Events archive
Group performance for Dew Pond #1
Dusk brings a shift of the senses, a change to how the world is known. A similar recalibration can happen when we choose to settle down somewhere and map what our perceptions find there. A powerful inspiration derives from Hildegard Westerkamp’s pioneering approaches to soundwalking and to soundmapping and, particularly, her sustained commitment to acknowledging the complexities at work when we establish “times for heightened listening, an opportunity to connect more deeply to a place, a sonic moment or situation … to one’s own associations”. In her compositional approaches as much as in her contributions to the methods of acoustic ecology, Westerkamp has both opened our ears to rich sonorities and located the listener as a creative contributor to encountered meaning.
After a short introduction, we will find our own time for heightened listening at the edge of the University campus, settling down together, each with a stick of chalk and blank piece of paper to document what we hear under the darkening sky, marking out a sonic sketch that could be a soundmap, a score, a diary of acoustic associations.
Angus Carlyle is Professor of Sound and Landscape at the University of the Arts. He edited the book Autumn Leaves (2007) – republishing Hildegard Westerkamp’s 1974 essay “Soundwalking” - and with Cathy Lane co-edited On Listening, co-wrote In The Field (both 2013) and co-developed a new book, Sound Arts Now (2020).
His creative work - which shifts between experimental writing, collaborations on films and working with sound (particularly field recording) - engages with sensory environments and their representation, addressing the documentary impulse alongside a more poetic register.
His artworks have included 51° 32 ' 6.954” N / 0° 00 ' 47.0808” W (2008), Noli Me Tangere (2009), Some Memories of Bamboo (2009), In The Shadow of the Silent Mountain (2016) and A Downland Index (2016) and Decoys (2018). Air Pressure (2011 – 2013) was a collaboration with anthropologist Rupert Cox, with whom he is also working on the project Zawawa, an exploration of sound and memory on the island of Okinawa.
Access: This event involves a short walk outside off the beaten path, please wear suitable clothing.
This event is part of the Festival of Music and Ideas: Hildegard Westerkamp and Acoustic Ecologies