Writer of Sound
Hildegard Westerkamp (composer, radio artist, sound ecologist)
in conversation with Riccardo Giacconi
Venezia, November 2017


Italian version published on Il Tascabile







Can you tell me about your beginnings in sound research? You were trained as a musician, playing piano and flute.

It really only occurred to me in the last ten years, that the reason I wanted to study music in the first place, was because I wanted to listen, not to perform. At the time I was not aware, so I went through totally agonizing studies in Germany. I was just not going to be a pianist, a flutist or any kind of performer. Then I happened to emigrate to Canada, where I decided to leave performance alone. Instead I focused on music history, theory and listening, listening, listening and had a fabulous time. In that context I encountered R. Murray Schafer for the first time, who was already running the World Soundscape Project then.


Which year was it?

He gave a lecture at the University of British Columbia where I was studying. I think it was in 1971 or 72. And it absolutely turned me around, opened my ears more than I had ever experienced before – so much so that I was inspired to phone him, about a year later, at the other university in Vancouver, Simon Fraser University. I told him that I would like to work with him, and indeed, I was hired shortly after. I had landed in paradise: I was part of the World Soundscape Project, a group of passionate listeners, wanting to understand the world through sound. There was an ecological focus, studying issues of noise pollution and all possible aspects of sound and acoustics, including making field recordings of the soundscape. We would ask ourselves how we, who were all musicians and composers, could work on environmental sound issues and engage the sciences at the same time. Concerned about the state of the soundscape, Murray Schafer’s ultimate vision was to bring together scientists and scholars from multiple disciplines, who would study the sound environment and find solutions through an innovative approach he called acoustic design. That vision never fully materialized, since our focus on listening – gaining information about the soundscape primarily through aural perception no matter what aspects of sound, acoustics, noise etc. we studied, recorded and researched – was rather new at the time and seemed unscientific to many. It is only now – more than 40 years later - that some scientists are accepting and including perceptual insights as relevant information for their own studies on noise and sound. In some of the more adventurous sound research, connections are being made between scientific data and perceptual inquiries by sound artists and composers, with some interesting and surprising results.


At the time, did you have the feeling that you were pioneers of a new discipline?

Yes, totally. We were pushing boundaries. By writing his book The Tuning of the World (1977), Schafer gave us a sense that something big was happening. He was very courageous, had a grandiose approach to things and could be quite outrageous at times, in his way of expressing ideas and trying to pursue his goals. But that was the tone of the Seventies; there was a revolutionary approach to everything. Nowadays, when people read the book they might be taken aback by its tone: it seems to be against noise, for silence; against city, for nature.


A political approach.

Yes, but ultimately his message is, “Listen, open your ears. Let’s find out about human beings’ relationship to the world through listening. What are we doing as soundmakers on a cultural, social, political, ecological as well as personal level?” That approach connects the ear to deeply relevant issues nowadays, when we are increasingly dealing with noise pollution and distraction – that is, the noise is not only in the outer environment, but also inside: the noise in our minds, the fragmentation of thought easily caused by information overload and multiple distractions through media and internet.


More than thirty years ago, Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium wrote, “We live in an unending rainfall of images. The most powerful media transform the works into images and multiply it by means of the phantasmagoric play of mirrors. […] Much of this cloud of visual images fades at once, like the dreams that leave no trace in the memory, but what does not fade is a feeling of alienation and discomfort”. Do you think that the inner noise you mention has to do with the fact that we are exposed to so many more images than before?

Yes, definitely. It’s the dominance of images. We are drawn into a visual reception and easily forget about the ear as a source of knowledge and information. In a quiet environment there is a balance between all the senses, we are not forced to use one sense more than the others. Our whole being is a perceiving whole. But again, I don’t want this to be misunderstood as an idealization of nature and silence: it simply is a fact that when we are in a noisy environment we are forced to orient ourselves mostly with our eyes, since that’s where we get the information necessary for keeping safe. There usually is little interest for us in traffic noise, so we ignore it, we block it out. The brilliance of Murray Schafer’s work is that he encourages us to listen to everything, especially noisy places. Only by listening to them with awareness, will we understand what we are doing to the soundscape, where the damage is and what our own role may be in creating soundscapes of varying qualities.

Right now, you and I are in a very busy space, which can serve as a good example. Hearing myself think is more difficult here than hearing myself think in a quieter environment. When we are able to listen inside ourselves, we get in touch with our own thoughts, with how time passes. We are in the present. But if the soundscape is too noisy and distracting, our eyes tend to dart outward into the world from one thing to the other and our ears cannot focus, our thoughts cannot be formed as coherently.


Who were your references when you moved to Canada? Were you familiar with Glenn Gould’s radio-documentary series The Solitude Trilogy (1967-1977)?

I was 22 when I emigrated. I loved Vancouver and the incredible sense of space you get in Canada, for instance when you travel by train across the country. There was an unconscious drive in me to get out of Germany and join this more open society. When I met Murray Schafer and the World Soundscape Project, that’s when I clearly, viscerally discovered listening. I realized I was suddenly on solid ground; I had arrived in an atmosphere where I felt completely at home, was comfortable working with my new colleagues. And at the same time I was introduced in a new way to Canadian culture, excited to learn more about Marshall McLuhan and Glenn Gould, for example.

I researched and read about the Canadian North, its soundscapes, the wide-open, sparsely populated spaces, the First Nations and Inuit cultures there, and I became more consciously connected to the country to which I had emigrated. I also felt I was getting to know Vancouver in a completely new way when I was asked to listen to it. For example, the rain, a frequent and dominant natural sound on the Pacific Northwest coast: not only does it have a completely different pace and rhythm than in North Germany where I grew up, but its sound is softer and soggier on the mossy ground and in the huge trees of the coniferous forests than in the deciduous forests I know from my youth. When you connect to the sound of a new environment so consciously, it inevitably grounds you and makes you feel more at home.


I was mentioning Glenn Gould because, like you, he moved from music performance to sound recording, exploring documentary formats and the use of voice. And, of course, radio.

He loved radio, and he experimented a lot with its sound potentials. He stopped performing live as a pianist at a relatively early age, and eventually presented his piano performance in recorded format only. He loved the type of analytical listening that happens in a recording studio and together with sound engineers explored various recording techniques. The result was a series of deliciously clear and liquid-flowing piano recordings. With a similar ear he created what he called “contrapuntal radio”, his Solitude Trilogy, the most famous of which is The Idea of North. In this approach, voices of two or more people are heard simultaneously, weaving in and out of each other like polyphonic musical lines.


He was using voices in his documentaries as in a Bach fugue.

His work was very inspiring to me at the time. A group of politically left leaning people was starting a new, alternative radio station then, Vancouver Co-operative Radio, which also attracted the attention of those of us who were interested in radio as an experimental sound medium. By that time we had completed The Vancouver Soundscape, and I had witnessed my colleagues working in the studio, but had not yet had much experience in this type of sound work myself. A few years after Co-op Radio received its licence, in 1978, I had the idea and received a grant for creating my radio program, Soundwalking. With a radio station at our disposal, I was excited to transfer Schafer’s idea of soundwalks into the radio medium. I took an educational/political stance at the time, wanting to make people aware of their sound environment. When I conceived it, I suspected it was not sufficient simply to record the sound environment and broadcast it ‘as is’ over the radio waves. Radio listeners most likely would put the sounds in the background of their perception and might even change radio stations if there was no guidance whatsoever.

Time flows very differently when you broadcast environmental sound – it is very slow. So I decided to intervene with my voice. Part of the recording process was that I included my own voice while in the field, perceiving it as a type of mediator between the environment and the radio listener, speaking of aspects of the environment that a broadcast could not convey: for example the time of day, the location, the weather, the season. But I would also sometimes point out specific sounds or comment on their unique character. I kept the talk to a minimum however, just enough to keep the listener interested, trying to keep the listening active and foreground. Every program took place in a specific location: a park, the waterfront, a factory, in markets, on mountains, in malls, forests, or socially run down areas of the city with voices of alcoholics and drug users. I had no real plan when I left my house to record the soundscape. Instead I would decide on the location intuitively, depending on the weather, my mood and energies, and in this way I really got to know Vancouver and the environment in a most interesting and inspiring way.


What was the reception?

Very rarely did I get immediate feedback. But over the years I would meet people who would recognize my voice and remembered the show vividly. In fact, it managed to stop people in their tracks and caused them to slow down and listen. Only once did I get an enraged phone call from a listener who could not cope with the slow pace of the show and said angrily that I should call it Sleepwalking!

Even though Vancouver Co-operative Radio was a lefty, alternative station, very different from the commercial ones or from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), it already had its very own radio rhythm. When I came in with my Soundwalking show, it changed even this radio’s pace radically. I remember feeling a little awkward initially, because there was a music show before me, and as soon as my show started, everything would slow down. [Laughs] The sounds of wind in trees, of ocean waves or an airplane moving overhead have a very different tempo than spoken words or musical rhythms and beats.My program was followed by another music show, and I would always ask the people after me to make a slow fade out of my show into theirs – often without much success. Most programmers at the station, even though passionate about radio, had not officially been trained in broadcasting, myself included, and were volunteering their time. They were simply not used to such detailed attention to radio sound in the same way I was: always focussed on the quality of sound and listening, no matter what the context.

Soundwalking became a way for me to learn about the pace of radio: how do you relate to an audience when you no longer have music or speech, but just environmental sound? It changes everything. On one rare occasion I got a phone call after my show from a German TV and radio producer who was working in Vancouver, who said, “I can’t believe I just listened to twenty minutes of walking through snow. It was marvellous!” He thought it was very courageous of me to broadcast such a long stretch of a quiet soundscape, given the radio listeners’ habits with, and expectations of the radio medium. And you know, quiet and silence on the radio, especially on commercial radio, are most feared, as it may cause people to switch stations and may mean potential loss of revenue. Soundwalking was often quiet or if not that, it was unusual because of the kinds of soundscapes it broadcast – very different from Glenn Gould’s polyphonic, busy and composed kind of mixes in his Trilogy. Since I was so deeply involved with the work of the World Soundscape Project, I had no perspective on whether my program was courageous or revolutionary, but the longer it went on I did realize, that I was pushing a variety of boundaries in the conventions of the radio medium.


Today, authors like Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire and Eliane Radigue are widely regarded as seminal references for sound research, as well as, on the other side of the ocean, figures like you, Annea Lockwood or Pauline Oliveros. At the same time, you told me you were the only woman in the first World Soundscape Project group.

That was a time when I became really conscious of the fact that I was always working with men, and indeed I started wondering, “where are the women?” Then I met Pauline Oliveros, and her work exposed me to a more meditative aspect of sound: sonic meditation, deep listening. I was working from an activist/environmental perspective at that time, and her work was creating slightly different frameworks for listening and soundmaking. These two approaches raised an ecological question for me: what is the balance between sound input (how much and what kinds of sounds our ears receive) and sound output (how much and what kinds of sounds we make)? It also became a feminist issue for me: what happens to women’s voice in our society? How much are we overloaded with input from male voices, families, voices of authority? How much time and space do we have at our disposal to actually develop our own voice?

Women are often good listeners because traditionally we have been trained to be in a caretaking role, to be there for families, our children, for men and many others. How much of a chance do we have in such a life, to find moments of inspiration, when we can listen in new ways and find a new voice? Pauline’s work pointed me to those questions, and Buddhist thought was an interesting additional inroad into contemplating feminist issues. It was not so much an activist stance – I was never really a ‘frontline’ feminist fighting for women’s rights. I was more interested in finding out what our genuine voice might be. Do we know it and its potential power? Historically, it was preferred that women’s voices were soft, not too loud, pleasant, perhaps seductive. But if a woman’s voice tried to be forceful or a little louder than normal, it would often be judged as tense or hysterical. If we want to be effective and have an impact, our voice has to be genuine. When we find it – and this applies to all people, men and women alike – the voice has a power of expression that is unique. It is our own and it is grounded in our bodies and hearts.

For a while, mostly in the 1980s, I was also involved with the Association of Canadian Women Composers, broadcast radio programs of women composers, put on concerts by and with women at Women in Focus, a gallery in Vancouver, and was a researcher for a course on Women in Music at Simon Fraser University. Those involvements were all expressions of a deep concern I had at the time: as a woman I needed to understand the role of the female voice, including my own, in our culture and society and both on a personal and professional level.


The Helicotrema festival, which we curate with Blauer Hase and Giulia Morucchio, was inspired by narrative formats such as radio plays and radio documentaries. In parallel with soundscape, narrative is another current that runs through your work, often through spoken words. Could you talk about this bipolarity between storytelling and contemplation?

I grew up in Germany, which had a very strong tradition of radio drama, called Hörspiel – literally translated as “a play that you hear”. I listened to radio drama all the time as a child and teenager, and it took me some years to realize that this has had a huge influence on much of my work. Initially I was soundscape-driven, but started including language in my pieces almost immediately including some of the poetry by my then husband, Norbert Ruebsaat. I was inspired by the connection between words and sounds, and would often call myself a “writer of sound” rather than a composer. A lot of my compositions include words, and a lot of my lectures include sound.


Can you talk about your interest in meditation?

Initially I was very interested in soundscape’s educational message and in raising awareness about sound, meanings of silence and the issues of noise, among other things. But life went on, and now my main concern is centred on listening itself. How can we deepen our aural perception in order to speak about the world and understand it in sound terms? I think that the clue to environmental sound issues lies in the act of listening itself, allowing us to understand the world through the ear, how we live as individual people and as entire cultures and societies on this earth – and how we might be able to make changes for the better.

When I began to practice meditation, I recognized it as another form of listening. Initially I was confronted with the many voices and noises in my mind, the brain’s incessant chatter. Eventually I learnt to accept that noise, to hear and notice it and to let it pass, perhaps even calm it down. I experienced a convergence of what I had learned through soundscape listening and my environmental/educational interests on the one hand and the discovery of an inner consciousness of listening, of what calms and stirs us, on the other. It was an interesting discovery, to experience my initially more activist ear turn inward, slow down and become more contemplative. Perhaps it is a sign of getting older, when we can dare to slow down a little and not partake in the social status quo of hectic daily life and busyness. Nowadays I think that one of the most revolutionary things we can do – and I include younger generations in this statement – is to slow down, to be mindful in our ways of pursuing life. Only in that way can we keep track of our thoughts and emotions. Slowing down is inspirational and energizing as it opens the door to listening and attending to life, people and the world around us in a conscious and caring way.


What are you working on at the moment?

I have completed and premiered two new pieces in the last year, which had been commissioned years ago by two different Canadian musicians. I’m usually quite reluctant to work with instrumentalists, because I don’t feel all that comfortable composing for instruments. But these musicians really inspired me: Terri Hron is a recorder player. Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa is a pianist.

The first proposal interested me because of the connection I have to the recorder; I used to play it as a child. There is also a European connection between Terri and me: her family is originally from Czechoslovakia. It was 2010, my mother had just died at the age of 102. We had to dissolve the family property located in a beautiful rural area in Germany where I grew up. My sister and I were cleaning out everything and getting the property ready for sale. So I told Terri, “Why don’t you come to my mother’s house? We can roam around the places of my childhood, and you can improvise”. One of these places was a huge indentation, a hole in the middle of the forest beyond my parents’ property. As a child it was a hiding place for us, very cosy, and I only found out much later that it was a bomb crater from WWII. So I took Terri there, and we made a recording on a very stormy day. The wind was up above us in the trees, making a beautiful sound, and the crater protected us. Terri improvised for a good 30 minutes, and I recorded her sounds together with the ever-changing shifts in the storm. My microphone always moves when I am recording, I very rarely stand still. So, when she was playing her recorder, I moved around her, in order to capture different relationships between instrument and soundscape: sometimes very close up to the recorder, sometimes further away, sometimes she would move and I would be stationary. The only instruction I gave her was to listen to the environment and respond to it in ways that came to her naturally. We made similar recordings in a few other locations, such as the village graveyard, as well as during an early morning dawn chorus.

Very shortly after these recording sessions, I had to stop working because my long-time partner Peter Grant was not well, and I wanted to be home and care for him. He passed away in 2014. I had stopped working for about three years. Only recently Terri came back to me. We listened to those recordings after all this time and discovered that we had a real treasure. So we decided to pick up the thread and create a composition together, Beads of Time Sounding, for recorder and soundtrack. It’s quite a complex piece with many different layers: the soundtrack consisting of original recordings of environmental sound and Terri’s improvisations as well as processed versions of both the environmental and her recorder sounds. Both of us composed parts of the soundtrack, to which she improvises on various recorders in live performance. She just performed the piece in Montreal and New York in late October.

The second piece has parallel aspects to the first one, in that some of the recordings on the soundtrack originate in the soundscape of my childhood and the piano was a cherished instrument when I first started to play it. The piece is for piano and soundtrack. It premiered in Vancouver during the World Music Days a week before I came here to Venice. The pianist, Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, wanted me to create a piece with a narrative, for live piano and spoken voice and of course a soundtrack. We also started to work on it in 2010-2011, had to interrupt and picked it up again recently. In those years we had many conversations in which we talked about the agonies of piano lessons, the hardship of music education, the discouragement…


Is the piece also about your own experience in music education?

Yes. We shared some of the positive and negative aspects of how we were educated, and how music education in the classical domain can completely destroy your ears and your confidence. The narrative of the piece concerns the beginnings of a child wanting to play the piano, and then the hardship of piano lessons, nightmares, but also of good teachers. The piece ends with recordings I made on an old piano I found in an abandoned house in British Columbia. I recorded myself playing on that thing, which was totally out of tune, broken, like a strange sound sculpture. I felt a sense of freedom: here was an instrument I could not go wrong with, because it was already full of mistakes. Basically, the work is grappling with cultural issues of music education, the freedom one can feel but also its opposite, total fear and imprisonment. It is called Klavierklang (“Piano Sound”).

These two pieces are quite different from what I normally do, because of the live aspect. Yes, I have composed a few other pieces for live instruments in the past, but mostly my focus has been on soundscape composition, making environmental sounds my main instruments and compositional ‘language’. But right now I am in a very strange place in my life. After Peter died, I did not want to return to hectic, stressful, busy schedules. I started accepting a few things slowly, like working on a film soundtrack and giving a few talks at conferences. But this year things became very busy again, so much so that I am intent on slowing down to find out what kind of creative energy may emerge without external pressures. So by choice, I am putting my life on a bit of a pause right now – an interesting pause, a time for review and reflection, a pause full of potential. Any kind of significant event in our lives – be it birth, death or falling in love – makes us stop our routine, which can be very positive. It’s a gift, an opportunity.