2021
Maria Madalena Oliveira; Martinho, Claudia. “Once you start listening to the world you are dealing with life.” Interview with Hildegard Westerkamp. Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies 8 1 (2021).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21814/rlec.3323
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Picture postcards are partly responsible for the visual relationship we still have with urban places today. They used to fix images of villages and cities and draw our attention to what can be seen. Cities are, however, places that can also be experienced and de-scribed in aural terms. They are a kind of auditorium, where the noise of traffic combines with birdsong. The experience of conscious listening — which has been analysed more intensively since the 1970s — is a way of getting to know one’s environment, as well as a way of preserving the body’s sentient nature. In this interview — which was recorded in January 2021 as part of the project “AUDIRE. Audio Repository: saving sonic-based memories” — Hildegard Westerkamp explains how original and unique a soundwalk can be and how inspiring or disturbing the urban acoustic experience can be today. The concept of soundscape and the notion of conscious listening are here considered fundamental to understand our relationship with the environment. With an academic background in music and communication, Hildegard Westerkamp is a composer, radio artist and sound ecologist. She was born in Germany, but has been based in Canada since 1968. As a researcher she participated in the “World Soundscape Project” team, which was coordinated by R. Murray Schafer. In the mid-1970s, she led the “Noise Abatement Project” of the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation (SPEC) in Vancouver, and a few years later created her pioneering radio programme Soundwalk-ing on Vancouver Co-operative Radio. She lectured in acoustic communication at Simon Fraser University for almost a decade, between 1982 and 1991, and was researcher for the “Women in Music” project. Between 1991 and 1995, Hildegard Westerkamp edited The Soundscape Newsletter and in 2000 she founded the Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, ofwhich she was the chief editor until 2012. An enthusiastic promoter of soundwalks, which she describes as excursions whose main purpose is listening to the environment, Hildegard Westerkamp is a founding member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia (Bazzana, 2007), Westerkamp is a member of many associations and several of her artworks have been awarded and earned recognition at American and European competitions. Environmental sounds are the “musical” resources of her compositions. As an art-ist, Hildegard Westerkamp is a kind of sound poet. Her exceptional experience in trans-forming everyday sounds into artistic practices and her clear but emotive understanding of sound as a language are the reasons why she is today one of the most distinguished references for researchers of sound studies.
Today there is no researcher in the field of sonic studies not referring, in a way or another, to the word soundscape. In your opinion, why is this such a unique concept?
When I started working with Schafer in 1973 and the “World Soundscape Project” (WSP), the word soundscape was new. Apparently the word was used by someone else beforehand, but Schafer took that concept and really just ran with it. The simple way of speaking about it is to refer to the word landscape. In the English language, this is a very obvious connection. When we think of landscape, we think of eve-rything from its geography, its vegetation, its inhabitants and its culture content, in other words the interaction between living beings and the specific environment they live in. The same applies to soundscape, which, according to Schafer, is to be understood as a sonic place that communicates to us and that we communicate within. It’s a place that is perceived aurally. His interest in soundscape originated in the concern that we were not paying enough attention to it, that we were beginning to have too many sonic problems, especially in the urban environment. When we talk about soundscape, we are not just talking about the sounds that are occurring in the environment. We are talking also and most importantly about our rela-tionship to it, in fact that of any living being, and how we listen to it and making sound in it. What is the interaction? What are we doing to the sound environment? What voices are we putting into it? And how do the sounds occupy an environment? How does an environment reflect sound back? An environment, a landscape, an urban place, a room will shape any sound through reflections, echoes, and resonances, and will give it its unique characteristics. There is always a relationship between how an environment receives a sound and how we put sound into it. Very often that kind of ecological relationship that we are talk-ing about here is forgotten when the word soundscape is used these days. But historically the term soundscape always implies — and is indeed its essence — that we are speaking about the relationship between living beings and the environment. All too often nowa-days, we hear people speak about a soundscape even when they mean a musical piece, a composition, and not even necessarily a composition that uses environmental sound. Indeed, sometimes a piece of music can also be a soundscape. But often in those con-texts the emphasis would be on an ecological understanding of this soundscape, how we relate to it, how we listen, what meanings do the sounds carry for us and so on.
Probably because of its connotation with sound ecology and natural landscapes, the word is very often used as meaning enjoyable listening…
This is a misunderstanding. I remember when I was in Japan some years ago, we had an intense discussion about exactly that. The term soundscape in Japanese culture then tended to imply a pleasant sound environment, such as the beautiful traditional gar-dens. No, in the “World Soundscape Project” tradition, we are talking about any sound environment. The idea at the time, in the 1970s, of starting to listen consciously to all as-pects of the sound environment was very much based in the fact that the sound environ-ment was getting progressively more polluted. And precisely because of that we needed to listen to it, especially since, as Schafer felt, the people involved in fighting noise pol-lution were not including listening in their anti-noise fights. Lots of measurements were made and noise studies were conducted in order to understand noise pollution and to make changes, but the one thing that was missing was listening to noise. Schafer claimed that conscious listening would help us to understand viscerally what is actually going on out there. His idea was that in our study of the whole soundscape we also needed to insert perception into the study of noise, uncomfortable as it may be.It can in fact be noticeably uncomfortable to listen to the soundscape if a sound-walk leads along a noisy street for a long time. In that context the listening is conscious! You are not just blocking the noise out; you are doing the opposite, you are opening up to it. And that can become very uncomfortable and exhausting. An experience like that is a reality check. It reveals what happens to our bodies and psyche even if we do not pay attention to it. If we block out that sound as we often do in daily life, while we are walking along a street, we are usually also not conscious of what that sound is doing to us. So, the essence of why we would want to listen to soundscapes in that fashion is to under-stand their impact on ourselves and any living being, especially when we are exposed to this kind of noise in everyday life. What is the reality of that? To supplement the listening experience with measurements and acoustic research was the ideal really behind the work of the “World Soundscape Project”. Let’s work together with scientists who are studying the sound environment, and bring together the information that comes from both quantitative data and qualitative research. If we combine these approaches, we may get a broader understanding of what we’re doing to our sound environments. However, such a comprehensive approach to studying the sound environment opens up enormous and complex arenas of work. Before I started working with the “World Soundscape Project”, when I was still a music student, I had never heard about sound research, noise measurements, environmental acoustics and the like, and certainly had never imagined to get into this field of study. Suddenly you are dealing with quantitative data, you want to understand terms such as the decibel, reverberation, resonance, and so on; you want to understand how environmental conditions influence sound quality, why something is disturbing or not; you learn about the psychology of listening, the physiology of the ear, to name just a few aspects of studying the world of sound. Not only are you entering into multi-disciplines of sound and acoustics, but on a personal level you are also beginning to understand how you listen, what kind of listener yourself are. This is a life task really, to begin to understand how we listen, how we react to sound, why some people are more sensitive to noise and loud sounds than others, why certain cultures are much more sonically expressive and outgoing than others. I always say that Schafer has left us a huge legacy, because once you start listening to the world you are dealing with all of life.
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