what’s incredible listening to “108″ is the fact that the very characters of noise, confusion and – not to exaggerate – stress one usually gets in metropolitan environment become – little by little – appreciated companions in any of their particular inflexions: the fast-food girl’s almost carillon-like voice accompanied by company jingles, a preacher, commercial music from Japanese radio, and so on… The only moment of relief comes with the wonderful tolling of a temple’s bell preceding the New Year. Here you have the total meeting: the body has time to settle down, the mind can work in spans at last. Contrarily to similar projects that just draw a blank, Sarah’s soundscape needs to be listened with polished ears.
— Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes
For solo tape with poetry and reading by Norbert Ruebsaat
Length: 16:05
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A Walk through the City is an urban environmental composition based on Norbert Ruebsaat’s poem of the same name (see below). It takes the listener into a specific urban location – Vancouver B.C.’s Skid Row area – with its sounds and languages. Traffic, carhorns, brakes, sirens, aircraft, construction, pinball machines, the throb of trains, human voices, a poem, are its “musical instruments.” These sounds are used partly as they occur in reality and partly as sound objects altered in the studio. A continuous flux is created between the real and imaginary soundscapes, between recognizable and transformed places, between reality and composition.
The poem is spoken by the author and appears throughout the piece, symbolizing the human presence in the urban soundscape. Its voice interacts with, comments on, dramatizes, struggles with the sounds and other voices it encounters in the piece.
A Walk Through the Citywas composed at the Sonic Research Studio at Simon Fraser University and, in its final stage, at the CBC studios in Vancouver, with the technical assistance of Gary Heald. Many of the sounds were taken from the World Soundscape Project’s environmental tape collection at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, including two of the street oldtimers, recorded by my friend and colleague, the late Howard Broomfield. Some were recorded by myself.
The piece was commissioned by and first broadcast on CBC Radio’s “Two New Hours.”
from: http://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/program_notes/walkcity.htm
