Soundwalk and Studio (top)

I always do my own recordings for my pieces because they connect me back to the recorded place. Somehow the connection to that place figures into the process of composing in the studio ... bringing a life experience into the studio from outside makes the studio environment easier to be in.
HW

The recorded soundwalk is not simply a passive recording, but is affected by the specific time of recording in that place, as well as the recordist's choices, gestures, and perspective. For instance, the Queen Elizabeth Park recording was recorded on a summer Sunday evening, perhaps one of the busiest times at the park. It would sound much different in winter at daybreak. Our choices about what to record included how much time we spent in each area (less than eight minutes total at the lookout, more than twenty minutes at the creek), and points of focus (the waterfall, the birds in the conservatory). The gestural moments are very exciting. Planefan, for instance, demonstrates how Westerkamp responded to the chance event of a plane flying overhead as we walked towards the Conservatory building. She brought the plane into direct dialogue with the building vent in a powerful way.

When Westerkamp does her own recordings for pieces, they can be recorded soundwalks, or field recordings focusing on specific aspects of a place. If she includes sounds that were recorded by others (such as by members of the World Soundscape Project, or by Norbert Ruebsaat), she knows the people, and often the place. She understands the context as a whole by knowing the person who did the recording, and their original intent.
AM

Much as I hate this dependence on technology... (top)

When I work in institutional studios, my back aches afterwards, I'm not breathing properly, I just simply feel very tired and exhausted. I actually experience it as a huge contradiction to what I'm trying to do in the pieces. It's the same with the... performance spaces... [they are] controlled environments. And yet when the pieces are playing, they open something up in the audience, they open something up in me. They're saying something about place, about environment, about ecology, and about acoustic balance in our lives ... Yet the contradiction is not gone.
HW

The institutional studio, for Westerkamp, is a stifling environment, where she finds it difficult to breathe. These studios often seem thoughtlessly designed, tucked away in basements or windowless rooms, cut off from the outside world. Westerkamp's home studio, on the other hand, is consciously not isolated from the soundscape. While it is quiet, it is still in touch with the sounds of the surrounding neighbourhood. AM

Technology tends to have a life of its own. It can break down. It is expensive. It is always changing.
HW

Studio as Sanctuary (top)

The studio environment has provided me with a "niche" where I could find my own creative voice without interference from the surrounding social, cultural context ... Since it has always been hard for me not to give external voices more power than my own inner voice, this was an important stage for me-and, given my socio-cultural background, this separateness may to some extent always remain an important part of my creative process. The sound studio has taught me to be in touch with that inner voice and to believe in it. In my electroacoustic compositions my inner voices speak .... I would go as far as saying that these isolated places are perhaps the urban person's poor substitutes for wilderness experience, places where one can play/work undisturbed and uninterrupted-at a distance from daily life.
HW

I find this description of the studio intriguing. A wilderness setting in its peace and privacy - a natural image applied to a technological location. A sanctuary-a place to give creative voices room to breathe, protected from voices of authority. At the same time, in her piece His Master's Voice, Westerkamp acknowledges the irony that many of these voices of authority are recorded and broadcast through electroacoustic means.
AM

Listening to the Material (top)

The structure of a piece always comes out of the materials and the way I work with them, through knowing a place for a long time.
HW

Westerkamp listens to the materials to decide how to work with them. During this listening, she will hear things that were not necessarily apparent during the recording process: aspects of the soundwalk that are particularly musical, evocative, connected to her experience of the place. Sometimes, she will reflect on a piece for months or even years before she is ready to go further. Then, she begins to highlight certain aspects of the recording by working with the materials. Often, she will take a certain sound gesture or fragment, work with it, then place it back where she found it, by layering the original recording with the processed sounds. She creates harmonic and rhythmic bridges between sounds by listening to what they have in common. You can hear some of these processes more clearly by listening to the sound examples.
AM

With any environmental sound, you are dealing with a given. Sometimes you want to impose something on it ... and it won't let you. There is an interesting dance that happens between the materials ... and your own compositional imagination.
HW

A New Place Sings Back (top)

I want to transport listeners into a place that's close to where I am when I compose, and which I like.They're going to occupy that place differently, by listening to it differently, but still, it's a place.
HW

Westerkamp begins with a specific place-the place of recording, of the original soundwalk. Through the process of composition, a new place is created, connected to the original place, transformed through Westerkamp's experience of it, and by her compositional choices. This creates a work that says something about the place, while leaving room for listeners to inhabit it in many different ways, as you see in the analysis of her piece, Breathing Room.
AM

It starts with a place, then it creates a new place inside the composition.
HW

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