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Dialogue

1. Entrance 2. Knife-Edge 3. Lookout 4. Conservatory 5. Sunken Garden Listening
Composing Website Intro 6. Creek 7. Quarry Back to Lookout Acoustic Ecology
In her article on soundwalking (Sound Heritage 3(4), 1974: 18-27), Westerkamp suggests that one of its aims is dialogue with the environment. This is one of the extensions of active listening. For instance, listening attentively to bird or animal calls can lead to imitation of these calls, a strategy that composer Olivier Messiaen used in his music. As you can hear inside the Conservatory, when birds and people begin to imitate each other, the dialogue becomes quite intense. Listening attentively to the acoustics of a place can also lead to an understanding of which landscape formations and building structures produce echoes.

Soundwalking can also encourage dialogue with the people in a place. Some soundwalkers use unobtrusive microphones that resemble headphones. Hildi uses a large microphone which is obvious, and seems to encourage people to approach and ask what she is doing. For instance, when we were in the sunken garden, recording the sounds of a large plant, a passerby approached and began to talk to us. After we had recorded the sounds of the young people playing the Knife-Edge sculpture, they also asked what we were doing.

When a soundscape composer makes a piece, they are creating a representation of a particular place and its sounds. Some of Hildegard Westerkamp's compositions about places in Vancouver were broadcast as a radio show called "Soundwalking" on a community radio station, Vancouver Cooperative Radio, which gave her a chance to "talk back" to places reached by the station's transmitters. She discusses these shows in her article "The Soundscape on Radio" (Radio Rethink. Banff Centre for the Arts,1994: 87-94). Another interesting level of dialogue is the memories and associations that are inspired by listening to a certain soundscape. Do you have any comments on the soundscape excerpts (short as they are!) that you have heard here? If so, email me: andra@yorku.ca

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