Sounding Places: Situated Conversations through the Soundscape Work of Hildegard Westerkamp.

Dissertation Proposal
Andra McCartney
PhD candidate
Graduate Programme in Music
In the winter of 1989, on Peterborough's community radio station, Trent Radio, I heard Hildegard Westerkamp's Cricket Voice. I was transported into a world in which the song of a single cricket reverberated and resonated in a way that I had never heard before, in an expansive place. Moreover, I felt urged to compose. It was an odd sensation. I had grown up listening to and playing a wide variety of music, and had always been drawn to electroacoustic music (even though initially I didn't call it that) since first hearing it in England at a very early age. 1. I had heard the work of, at least, hundreds of composers, and had never felt drawn to compose before. Yet now a powerful desire to record sounds and work with them on tape caused me to go out, rent equipment, and begin. Since then, I have discovered that through her composition, teaching, and radio work, Westerkamp has had a similar effect on other composers, and is a particular source of inspiration to many women composers in Canada. I believe that this is due to the way she approaches soundscape. In the liner notes to Westerkamp's recent CD, Transformations, American composer Pauline Oliveros says:

One can journey with her sound to inner landscapes and find unexplored openings in our sound souls. The experience of her music vibrates the potential for change. Her compositions invite interaction--a chance to awaken to one's own creativity.2.

In this dissertation, I propose to consider the significance of Hildegard Westerkamp's work to current scholarship in the area of feminist epistemology, and to contemporary electroacoustic music in the genre of soundscape composition, specifically in her receptive, dialogic approach to particular places and their sonic, social, political and technological resonances.

The title of this dissertation, "Sounding Places", has several implications. It refers firstly to Westerkamp's insistence on a way of working that I call sounding, referring to the mariner's slow and careful navigation through unfamiliar waters, finding a channel through invisible topography.3. Westerkamp takes time to listen to places in depth in order to understand them, moving slowly and carefully through landscapes, listening to their resonances to avoid carving into them. Sounding places is also a term to describe the pieces that she composes, which explore the intricate sonic relationships of active environments. The title also points to the importance of the concept of place in my discussion: the places where pieces are composed, the virtual places such as the radio show or CD where the pieces are heard, the places evoked in the responses of listeners. The relationships between "virtual" and "real" places will be particularly important to this dissertation, as I propose to create it in interactive multimedia CD-ROM format.

As I discuss in my Master's thesis on the work of Canadian women composers of electroacoustic music,4. there has been little academic literature on the development of electroacoustic music in Canada, despite Canada's important contributions in acoustic ecology, musique acousmatique , and sound environments in virtual reality. Some international authors do not mention Canadian work at all, while others briefly discuss work at the University of Toronto studio, or early work by Hugh Le Caine at the National Research Council in Ottawa. Canada is generally perceived as marginal to electroacoustic activity, with most of the literature concentrated on developments in Europe and the United States.

The compositional work done by members of the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in the 1970s is not mentioned at all in texts devoted to electroacoustic composition, perhaps because the project primarily emphasized research and education about the soundscape. On the other hand, their works are widely recognized in the fields of music education,5. communications,6. radio art,7. and acoustic ecology.8. But most of the project members were composers, including Westerkamp, R. Murray Schafer (who directed the project), Barry Truax, Peter Huse, and Howard Broomfield. All of these composers produced musical works as a result of their association with WSP. The only time that these works have been discussed in texts on contemporary electroacoustic composition is in recent writings by Barry Truax.9.

There are other reasons as well for the relative invisibility of soundscape composition in electroacoustic history. Soundscape composers work with environmental sounds in context:

In the soundscape composition ... it is precisely the environmental context that is preserved, enhanced and exploited by the composer. The listener's past experience, associations, and patterns of soundscape perception are called upon by the composer and thereby integrated within the compositional strategy. Part of the composer's intent may also be to enhance the listener's awareness of environmental sound. (Truax 1984: 207)

Truax concentrates on the importance to the composer of the diverse experiences, awareness and perceptions of listeners, and their relationships to the sound environment. These become an integral part of the compositional strategy. Hildegard Westerkamp also defines soundscape composition as a form that insists on contact between the composer, listener and sound environment: "The word soundscape always implies interaction between environment and individual, and between environment and community."10. Thus the serious use of environmental sound, according to these composers, is to work with the environment of the sounds, their context and interrelationships with listeners and with the composer. This contextual approach is often undervalued or misunderstood in the field of electroacoustic music which values skillful manipulation of isolated sounds as abstractions, following the traditions of musique concrète 11.and elektronischemusik.12.

Recent work in feminist musicology interrogates the basis of values in musical communities using insights about the relationships between power and knowledge derived from the work of feminist epistemologists, including the analysis of such gendered dichotomies as the culture-nature and abstract-concrete pairs, and their relationship to canonical issues.13. This dissertation will extend those insights to a consideration of the epistemological bases of musical values in the field of electroacoustic music, specifically focusing on the canonical position of soundscape composition and its relationship to the culture-nature and abstract-concrete dichotomies, as well as others.

Soundscape composition as a genre challenges many musical boundaries, using environmental sounds not just as a source but also considering and working with their musical, social and political context. Many of Hildegard Westerkamp's earlier works were designed specifically for radio, produced as a program series called "Soundwalking" on Vancouver Cooperative Radio, based on the soundscapes of various places in the Vancouver area, heard as she walked through and recorded them. She later took part in the "Radio Rethink" project at the Banff Centre for the Arts. The pieces that she created for these projects ride the borders between narrative documentary and musical discourse, between broadcasting and listening:

I was attempting to make radio a place of environmental listening by broadcasting the soundscapes that listeners experienced in their daily lives ... Imagine radio that, instead of numbing us to sounds, strengthens our imagination and creativity; instead of manipulating us into faster work and more purchasing, it inspires us to invent...instead of silencing us, it encourages us to sing or to speak, to make radio ourselves.14.
In her teaching at Simon Fraser University, Westerkamp encouraged students to think of the filtering and sound processing capabilities of their own bodies, and their bodily relationships with technology and with the sound environment. Her work as a founding member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology has combined editorial and educational roles with composition and research. Most recently, she has led workshops in Vancouver, India and Brazil that integrate education and acoustic research with group and individual composition by local and international composers. A discussion of her work therefore contributes to thinking about music-technology education and acoustic research as well as contemporary composition, suggesting an approach which integrates these disciplines rather than delineating them.

I am developing a method of analysis that explores the relationships among the perceptions and attitudes of listeners and those of the researcher and the composer. Electroacoustic music has defied traditional methods of analysis that rely on a score, because they rarely exist in this genre. I have done a pilot project with Westerkamp's work that brings together critical and feminist theory with James Tenney's gestalt approach to musical analysis, and listener responses, to discuss the music in context.15. I propose to extend this approach to more of Westerkamp's work, providing a model for possible analysis of electroacoustic pieces. This approach demonstrates relationships between the place created by the composer in her soundscape work and the diversity of places constructed by the audience as they listen.16.

The phrase "situated conversations" in my subtitle refers both the Westerkamp's approach to composition as well as my method of analysis of her work. Donna Haraway says:

Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and authorship of 'objective' knowledge ... Accounts of a 'real' world do not, then, depend on a logic of 'discovery' but on a power-charged social relation of 'co17.
Consideration of the power of social relations in the construction of knowledge is also important in the work of Lorraine Code, who has developed a feminist epistemology that approaches knowledge as a social construct produced and validated through critical dialogue, engaged with the subjectivity of the knower.18. When I think of Westerkamp's soundscape work, I hear conversations with active sound environments in specific places, in which she is always aware of her own position as recordist. My method of analysis of her work makes evident the diverse conversations between composer and listeners, composer and researcher, musical work as composed and as heard. In each of these conversations, the actors are situated, emplaced.

Because of Westerkamp's insistence on the specificity of places, it is important to consider current scholarship about place and music. Much of the research on place in music has been in the field of popular music19. studies and in ethnomusicology.20. There are fewer studies of place in Western concert music, perhaps because until recently in this genre, place has not been considered an integral part of the music: the title of a thesis on environmental references in the work of R. Murray Schafer is called "Extramusical References in the Works of R. Murray Schafer"21.(my emphasis). One exception to this relegation of place to an extramusical realm is a recent article on American composer Charles Ives. Denise Cooney discusses Ives' us of the "musical memorializations of places to get at ideas that were especially important to him."22. She describes the musical, social, historical and political roots of Ives' Putnam's Camp, in an article which integrates a fairly traditional musical analysis with historical and biographical information, and poetry related to the theme. Even here, though, the place itself is represented as passive, 'sonified' by Ives. Cooney explains her use of the word 'sonification' as the descriptions of "aural manifestations of otherwise nonsounding phenomena--objects and places (my emphasis)."23.

Although some composers have succeeded in creating evocative images of places using acoustic instruments,24. tape recording has allowed electroacoustic composers to work with the actual sounds of places. Still, there has been very little writing until recently in this field about approaches to place. Trevor Wishart25. discusses the use of landscape in electroacoustic music. His focus is not on the acoustic distinctions and relations among specific landscapes, and their relationships with social, political and geographical contexts. In his discussion of his work Red Bird, he generalizes the morphology of landscapes in order to create a symbolic virtual landscape that mimics the spatial qualities of real landscapes, without being closely related to any particular one: "The transformations are neither simply relatable to existing acoustic spaces, nor do they relate to any conceivable or visualizable events in the real world ... we find ourselves travelling in a dream landscape which has its own logic."26.

While Westerkamp considers the symbolic meaning of landscapes in her work, this is not the main focus. She maintains links with events in the real world throughout her play with the boundaries between dream and reality. While each of her compositions has its own logic, it is a logic derived from conversations with the sound environment. Her discussions of her work focus on the particularity of places, and her situated perspective as recordist:

... the recordist's position and perspective, the physical, psychological, political and cultural stance shaping the choices when recording. My choices are influenced by an understanding of the sonic environment as an intimate reflection of the social, technological and natural conditions of the area.27.

I want this dissertation to continue this situated conversation. My methodologies will include a contextual approach to musical analysis as described above. To collect data on a variety of listener responses from different communities, I will conduct listening sessions with selected high school and university music classes, electroacoustic composers, Vancouver residents, and members of the World Form for Acoustic Ecology. I will also conduct several recorded interviews over the next year with the composer, in addition to the one I have already done. We will also continue our extensive email conversation. She has agreed to give me access to her scores, notes, and recordings. Because of the fundamental importance of soundwalking techniques and field recording to soundscape composition, I plan to record a soundwalk with her this summer, using sound, video and still photograph recordings. This walk will take place in Queen Elizbeth Park, Vancouver, a location which is the subject of her first article on soundwalking.28.

For the presentation of the dissertation, I have chosen the CD ROM format because of its ability to easily present images and sound with text, and because of its potential for intersubjective interactivity. While computer technologies are well known for their ability to create completely imaginary, competitive virtual environments such as video games, they are also becoming known for their function as social arenas encouraging communication over distance and interaction that goes beyond the mouse-click to engage "conscious agencies in conversation, playfully and spontaneously developing a mutual discourse."29. Current research in what Rosi Braidotti30. calls "cyberfeminism" suggests some approaches used by feminists to construct virtual environments that are situated and intersubjective. These range from new approaches to video games,31. multimedia performance,32. and interactions through the internet,33, which attempt to encourage intersubjectivity through the format of the presentation as well as connections to places and conversations with people beyond the confines of the computer.

I will give people access to materials such as colour imagery and music that are not usually available in a written dissertation, as well as scores, music analysis, glossary, bibliography, discography, footnotes and so on, with choices about how these are presented. I will employ hypertext links to related academic and artistic internet sites, for up-to-date information and connections to organizations such as the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. Users will be invited to converse with researchers and composers through email links. The format will allow equivalent academic depth to a written dissertation, with the advantages of intersubjectivity, imagery, and sound. This dissertation will encourage situated conversations among actors in many sounding places, about and through the work of Hildegard Westerkamp.

1 On the program Dr. Who. After thirty years, I can still hear it. I wasn't aware at that time that the music for this British TV show was composed by Tristram Cary, an electroacoustic composer who is perhaps better known in the electroacoustic world for his work on the VCS3 or Putney synthesizer (Chadabe 1997: 53-54; 150-152).
2 Oliveros, Pauline. "The Music and Soundscapes of Hildegard Westerkamp." Transformations CD liner notes. Montréal: DIFFUSION i MéDIA, 1996, 18.
3 Especially in difficult weather: "mist, fog, falling snow or heavy rainfall." Mariners would also listen to fog horns, ships' sirens and echoes to judge distances from other vessels and the shoreline. I am grateful to my father, Capt. Jeffrey McCartney, for this information.
4 McCartney, Andra. "Creating Worlds For My Music to Exist: How Women Composers of Electroacoustic Music Make Place for their Voices." MA thesis, York University Graduate Programme in Music, 1994: 15-17.
5 For instance, Murray Schafer's A Sound Education, Indian River, Ontario: Arcana, 1992; and The Thinking Ear, Indian River: Arcana, 1986.
6 For example Barry Truax' Acoustic Communication, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1984.
7 See for instance Schafer's and Westerkamp's contributions to Sound By Artists, Banff AB: Walter Phillips, 1990; and Westerkamp's contribution to Radio Rethink: Art, Sound and Transmission, Banff, AB: Walter Phillips, 1994.
8 The most obvious example here is Schafer's well-known The Tuning of the World, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977.
9Truax, Barry.Acoustic Communication. Ablex: Norwood, NJ, 1984. This book, primarily concerned with an acoustic approach to communication studies, has a chapter on electroacoustic composition. Soundscape composition is discussed within that section. The more recent "Soundscape, Acoustic Communication and Environmental Sound Composition," Contemporary Music Review, 15 (1), 1996: 49-65 focuses specifically on soundscape composition at Simon Fraser University in relationship to contemporary composition.
10 Westerkamp, Hildegard. "Listening and Soundmaking: A Study of Music-as-environment." Simon Fraser University, M.A. thesis, 1988, 3.
11 An approach to working with recorded sounds developed by Pierre Schaeffer in Paris shortly after WW II. Later work by this GRM studio became known as acousmatic music.
12 An approach developed by composers working at the Cologne studio in the early 1950s, using electrically-produced sounds composed using the serial method.
13 See for instance Citron (1993) for a discussion of the construction of generic norms in Western art music; McClary (1991) for a brief discussion of the norms of electroacoustic music in relation to the work of performance artist Laurie Anderson.
14 Westerkamp, Hildegard. "The Soundscape on Radio" In Radio Rethink, edited by D. Augaitis and D. Lander. Banff, Alberta, Walter Phillips Gallery, 1994, 88-89.
15 I presented this work at Feminist Theory and Music III, in 1995, where it was very well received. The paper has been accepted for inclusion in an anthology on gender and music.
16 I use the word 'place' here advisedly. Westerkamp says that she wants to transport her audience to a place when they listen.
17 "Situated Knowledges". Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991: 198.
18 Code, Lorraine. What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: 1991.
19 Some recent examples are Tony Mitchell, Popular Music and Local Identity: Rock, Pop, and Rap in Europe and Oceania. London: Leicester University Press, 1996; Charles Hamm, Putting Popular Music in its Place. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Mel van Elteren, Imagining America: Dutch Youth and Its Sense of Place. Tilburg, Netherlands: Tilburg University Press, 1994; Lipstiz, George, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place. London: Verso, 1994.
20 Recent examples include Ruth Glasser, My Music is My Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and their New York communities, 1917-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; Stokes, Martin, editor. Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place. Oxford: Berg, 1994; John Lehr, "As Canadian As Possible ... Under the Circumstances: Regional Myths, Images of Place and National Identity in Canadian Country Music, In Canadian Music: Issues of Hegemony and Identity, edited by Beverley Diamond and Robert Witmer. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 1994.
21 Bradley, Susan. "Extramusical References in the Works of R. Murray Schafer." Master's thesis, Music Department, University of Alberta: Edmonton, Alberta, 1983.
22 Denise von Glahn Cooney, "A Sense of Place" Charles Ives and 'Putnam's Camp, Redding, Conneticut" American Music Fall 1996, 276.
23 Cooney, 304.
24 For example, Claude Debussy's La Mer, or R. Murray Schafer's Waves, which uses the timing of ocean waves as a structural basis.
25 Wishart, Trevor. "Sound Symbols and Landscapes." In The Language of Electroacoustic Music, edited by Simon Emmerson. London: Macmillan, 1986.
26 Wishart, 52.
27 Westerkamp, Hildegard. "The Soundscape On Radio." In Radio Rethink, edited by D. Augaitis and D. Lander. Banff, Alberta, Walter Phillips Gallery, 1994: 89.
28 Westerkamp, Hildegard. "Soundwalking". Sound Heritage 3(4), 1974: 18-27.
29 Allucqu�re, Rosanne Stone. "Sex, Death and Machinery Or How I Fell In Love With My Prosthesis." The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995: 11.
30 Braidotti, Rosi. "Cyberfeminism with a difference." Braidotti article. Accessed February 7, 1997, 5:25 pm. Last modified: July 3, 1996.
31 See, for instance, Sanders, Toby. "Boys and Girls Take to Oregon Trail II." Global Navigator Inc.

Oregon Trail site. Accessed March 7, 1996; Koch, Melissa. "Education Center: No Girls Allowed!" Global Navigator Inc. "http://www.gnn.com/gnn/meta/edu/features/archive/gtech.html">Education Centre site . Accessed March 14, 1996; Favre, Gregory. "Logged On or Left Out? Women and Computers: A Sacramento Bee special report." The Sacramento Bee onlineSacramento Bee site Accessed March 14, 1996; Cassell, Justine. Personal homepage: "Justine Cassell." Justine Cassell site. Accessed March 7, 1996.
32 Recent multimedia performances by myself and Selena Cryderman define interactivity not merely by the inclusion of mouse-clicks but by mutual discourse between the performers. See for instance Sonic Circuits. Also, see the discussion of interactivity in Allucqu�re 1995: 10ff.
33 Keng Chua. "Gender and the Web." AusWeb '95. Gender and the Web site. Accessed March 6, 1996; Lawley, Elizabeth Jane. "Computers and the Communication of Gender." 1995. Computers and the Communication of Gender". Accessed March 6, 1996.