HILDEGARD WESTERKAMP

Hildegard Westerkamp is one of the most significant womxn working with technologies of sound. She began her career in the 1960’s as a student at the University of British Columbia. She is one of the first artists to define and work in the genre of Acoustic Ecology, and to compose with environmental sound. She is also one of the first people to develop the sound walk.

Hildegard works with the environment, and the positioning of the artist (or participant) in the environment as her milieus and materials. She creates compositions that impart an ecological awareness to the listener Her show don’t tell brand of ecofeminist activism continues to be refreshing to this day.

She’s made immense soundscape works that present everything from the natural “Beneath the Forest Floor” (1992) to the social “His Master’s Voice” (1985) spheres. Sometimes responding to current events such as the horrific gender based murder “École Polytechnique” (1990) and music for “Koneline: Our Land ” (2016) made at a time when Canada was finally reckoning so many oppressions it made towards its First Nations. At other times she has presented work that requires some analises for its political bent to be seen such as “Kit’s Beach Soundwalk “(1989).
Much of her work puts the listener/participant in a meditative state through immersive compositions and deep listening.

Hildegard: We have a rainy day here today again. We have quite a bit of stuff happening in British Columbia with the weather these days. I don’t know whether you’ve heard but we’ve had mudslides and roads closed and it’s been pretty crazy. Vancouver’s okay but it’s pretty dramatic here right now.

Sofy: That’s wild. I mean it’s happening all over the world so I did hear about it, but it was months ago, so it’s interesting that it’s still happening.

Hildegard: We had fires in the summer and now in the last week we’ve had a lot of rain. The last few months and then literally from Saturday to Monday it was just pelting down non-stop and it created a lot of floods and mudslides in the interior of British Columbia, people were cut off people from one town had to be evacuated completely, people were caught between two mudslides, farmers have had to bring out their their cattle because it was flooding, it was just—it’s been crazy. And it’s still going on right now. It’s getting a bit better. Most of the people have been taken out from between those mudslides and have been safe but it’s been pretty crazy. So it’s on my mind a lot because Vancouver is fine but that’s going on. The world is changing in that way around us very quickly, it really is, it’s quite incredible. So anyways—

Hildegard: What you were saying earlier about technology as a tool—I should start by talking about the fact that I’ve always struggled with technology and I continue to struggle with technology. I’m not someone who naturally is attracted to it. I’m talking specifically about the audio technology that I need. I’m just not someone who’s  interested in exploring that very much. I’m always very happy when I have the right tools and I know how they work, and I know I can relate to them. Then I can work with them forever.

But I’m not someone who will necessarily always explore new technologies. I have a lot of colleagues in the electro-acoustic music field. They sometimes say to me—oh you really should think about getting this and this and this…” I think ‘[yes] I’ll like it’. Then I may explore it. So it’s always been a very love-hate relationship that I have to the tools that I need. I think it’s important to know that because I have to have a stable situation technologically so that I can work. That means good quality stuff.
When I started field recording in the late 70s I was doing it for a radio program on Vancouver Cooperative Radio which was at that time, a mono station. I tried to get the best possible portable cassette recorder at the time. It was very new. They had just come out and I was not going to get the very expensive and high tech reel-to-reel Niagara because it was—first of all—very heavy, and secondly it only allowed you to record about 15 minutes at a time, and then you had to change wheels.

Fig. 250. Yuditskaya, Sofy and Gooey.ai. Under the Flight Path Link 2025, From the Archive of the Artist The cassette recorder allowed me to record at least 30 minutes at a time and then turn it over and the turning over was very quick. This was all in the analog times, that’s also important to mention because analog technology suited me much better. Those tools were more embodied. You cut your tape and you walked around the studio and you did the mixing. You weren’t sitting in front of a visual screen, everything was oral and you were in this sound studio.

Sometimes it was hard for me to understand the technology, but it was still a little bit more approachable [than today]. When I started recording for my program “Sound Walking” on Vancouver Cooperative Radio I would go out for anywhere from two to four hours, once or twice a week and record in and around Vancouver. Then I would take those cassette tapes into the studio and would usually dub the sections I wanted to use onto a good reel to reel. Then I would do editing and mixing for a one hour, show, so two hours would turn into one hour or if it was three hours it would be extracted into a one-hour show—and in that process I was very interested in making sure that my own voice was part of this.
I wanted to be a mediator between the soundscape and the listener on the radio. I was very aware at that time—because I had worked with The World Soundscape Project and learned a lot about sound and listening —I was aware that we have a tendency to put any background and environmental sound into the background of our listening and focus on other things.

Fig. 251. Yuditskaya, Sofy and Gooey.ai. Klavierklang Link 2025, From the Archive of the Artist

With this radio program I wanted to create more of a foreground listening situation, so that the listener was present and I could share the my interest and my passion about listening to the soundscape with them. And also maybe I was thinking of ecological issues of noise, I was also wanting to educate. So my voice was always very much part of it.

The microphone became a tool for me to speak live while I was recording the environment. I [would] speak live into the microphone and I would move it from the environment, towards my mouth so that I would get a natural phase between the environment and my voice. This was all something that I discovered. I didn’t know that’s what I was going to do when I started recording and monitoring on headphones, I just experimented and that’s what happened.

Through my microphone movements, I also discovered that I liked to move through the environment and move According to what my listening ears were discovering. So the microphone would be leading my listening in the direction of what I wanted to record.

There would be movement from a sound further away to close up, say walking towards a creek you could hear it from the distance and then you would walk closer and work close to it and get really into the water sounds, you can hear some of that in “Beneath the Forest Floor”.

Fig. 252. Yuditskaya, Sofy and Gooey.ai. Vancouver Co-op Radio CFRO 100.5FM 2025, From the Archive of the Artist

Certainly in “Talking Rain” it’s there too. But or it could be in anything, it could be a video game gallery where you come in and you create, then listen to this ambience. Then you would move into individual machines the speakers of the machines and zero in on those coming out of the general ambience and then move into focusing on one game.

For me the technology was a tool to listen more deeply to the soundscape and to the environment and that has been the basis for my field recording. The result of that is the kinds of recordings that would then create a specific way of working with these sounds in the studio. That’s the general approach that I have where I love the tool of the microphone of course and what it gives me and then the sounds that I’m receiving through this process to me are just a gift that enables me to go on and get more ideas and get me more close to the meanings of the sound within the environment. Then ideas for composition.
Sofy: Could speak to your process of embedding ideas in the composition?

Hildegard: For example since “Beneath the Forest Floor” there was an experience with the first sound that you’re hearing—a low rumble, like a throbbing, and then you hear a raven and the recording of that raven was this special thing that happened. We were packing up the equipment. That was it. My partner and I, we were packing things up after being in this beautiful indigenous forest for a few days and we were in the parking lot by the car. And I hear the raven approaching and I very quickly turned my equipment back on, I hadn’t packed it away, and I turn it on and this raven flies right over us and so I’m getting this fairly close up clear and very grainy raspy call in the reverberant environment of that forest parking lot.

https://earsaymusic.bandcamp.com/album/harangue-i

When I started to work on “Beneath the Forest Floor” I was in the first. digital facility in the CBC in Toronto at that time and I slowed that sound. down and it became that “boom boom boom boom”.

That beginning sound of the piece is the raven and what I recognised at the time was that. I experimented with other raven recordings to see what would happen if I slowed those down and they would just not give me that same almost drumming sound. The reason is that every recording has its own very strong characteristics and that clarity that I got from that call and this expression of it too, that very sharp expression of it that raven made gave me this drum sound. None of the other recordings I had of ravens did not do that.

That was really an interesting discovery because it makes so clear to you that what you experience in the field will determine how you work with that in the studio after. I didn’t anticipate any of that when I was making that recording. I had no clue that would happen so it was a real surprise to me that was revealed in the studio. There’s this continuity between making your own field recordings, having the experience, not just the sound but you’re also physically out there you are in the air, you feel the humidity, the temperature, you sense the deep acoustics of that forest.

For example, you’re walking in it, you’re walking on soft mossy grounds in these forests and it’s very quiet, and you’re hearing water in the distance and you’re coming with this entire experience into the studio and then you listen back to your recordings. You remember the experience but you’re also hearing things that you did not hear while you were recording. It’s a bit different listening then, you intend on listening for possible opportunities to use in this in the composition you’re developing, an idea you’re developing, a way to work with these sounds. That continuity just keeps on going while you’re working and the discovery of sounds that you recorded in the studio, that you did not even notice you recorded when you’re in the field that happens quite frequently. It’s always really important to do a very careful listening back to recordings because you’re listening with completely different ears. You’re not in that environment anymore.

If you are in a different situation and you have perhaps some ideas of a piece or what you want to do with it, your ears are a little bit more focused in a different way and that also is an interesting surprise. You’re getting this—let’s call it a bird’s eye view of your recordings. Then you make decisions according to that experience.

So your studio experience, listening experience, and your environmental. listening experiences are melting together and something comes out of it. Some creative ideas may emerge from that and lead you further into. the piece. In “Beneath the Forest Floor” once I had these throbbing. sounds which I perceived very much as close to a First Nation drumming. It was a reference, an association, to that sound. It became a new instrument in that composition, and it repeats itself, it becomes a punctuation, it is a drum or something that comes back throughout the piece, and it helped me structure the piece. It suggested structure and that is in essence, how I work in all of my pieces.

The sound that you’re bringing into the studio, and possibly the process then lead you into an idea of how you might want to structure the piece. I never have a clear idea of a structure beforehand because the environmental sound brings so much with it. I don’t want my compositional intent to dominate what the environmental sounds bring, I want to get to know the environmental sounds in all their depths, in terms of their context, their musical structure, the texture, all that and see what it gives me, see what it suggests.

Sofy: You spoke about bringing attention to the ecology and your radio show how does that influence your work?

Hildegard: Inside and outside the studio, it (ecology) influences me all the time. It’s the reason I went into composition. I learned that when I was working with The World Soundscape Project and R Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University. That’s absolutely crucial for everything else that happened in my life. I was studying music first in Germany, and then I immigrated to Canada, and I studied music at the University of British Columbia. In those years the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer came and gave a guest lecture at that university. He had a research position and a research group at Simon Fraser University at the other end of town. He’s a fairly high-profile composer and was. He came to the university and gave us a rather, for that time, unusual lecture.

Fig. 257. Yuditskaya, Sofy and Gooey.ai. The Soundscapes of R. Murray Schafer Playlist Link. 2025, From the Archive of the Artist He was on stage with four music stands and each music stand was devoted to one topic. A little bit influenced by John Cage, he would seemingly randomly walk from stand to stand and speak about these different subjects. That would be say, noise music, composition, maybe silence, environmental sounds, and then he had colleagues that were in the audience. They were also seemingly interrupting and asking questions. “What was the first sound you heard this morning? How many airplanes have you heard?” They would just get up in the middle of his talk and it was of course a highly composed talk, but it felt like constant surprise.

I came out of that lecture with totally all my ears popped open in ways that I hadn’t experienced before. It was this liberation for me because it was —“oh my goodness! I can listen to the world this way! I can listen to the soundscape as if it was a composition, and listen to it with that critical open mind.” To me that was absolutely inspiring, continued studying and I never forgot this lecture. And one day I just phoned him. I heard that he had this research project and I said I would really like to work with him. He pretty much hired me right away in the next few weeks.
I haven’t been on campus for many years. I decided to stop teaching in the early 90s, and then decided to go freelance. So I haven’t had an office at the university since then. Oh that’s great liberation [Laughter]

I loved the teaching but I really didn’t like the academic context, it’s not for me so I stopped that. But that was when I started working with Schaefer. They were working on a project called the Vancouver Soundscape. It was an expert a study of Vancouver from the acoustic perspective. Something had never been done really before. Not to that extent anyways, there’s been people who’ve recorded, you may know Tony Schwartz in New York who made recordings in the early 50s, and even before that I think. But nothing in on that scale that we were doing.

We published it at the time and as 2 LPs and an extensive booklet. Schaefer was writing his book called “The Soundscape” with the subtitle of “Tuning of the World”. The book is pretty much an anthology of looking at the soundscape from all perspectives. The basis behind all this was that Schaefer very much realised the world was becoming noisy place. He was a composer and he was quite annoyed by that.
He initially tried to teach courses about noise and then he realised it was not really of much interest at the time. So he decided it wasn’t so much about fighting noise but about trying to listen to the soundscape from an ecological perspective. Listening to it and seeing what is out there. What are we doing to it.

What are the sounds out there? Let’s listen, let’s record them, let’s analyse them, let’s study the soundscape, and through the ear with technological tools, measure. Making measurements, analysing the sounds, in the studio and all that. I learned so much about sound, and about the environmental issues around it. I was absolutely fascinated by this interesting interdisciplinary approach which again was unusual at the time. We were all musicians and composers in the project but we learned what engineers know about sound or what an audiologist would know about sound. We tried to bring these disciplines together and his aim at the time was to get scientists involved.

We all need to work together to do something about the quality of the soundscape. So there was this interesting Interface between the artistic creative approach and the perceptual approach of listening and sound making, the scientific approach to sound, and the political environmental issues, the social issues, around all that as well. That large context of listening to the soundscape was what interested me and that’s what got me interested in making recordings myself.

While I was working with The World Soundscape Project, my colleagues were the ones that did the recordings but I listened to most of them. We listened together often and had discussions about it and it was this context that made me want to learn field recording and also learn to work in the studio. My colleague Barry Truax who took over from Murray Schafer taught me the studio techniques and the recording.

I’ve just simply explored myself and learned as I went along. So the interest in composition came entirely out of all that knowledge that I had gained. I wanted to speak through my pieces about places, about situations, about the soundscape, about listening itself because it was so fascinating to me. I guess my classical musical training helped me indirectly in that I had never studied composition but I knew much about the compositional structures from the classical world. It was in my bones.

I had never ever in my life thought that I would become a composer, my musical training never encouraged that. Musical training was also difficult for me. I found it rather challenging and the environment was sometimes rather authoritarian. Certainly in Germany. I didn’t respond well to that and I was not a performing musician, I was a listener basically. I didn’t really understand that until I started working with The World Soundscape Project. So when I became interested in composing it had everything to do with the issue of acoustic ecology, the soundscape, the meanings of sound, the meanings of silence, the meanings of noise, the social context, etc.

When I was composing “Beneath the Forest Floor” for example there were a variety of things at play. It was a commission from the CBC and they wanted me to come with my raw recordings into this new digital facility and not do anything in my own studio beforehand. To compose the entire piece there in the digital domain. Because of that I decided on the more clean quality of working in the digital environment as opposed to the analog one, where you deal with accumulating hiss and noise when you make dubs and mixes. I decided then I wanted to go into a very quiet natural environment and record. When you bring that into the studio, into the digital studio, you don’t have to struggle so much with the analog noise. That really is a challenge in the analog studio the accumulation of hiss and pops and noise. There was a logistical decision behind that opportunity to work in a digital facility.
The first time that caused me to rent a really good microphone. I mean I had pretty good equipment, but it wasn’t not not high-end. I had a digital audio tape deck by that time and I decided to rent a high-end microphone that would record a fairly wide range in the environment. It would allow for the space of that force to be much more audible and it allowed me to zero in on sounds and get this incredible clarity. Those were logistical decisions before I went in there.

The other reasons why I went into that particular indigenous forest called. the Carmanah Valley was a logging issue. They had already cut down half. of it and then an environmental organization decided to get the other. half to become a park, to be protected, so I went there. We were literally. camping in the logged area and then you walk from this battlefield of the. logged area across the river into this incredible environment of the. indigenous forest. With huge huge trees, cedar trees, teak, spruce, and Douglas fir, this very absolutely amazing environment on the West coast of Vancouver Island with mossy soft ground and moss coming down from the trees.

There was this incredible contrast between that large environment and the original environment that the only trace of that experience is the appearance of a chainsaw.

In one part of the piece that threat of the chainsaw, and that’s only one time where I get into that, in that piece, and the rest was just really wanting to work with the sounds that I managed to record there and create a sense of forest that I experienced. It took me a while to come to the title but I noticed when I was working with these sounds that there was something about the underground. Everything that happens underground in the forest and creates that life. Nowadays we read many books about the mushrooms and the connections underneath between the trees and all the plants and what goes on there. At the time that wasn’t such a concrete thought. But it was certainly a presence.

I had gone underground with this piece because it has a fair amount of darker ominous sounds in it. The forest is not just pretty, but it is also it has its dark sides and it has secrets, so those things all played into this. piece in the end. The strategic technological questions were all tied together with the environmental issues and the opportunity to drive into that environment because of the political issue that was going on at the time around that particular valley all played together.
I’m thinking back and this was in the early 90s and now I’m suddenly myself listening to that piece and think all right that would have been a more conscious thought nowadays if I went into that environment, I would. probably do different recordings, it would be a completely different piece, but the seed of that is already in that piece. It’s very strong.

Sofy: You spoke about your voice in the radio and the question of feminist visibility, what you think around that and how does it expresses itself in your work?

Hildegard: I was pretty conscious of feminist issues and the rights of. women but I didn’t necessarily make overtly feminist pieces. Except maybe there’s a piece called “His Massive Voice” which is definitely dealing. with the authoritarian macho voice. That was definitely a feminist. criticism there but I was conscious that as a female this was my. approach and this worked the best for me. I was able to work that way. because I had a supportive environment.

Fig. 267. Graham, Seth..Vancouver Island Rainforest 2025, From the Archive of the Artist Being at Vancouver Cooperative Radio at the time, it was a leftist station. It was full of feminists and people who were conscious of social issues and racist issues and all that stuff. I was in a political environment that supported my ideas on some level even though the hardcore leftists did not know what to do with my sound walking show because it was a very slow show and it didn’t have that activist voice. It was just inviting people to listen, it was a perceptual approach really. It wasn’t hardcore enough almost for that station.

Artistically when you think of using the radio as an artistic medium, people who were sensitive to that recognised that it disturbed even cooperative radio rhythm because—you go from a folk music show and then fade into my show and suddenly everything falls down. Some people were just so puzzled by that show they didn’t know what to do with it. I myself was a little bit puzzled sometimes. It felt awkward in that environment, it seemed almost too gentle, and the political times were different at the time. As an activist you spoke loud, you went to demonstrations.
And yes we did that too, just as nowadays but the emphasis on listening and perception was really new at that time and even now people are surprised by it. But it is so much more accepted. People are more conscious of meditation and of a meditative approach to life. That is also. very powerful.

It was interesting that I got very little direct feedback for that show other than from friends and people who were listening but not from a general listenership. I would run into people over the years, strangers in the swimming pool, who heard my voice and said “oh I heard your voice on that show about five years ago” or something and they’d never forgotten it. This happened several times where people remembered the tone of the show which included my voice, they had listened to it and it had stuck with them. That was really surprising to me because I felt pretty good about the show but a bit ambivalent because there had been so little feedback and so little response to it.
I wasn’t sure whether it was something that works on radio but ultimately it broke some radio format boundaries at the time and that was remembered. So there was my female voice doing that in a gentle way. So yes I’ve always had the opportunity to use my voice in that way, and also in composition, I became more and more confident about it because that seemed to be the only way I could do it really. To speak about the environment through the sounds and with my voice sometimes as well. That was my type of activism, awareness raising, education, and artistic expression. I think it’s very powerful because giving that much space to gentleness is a big act, it takes a lot of effort and concentration and agreement and it’s such a big deal actually because everybody wants the screaming loud people to be everywhere all the time. It’s a very interesting moment, and very important moment.

Now in hindsight I’m looking at it, I think I really did have a supportive environment. My experience was with The World Soundscape Project, which were all guys, I was the only woman, and Coop Radio, and then the electro-acoustic scene which was also very male dominated. My then husband was a writer and he completely understood what I was doing. Murray Schaefer was very much behind all this.
I was just experimenting and the whole thing was just one big surprise to me because I didn’t really know that I was a composer until someone said it to me. It was that supportive environment of the 70s that was both activists on that outspoken way and experimental and cultural. That edge between those two was exactly the place where I wanted to work. I realise in hindsight now how much that allowed me to do the work. Because it wasn’t easy, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing in each individual piece. It made sense but it was not a straightforward career in any way and the whole field was so new.
We then established another larger international organization and started to have conferences, then in the 90s finally, and then in the 2000s in particular, the whole sound art soundscape, sound studies, acoustic ecology, area exploded. There’s now so many books, and so many courses, and so many people, interested in doing sound walks and doing soundscape composition and writing about sound and listening. That was a surprise when that finally happened. We had hoped for that in the 70s but it didn’t really come about until fairly recently. Now I can look back, and I think we were doing a lot of experimenting and fiddling around trying to figure out how we are doing this.

Even organizing conferences around it, how do you do that when you want to speak about listening and want to do the ecological work we want to do. There was a lot of questioning going on.
Sofy: It’s funny right now I’m talking to you on my phone and I’m recording the conversation so I can transcribe it later also on my phone and it’s so easy to just record an hour of audio and cut out those silent spots and get the words out of it.
Hildegard: Exactly all that is so much easier now, I’m very grateful for some of that During the pandemic because we’ve had opportunities to speak internationally in these zoom sessions, we didn’t have to fly to conferences, we could just speak in our own homes with each other about these things. It is, of course sad that we can’t be in the same room and do this together, but the other part is that we can relax and have these conversations from the perspective of our own lives and homes. I found that the tone of those kinds of exchanges is very different than what we used to have in conferences where everybody flies to one place, mostly jet lagged for four days of the conference, everybody is hectic and enthusiastic and animated, and then nobody gets to know the place where we actually landed, we’re all in one hotel together, nobody knows what’s going on in the environment around us, and we go back home. Ecologically [it’s] absolutely crazy. I’m just hoping that we’ve learned from all that and that we can somehow get together live and we can get together on zoom.

What is the best way of dealing with this environmentally speaking? Socially speaking? I’ve been finding it really interesting to speak to colleagues old and new through zoom because we’ve been able to take that time and it’s changed the dynamics for sure.
I was delighted when you offered the phone, I thought oh I’ve gotten so used to zoom, let’s do it on the phone again, you can sit on your terrace or outside and take a walk. I’m very glad that people are accepting of that more now because it’s been here all along.
Sofy: You spoke a little bit about the meditative state or thoughts about that in your recording and creation of sound, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that going back to the philosophical spiritual outlook and how that expresses itself in your in your process.
Hildegard: The meditative aspect becomes very very clear when you do a lot of sound walks. I’m not talking about sound walks without equipment, we’ve had a group here in Vancouver now since 2003 called the Vancouver Sounds Collective offering sound walks through mostly Vancouver. New music as part of their yearly concert season we offer these free sound walks to the public, about four a year.

We’ve done this now for such a long time, we’ve all learned a lot from that. One of the aspects that gets mentioned over and over again by participants is how meditative it is to walk for a whole hour in a group without speaking, just listening. The format is usually an hour, then we have a discussion afterwards. In these discussions comments come up about that there’s something very grounding about doing this. It’s particularly interesting when you do it in a group, you connect as a group despite the fact that you’re not speaking with each other, you’re connecting on a very different level, and so the meditative aspect of that has been picked up by many of them. I think it has to do with the fact and this would also apply to recording and recording with environment, and composing with environmental.
It also has to do with what I spoke about with the sound walking show on Cooperative Radio that slows everything down. When you do concentrate on listening to environmental sound whether you’re recording or just listening by ear you’re slowing down. You actually end up in the presence of the sounds, the passing of time. The fact that you’re you’re listening to the sound, that’s just happening at this moment so you are in its presence. You’re in the presence of how it moves through time and that slowing down allows this grounding and that in turn can put you into more of a meditative space.

What I’ve observed with recording, and what I observe when I see other people recording, is that you get so engaged by what you’re hearing over the headphones that you almost lose track of time. We’ve tried to combine sound walks where people are recording and where people are listening to the ear and it’s impossible because the people who are listening through headphones are completely in another world and will forget time and space and just be in their own world. It’s that intense, and that is a good grounding for a meditative state. Then of course when you’re working with environmental sound, in some of the processing of the sounds I end up with a sound that can be very meditative.
The last part of “Beneath the Forest Floor” is all made up of slowed down bird sounds and it sounds rather electronic but it gives me pictures and sound relationships that can be put into a meditative state. It has that reverberation and, sounds, drumming, and all that. What you’re doing with the soundscape composition, is you’re creating a framework for people to spend time on listening itself which is why we go to concerts —because we enjoy doing that. When you do that with environmental sound you’re given an opportunity to meditate on what you’re hearing, you can meditate on the ideal forest while you’re listening to “Beneath the Forest Floor”. You can meditate on what is your own relationship to forest. if it’s more a city walk, say Downtown Vancouver, which is a very problematical space with addiction and homelessness and stuff, even there it gives the framework to think about those issues right? It allows for, and that’s really what I love about it—creating a space of time for everyone to think about these things.

Sofy: Wow what amazingly well put replies.
Hildegard: That’s the essence of that really because I’m thinking about it myself. I want to share. They’re important issues. Now we’re in the climate change world and all those issues have become more urgent. They’re still the same issues, it seems to be always the same thing still continuing still all around us. It becomes more urgent now, we’re continually changing the environment. I wonder about the past. I wonder if it was changing as much.
Surely it wasn’t, but there’s no way to know. I mean we can’t really have an overview at all. What’s clear to me is what the pandemic has contributed to, and the climate change issues, is that people are constantly talking about it. We need to listen more, we need to listen to the Indigenous people more obviously. They have the knowledge. What originally to me was ecological, listening to the environment because we had noise pollution, has expanded into all aspects of life. We listen to each other, we need to listen to the different races, we need to listen to our children, we need to just simply learn to listen better.
The capitalist society we’ve lived in, has really encouraged a visual approach to the world and has wanted us to stay in that. I mean if you think of the Muzak Corporation started in the 1930s. It was making background music for factories originally in the wartime industry but later of course everywhere else. Their first drive was to create music, that was not to be listened to. It was music that was supposed to manipulate us into working faster or buying more.

To me it’s symbolic for a corporation that actively wants you not to listen because if you do listen then there’s danger that we might find out the truth, the motivations. It’s incredible what this virus has done, it’s proved to the most unbelieving people here in the States that we can do without going to work. Now the country’s turning over, there are strikes everywhere. Finally people have realised that they can not go.
That’s why listening is sometimes considered as being quite dangerous because it’s dangerous to hear the truth. What does that mean if we hear the truth? Then action will follow.
The original idea of of listening in the way I picked it up to listen to the environment and try to improve the quality of the environment has deepened into all of that over the years. I mean it was always there when you read “The Tuning of the World” all those ideas are already there. When we go to into some of the world’s religions—Buddhism I mean it’s all there. The way meditation is, on some level about listening in that you’re noticing something, and you’re noticing it and you’re letting it go but you’re noticing it, you’re aware. That’s where listening and meditation connects very much.
Sofy: That’s a great connection I love it. I also loved your your phrase— “the perceptual approach to expressing” when we were talking about feminism. It’s so great not talking about it but embedding it in the work.

Fig. 278. Yuditskaya, Sofy and Gooey.ai. The Magic of Muzak 1973 2025, From the Archive of the ArtistHildegard: That’s very true actually I’ve always been challenged by some of my feminist friends—“Are you really a feminist?” And yes I am, but maybe I’m expressing myself differently. It’s a different relationship between the listening and the sound making. I mean the sound making in terms of vocalizing.
How one speaks about these things when you begin to listen—the complexity of everything becomes very apparent and then you can’t necessarily just shout as an activist. I did when I was younger, I shouted a lot. I was quite outspoken, and I was protesting a lot. As you get older that changes that has to do with age too and experience, which doesn’t mean that you’re less of an activist.

Bio (provided by the artist):
Hildegard Westerkamp was born in Osnabrück, Germany in 1946, emigrated to Canada in 1968, and since then has lived on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish peoples – the Squamish (Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh), Tsleil-Waututh (Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh), and Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓ əm) Nations. After completing her music studies at the University of British Columbia in the early seventies she joined the World Soundscape Project under the direction of R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University (SFU). Her involvement with this project not only activated deep concerns about noise and the general state of the acoustic environment in her, but it also changed her ways of thinking about music, listening and soundmaking. Vancouver Co-operative Radio –founded During the same time- provided an invaluable opportunity to learn much about broadcasting, and ultimately enabled her to produce and host her weekly program Soundwalking in 1978/79.
One could say that her career in soundscape composition and acoustic ecology emerged from these two pivotal experiences and found support in the cultural and political vibrancy of Vancouver at that time. In addition, composers such as John Cage and Pauline Oliveros have had a significant influence on her work.
While completing her Master’s Thesis Listening and Soundmaking – A Study of Music-as-Environment, she also taught acoustic communications courses until 1990 in the School of Communication at SFU together with colleague Barry Truax. Since then she has written numerous articles and texts addressing issues of the soundscape, acoustic ecology and listening, has travelled widely, giving lectures and conducting soundscape workshops internationally.