1. Entrance 2. Knife-Edge 3. Lookout 4. Conservatory 5. Sunken Garden Listening
Acoustic Ecology Website Intro 6. Creek 7. Quarry Back to Lookout Dialogue

Composing

Go out and listen. Choose an acoustic environment which in your opinion sets a good base for your environmental compositions ... What kinds of rhythms does it contain, what kinds of pitches, how many continuous sounds, how many and what kinds of discrete sounds, etc. Which sounds can you produce that add to the quality of the environmental music? Create a dialogue and thereby lift the environmental sounds out of their context into the context of your composition, and in turn make your sounds a natural part of the music around you. Is it possible? (Hildegard Westerkamp, in "Soundwalking", Sound Heritage 3(4), 1974: 25).

Westerkamp's soundscape compositions begin when she records a sound environment. In the tradition of American experimental composers such as John Cage and Pauline Oliveros, and like other members of the World Soundscape Project such as R. Murray Schafer and Barry Truax, Westerkamp hears the sound environment as a composition. She speaks of the sounds of a place as the language of that place, its active voice. A number of other sound artists and soundscape composers can be found in the WFAE Web Registry

Soundwalks themselves are composed, in that the recordist always has a certain perspective, as Westerkamp points out in her article "The Soundscape on Radio" (Radio Rethink: art, sound and transmission, edited by Daina Augaitis and Dan Lander. Banff Centre for the Arts, 1994: 89). She highlights and juxtaposes certain sounds and sound relationships by the way that she moves the microphone within the space. Each person's soundwalk might reveal different aspects of the soundscape.

Beyond the soundwalk, a soundscape composer works with the sound environment through sound journals and in a studio. Sound journals record reactions to certain sounds and their relationships to the sociopolitical context of the place that was recorded. Sometimes the text from these sound journals becomes part of the composition, as in Westerkamp's India Sound Journals. Like Westerkamp, I work in a home studio with a Macintosh computer and a variety of digital audio software, including sound design, multitrack mixing, equalizing, and effects processors. Westerkamp's approach to studio composition - and mine as well - is to maintain a connection with the sound environment by choosing to use fairly long sequences and studio techniques that highlight and trace the contours of sonic gestures rather than isolating sounds from their original context, and radically changing them to make them unrecognizable. I will be including an extensive discussion of studio soundscape work in my CD ROM on Westerkamp. "