Interview: Hildegard Westerkamp

Listening (24 min.) This film by Mike Hoolboom and Heather Frise is a short bio of iconic Vancouver composer and sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp. She was the only woman to participate in the original version of the World Soundscape Project that not only brought new ears to city life, but laid the foundation for noise bylaws/pollution standards, radically upending traditional notions of music, the role of the composer, and found new uses for the portable tape recorder. In addition, Hildegard has brought the art of sound walking to groups around the world, and in these face-to-face encounters she has formulated a deep feminist ecology rooted in the body. This experimentalist short offers a place for the viewer to listen, conjuring the space of listening as the necessary precondition for personal and societal change. 

The film was first shown at the BEAST FEaST 2021, Recalibration, April 22-24, 2021

 

Soundscape Composition: Lake Data & Music

Lake Data Bases For Musical Score: (30 min.) A classically trained musician, Evelyn Gaiser, recently translated high-frequency lake data into a musical compositions in order to better understand and describe environmental changes.

Evelyn Gaiser is an aquatic ecologist who studies long-term dynamics of ecosystems in response to environmental change. She is the executive director of FIU’s School of Environment, Arts, and Society in the College of Arts, Sciences and Education and lead principal investigator of the Florida Coastal Everglades Long Term Ecological Research program.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

Interview: The Nature of Music: Interspecies Music

The Nature of Music: Interspecies Music with Jim Nowman (1:34). Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian hosts a discussion with composer Jim Nollman, who has dedicated his life to the art and science of “interspecies” communication and music.

This virtual interview features recordings of live performances with Orcas, Macaws, and Turkeys as well as never-before-heard electroacoustic and contra dance music by Nollman.

Amirkhanian and Nollman also discuss the composer's role in the U.S. Navy's efforts to combat whale deaths through sonar, his work as an activist against Dolphin drive fisheries in Japan, and the intersection of technology and intuition involved in collaborating musically with animals. Source: Other Minds.

Lecture: Sound of Care

Sound of Care (1:28) "An unusual transdisciplinary roundtable to explore how sound can be used as an engagement tool, specifically, understanding the “sound of care” and how sound can be a vehicle for collective action at scale. The conclusions drawn from this will influence the work of the partner organizations and hopefully open the door for cross-sectoral collaborations and feed into a report for EIT Climate KIC." List of participants listed.

Soundwalk: The UK Dumbles

Virtual Stroll the Dumbles: “A walk through rarely seen parts of The Dumbles, near the village of Lambley, Nottinghamshire, UK. Filmed and recorded around dawn and early morning, with extracts from Sacred Texts and poetry read by Helen Simpson.” Source: Vimeo.

 

Lecture: Learning From Sound

Learning From Sound. This is an archived Zoom seminar that took place on Tuesday, September 29, 2020 with Canadian composer, radio artist, and teacher Hildegard Westerkamp and hosted by PRAKSIS - an arts and culture organisation based in Oslo, Norway. 

Soundscape: Whistle Language

Whistle Language. (10 mins) World traveler and video blogger Drew Pinsky visits Kuskov, a small village in the mountains of Turkey where all residents can speak a language made up of whistles. According to Binsky this whistle language was invented around 500 years ago by local farmers, who needed to communicate with their peers over the steep hills. Amazingly, the whistles can be heard up to 3 kilometers away!!

Research: The spotted Owl

Last Call: Tracking The Sound Of The Spotted Owl’s Extinction. (8:41): It’s been 30 years since the northern spotted owl gained endangered species protections in the old-growth forests of the Northwest United States. Scientists trying to save the owls have new bioacoustics technology and big data on their side. But less hope. Source: Oregon Public Broadcasting