Hildegard Westerkamp is a German/Canadian composer who was involved with R Murray Schafer etc in the 1970s as part of the original team of people that founded the acoustic ecology movement, and the World Soundscape project.
Westerkamp's work continues to center around environmentally orientated sound practice; employing a range of techniques/methods ranging from soundwalks & field-recordings; to sound-scape orientated composition and installation work. Her work occupies a liminal territory between categories; field recording and soundscape composition, documentation and docudrama, empiricism and poeisis, are blended together to create something more, to offer an entrance point to a living experience of a sound environment. In her own words she: "transforms sound in order to highlight it's original contours and meanings"(1). "Such original contours and meanings are to be found not strictly within the acoustic shape and dimension of the sound object, but in the contextual location of its origin"(2).
In such a way her work is highly narrative based, and compositional, but uses fiction in a functional manner, to suggest or elude to something that lies beyond. Rather than attempting or presuming to be able to document the sound-environment and somehow capture it's essence via merely technological means, she employs a wide ranging methodology; that is as creative & poetic as it is empirical, to try and reveal something that the microphone itself seems unable to pick up; the living breathing sound-environment, not as a mere objective plane, but as a intersubjective experience, as subjective and social as empirical or objective.
Another interesting aspect of Westerkamp's work is how she plays on the inherent dislocation present in environmental recordings (which I have previously touched on), engaging it creatively and productively rather than trying to escape it. "For Westerkamp (and others) dislocation seems to posit the possibility of finding place: to bring the alien back home. Such tension, I would propose, is at the heart of Transformations and other related works, and further, functions as the potential of environmental recording itself: that is, to offer up difference"(3). Through this dislocation an opening is created, whereby a new relationship to the sound-world can emerge in the listener as they follow the traces or lines of flight offered up by Westerkamp.
1) Westerkamp, Hildegard, from the liner notes of her CD Transformations (Montreal, Empreintes Digitales, 1996), p. 20
2) Labelle, Brandon, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, Continuum, New York, NY, 2006, pg 206
3) Ibid, pg 211
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