Listening is Action: A Soundwalk with Hildegard Westerkamp
Keywords:
ethics of listening, acoustic ecology, more-than-humans, politics of recording, sensory ethnography, sound communitiesAbstract
In the sound documentary Listening is Action, the composer Hildegard Westerkamp engages in a conversation with Luis Velasco-Pufleau at her home in the city of Vancouver, which is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She talks us through her first field recordings and her soundwalking practice, her work at the Vancouver Co-operative Radio, and her participation in the World Soundscape Project, all of which started or took place in the 1970s. Furthermore, she takes us on soundwalks at places she used to go and record more than thirty years ago, such as those now called Kitsilano Beach and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and that constitute the sources for her soundscape works A Walk Through the City (1981) and Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989). This sound documentary is an invitation to listen more attentively to the multiple voices that inhabit our environments in order to imagine new, plural, and unforeseen realities. The sound work Listening is Action is enhanced by a written commentary in which Luis Velasco-Pufleau explores the radical relationality of listening and the connection between Westerkamp’s thinking with the work of Pauline Oliveros and Hannah Arendt. Finally, he engages with critical listening positionality in order to reflect on some of the limits and contradictions present in the sound documentary.
References
Amsler, Sarah. 2023. “From a Modern/Colonial Sensorium to Relational Response-Ability: Listening Into What Separation Has to Say.” Journal of Sonic Studies 24. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1925993/1925994.
Arendt, Hannah. 2018. “Freedom and Politics, A Lecture.” In Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975, ed. Jerome Kohn, 220–44. New York: Schocken Books.
Baloy, Natalie J.K. 2016. “Spectacles and Spectres: Settler Colonial Spaces in Vancouver.” Settler Colonial Studies 6(3): 209–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2015.1018101. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2015.1018101
Barman, Jean. 2007. “Erasing Indigenous Indigeneity in Vancouver.” BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly 155: 3–30. https://doi.org/10.14288/bcs.v0i155.626.
Bassel, Leah. 2017. The Politics of Listening: Possibilities and Challenges for Democratic Life. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53167-4_1 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53167-4_1
Born, Georgina. 2005. “On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity.” Twentieth-Century Music 2(1): 7–36. https://doi.org/10.1017/S147857220500023X. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S147857220500023X
Couldry, Nick. 2009. “Rethinking the Politics of Voice.” Continuum 23(4): 579–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304310903026594. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10304310903026594
Escobar, Arturo. 2020. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Translated by David Frye. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012108 DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11315v0
Kennedy, Paul, dir. 2017. “How Opening Our Ears Can Open Our Minds: Hildegard Westerkamp.” Ideas. CBC Radio. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-opening-our-ears-can-open-our-minds-hildegard-westerkamp-1.3962163.
Oliveros, Pauline. 2022. Quantum Listening. London: Ignota Books.
Pijanowski, Bryan C., Luis J. Villanueva-Rivera, Sarah L. Dumyahn, Almo Farina, Bernie L. Krause, Brian M. Napoletano, Stuart H. Gage, and Nadia Pieretti. 2011. “Soundscape Ecology: The Science of Sound in the Landscape.” BioScience 61(3): 203–16. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2011.61.3.6. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2011.61.3.6
Reid, Julie, and Dale T. McKinley. 2020. Tell Our Story: Multiplying Voices in the News Media. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. https://doi.org/10.18772/22020055775 DOI: https://doi.org/10.18772/22020055775
Robinson, Dylan. 2020. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvzpv6bb DOI: https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvzpv6bb
Shah, Rajni, Julietta Singh, and Fili 周 Gibbons. 2021. “Episode Three: Julietta Singh.” Performance Philosophy 6(1). https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2021.61340. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2021.61340
Solomos, Makis. 2023. Exploring the Ecologies of Music and Sound: Environmental, Mental and Social Ecologies in Music, Sound Art and Artivisms. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003254454 DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003254454
Thiele, Leslie Paul. 2009. “The Ontology of Action: Arendt and the Role of Narrative.” Theory & Event 12(4). https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.0.0101. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.0.0101
Todd, Zoe. 2016. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29(1): 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124
Velasco-Pufleau, Luis. 2021. “Listening to Terror Soundscapes: Sounds, Echoes, and Silences in Listening Experiences of Survivors of the Bataclan Terrorist Attack in Paris.” Conflict and Society 7(1): 60–77. https://doi.org/10.3167/arcs.2021.070105. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3167/arcs.2021.070105
Werry, Margaret. 2019. “What’s Left of Rights? Arendt and Political Ontology in the Anthropocene.” Performance Philosophy 5(1): 8–24. https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2019.51275. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2019.51275
Westerkamp, Hildegard. 2002. “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology.” Organised Sound 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771802001085. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771802001085
Westerkamp, Hildegard. 2019. “The Disruptive Nature of Listening: Today, Yesterday, Tomorrow.” In Sound, Media, Ecology, eds. Milena Droumeva and Randolph Jordan, 45–63. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16569-7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16569-7_3
Westerkamp, Hildegard. 2022. “Soundwalking.” In Going Out: Walking, Listening, Soundmaking, ed. Elena Biserna, 216–27. Bruxelles: Q-O2.
Published
Issue
Section
Categories
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Luis Velasco-Pufleau, Hildegard Westerkamp
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal, provided it is for non-commercial uses; and that lets others excerpt, translate, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
