Introduction

Tradition

 

Soundwalks are live collective listening acts. The actors are the listeners and the acoustic events they encounter, both arranged and serendipitous. These converge with other sounds to create an acoustic space (soundscape), changing moment to moment. Soundwalkers perform listening and are an inherent part of the soundscape through their movement and listening attention.

 

A soundwalk is designed along a route with a theme. It tells a story with acoustically distinct features and sometimes has on-site interventions staged along the way. Participants refrain from speaking or wearing sound-making clothing for the duration, and a discussion usually follows.

The specific aim when designing a soundwalk is to expand the listening range of the soundwalk participants, open them to acoustic features and ways of experiencing or thinking about sound, and guide them toward a new listening experience.

 

Intervention

Of interventions, the possibilities are endless. Visual artists bend their eyes and think through an aural version of their art. Dancers interpret sounds through their movements. Intermedia artists create mediations that focus on listening. Poets and writers inflect written sound. Musicians fracture or enhance musicality by improvising to acoustic events or features. Some interventions are about a physical location or sense of place, histories, imaginaries, and ideas. The possibilities are endless.

 

As part of the soundwalk, interventions range from  anticipated to chance encounters of acoustic space as it manifests along a designated route.

 

I experienced earplugs a part of a soundwalk; a freezing dawn village soundwalk that ended in a warm kitchen with the sounds of toast being buttered and coffee being hand ground; a lone saxophonist riffing just out of sight along a seaport warehouse in the fog; an ethereal singer’s voice riding on the breeze; violins in practice drifting out a window impromptu – so many, so many.

 

A Settled Practice

I became proficient in soundwalking with my mentors, R. Murray Schafer and Hildegard Westerkamp, who began the activity in the 1970s. (Hildegard leads soundwalks internationally up to today and has written prolifically about the activity.) Also, through the many soundwalks designed by  me or others. Soundwalking has profoundly shaped my listening to, and understanding of, sound as a lived experience.

 

Incorporating other types of artists in a soundwalk’s design creates a pathway through familiar modes of expression (visual, musical, spoken) and habituated ways of listening toward something unexpected and unknown. As artist-performers stretch to expand their medium, participants are likewise cued to move beyond their listening tendencies. As a professional artist working in sound and other modalities myself, this is proven fertile ground.

 

My soundwalking style came from leading  and experimenting with soundwalks in Vancouver, Toronto, Prague (Czechia), and throughout Europe. In Vancouver, as part of the Vancouver Soundwalk Collective for many years, I determined to increase a soundwalk’s performative aspect to signal alternate listening possibilities.

 

This creative urge emerged from my interest in arts-based research and soundwalks I participated in and led that grappled with cultural and historical constructs, ideas about the layers of meaning submerged in acoustic space, and how to bring them to the surface. What follows are two case studies.

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Preamble

Unsettled Ground

In Vancouver, encounters with the past inevitably stumble upon Musquem xʷməθkʷəy̓əm First Nation culture and land use. As Settlers, our perception of indigeneity betrays a  colonialism in denial of the continuous indigenous habitation (now densely submerged) of a place, such as in urban settings. 

 

As part of British Columbia, Vancouver is the most recent acknowledgment of land use claims in Canada and the United States. Tragically, it took so long and immense suffering to get to this rightful ownership. Settler governing bodies in Canada are beginning to acknowledge and legislate more equitably with First Nations. As a result, First Nations and Settlers are all currently in a pivotal process of Reconciliation.

 

There is still much work to be done: First Nations presence remains only marginally recognizable and is mostly erased throughout the city despite that Settler life happens on c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the modern city. In the Settler mindset, this place of “before” is an abstract preconception where First Nation peoples’ living spaces and land use are tableaus referenced through books, media, museums, or tourist settings.

 

Euro Relativism

By contrast, European history is intact and celebrated everywhere, except for changes brought about by wars and resource extraction. Czechia (where I was based) is unique because the town and city streets, buildings, and stonework were never bombed in the Second World War as an atonement by the Allies for the Munich Agreement.[1]  The first recorded peoples on the Vltava (the river that runs through Prague) were 5th-century Celts[2], and Prague’s inner townscape has remained relatively intact since the 9th century.

 

Prague is also unique as a Western soundscape whose past is still intact, lived-in, and thus discernable. Sound moves through the streets, over and around cobbles and buildings in much the same way — even with the restricted car traffic, traffic lights, trams, recorded music, interspersed glass and cement facades, and other signs of modernity.* Although many eras are in evidence, there is planning and architectural continuity. The past is evident in tangible coveted terms, so the layers of submerged historical space are still in play.

 

Given that modern colonialism began in 1415 and that indigenous peoples were continually inhabiting the land stretching back thousands of years and continue to do so, it is inconceivable to me the degree that this remains overlooked in most of North America. It is easier to hijack what indigeneity looked and sounded like in places like Vancouver than to listen to the echoes of the past in Prague, which speaks volumes about Eurocentrism, history’s solipsism, and the ever-present erasure of indigeneity worldwide.

 

I came to this awareness because of my Eurocentrism and because First Nations, not that they owe us anything, are showing us interlopers the way.

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Two Case Studies

Appropriation 1: The Museum Ground

I remember a soundwalk that I designed at the University of British Columbia that went behind the Museum of Anthropology, where there is an outdoor Musqueam xʷməθkʷəy̓əm long-house with greeting figures as well as clan and funereal totems carved on the site in the recent past. There are also artifacts, canoes, and totems brought from other older indigenous sites into the museum and displayed behind its imposing glass facade. 

 

Visually, this arrangement is compelling. It brings to mind the indigenous culture, songs, ceremonies, and dress of the Coast Salish [3] peoples, which is how we are fascinated and know them — as an imaginary past.

 

Despite colonialism, First Nation culture is thriving. First Nations are spearheading the Reconciliation process with Settlers, questioning resource extraction and climate issues, revitalizing their languages and knowledge, and guiding us in planetary and creature stewardship — especially here, where I am a Settler.

 

This day in this place, the indigenous real and imaginary past (the one Settlers experience) was intertwined. When encountering the always-already[iv] living artifacts of First Nations cultural activities, even though not the sole feature of the acoustic landscape we were moving through, Settler minds cannot avoid going to some stereotypical ideation. Years of colonialism take us there.

 

Edifice or Edify?

Soundwalkers often encounter visually based concepts and materiality; this visual logic presents a challenge. It takes time and practice to even marginally get beyond it to listen attentively and experience any shift in sensory primacy. Is it possible to move beyond visuality to access the acoustic features such as those of this potent museum space as it presents itself to us in subjective time and space?

 

As we walked, buffeted by the wind and its whooshing atop this sea cliff in front of the grand museum edifice with the cedar longhouse and totem poles tucked into the forest, the imagistic (visual) past competed with an acoustic present.

The difficulty is that contemporary Western space presents itself as linear because it is grounded in the visual, while acoustic space is fiercely in the here-now. The small contingent of sound designers working with me and I prompted participants to pick up the white stones that were part of the landscaping and hit them together to make sounds that explored this artificial aspect of the place and tested its acoustics.

 

I naively brought an Inuit – Inuktitut: ᐃᓄᐃᑦ ‘the people’ – drum to play on and invoke spirits of the listening past. That I am not indigenous to North America mattered but did not seem prohibitive, which I now recognize as a severe misappropriation of both Inuit Inuktitut: ᐃᓄᐃᑦ and Musqueam xʷməθkʷəy̓əm culture.

 

The Affect-Effect

The effect was that we related to the rhythms and tenor of our rock-hitting incursions. Still, these tentative gestures were not large enough to have an impact on, or travel across, the physical geography that surrounded us or to invoke in any way the substance of the traditions of that land (a place where the Musqueam xʷməθkʷəy̓əm taught their youth life skills) that loomed over us in carved figures, creatures, buildings and the sense of the place itself.

 

While the occasion of the Inuit drum met the grandeur of the landscape, it felt dishonest and intrusive. It was. Consequently, there was no force behind it.

 

Our acoustic explorations barely referenced the stunning land we were on, a cliff plateau high above the ocean where the wind whips up and over onto the grassy plane.

We barely experienced the soundscape, although we did stand and listen to the wind against the glass wall as a  reflective surface — one ear to the glass to feel the vibrations and listen for air against the surface. 

 

We did not listen from the cliff’s edge or with our ears close to the grass or the wind against and around the wood and shapes of the cedar long-house and clan poles. We missed much.

 

This soundwalk haunts me still. I was preoccupied with trying to hear indigeneity. How can one listen for a sense of place so profoundly dis-placed in time and space when what is being listened for is a performance of space that is now profoundly out of place?

 

What if we asked Musqueam xʷməθkʷəy̓əm people to participate and enact the games they played to teach their life skills at this place? What if someone read a historical account of the place while we were there? What if there was traditional music and singing? Would this take us deeper into the listening space we encountered or merely become an extension of the museum, a staged act?

 

Is it possible to tease out the acoustic past and bring it into the present meaningfully? Is it appropriate or appropriation?

 

Appropriation 2: False Creek

I re-encountered this as a participant in another Vancouver soundwalk.

 

In this circumstance, the soundwalk designers (including an Anthropology student) designed a route through Musquem xʷməθkʷəy̓əm ancestral land that followed rich delta fishing and gathering grounds. This location, now called False Creek, is a busy park with walking, biking, and jogging paths past a yacht club, fishing docks, and condominiums in downtown Vancouver.

 

Again, the intent was honorable: to reference the indigenous past while listening to the present and perceiving the changes in land use.

 

The traditional clan peoples, the Musqueam xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, of the area, agreed to sit on an area of this land where they once fished and gathered seafood and play a traditional betting game while singing and drumming intermittently.

As the soundwalkers encountered this intervention, they entered a performative space. Their attention shifted from listening to the soundscape to becoming primarily observers as their heightened listening conceded to a potent visual reference (the First Nations imaginary). 

 

The sensory now of listening was overridden by the visual, again with the Settler fascination with First Nation culture and the experience of it, not as a lived way of life, but a performed way of life known through museums, artifacts, and events tailored for Settler viewing.

 

More UnSettlement

Even more problematic, soundwalkers were invited to break with their role as silent listeners and participate in the game. Without its cultivation, the listening state unraveled entirely. Some asked questions of the Musquem xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, and others, reluctant to break their silence with speaking, sat theatre style around this First Nation’s enactment, while others, invited by drummers, took up the drum. Everyone was thrilled with the encounter and access to Musquem xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, who were well-versed in this type of performance space.

 

With my soundwalking background, it seemed entirely out of place other than as a curiosity among the Sunday park-going population. Passers stopped and watched. This soundwalk intervention had now become a spectacle (the visual sense of the word) where the emphasis was on watching a piece of theatre, not on listening to or understanding it as part of the soundscape.

 

Here-Now Digression

I found it unsettling and decided to move around the periphery of the players and drummers to listen to how voices carried or were submerged in the mix of geography and other sounds, with my eyes closed at times, to try to understand the event acoustically. 

 

I noticed how the drumming carried up to the underside of the concrete bridge above and bounced around there as a rhythmic counterpoint to the sound of car tires going over the steel girders – a syncopation.

 

For me, this created a hybrid past-referenced and contemporary acoustic moment that was fascinating and rich. One may use this moment in a recorded soundscape composition to underscore the convergence of indigenous culture (drumming) with a current urban culture soundmark[v] (tires going over Grandville Bridge).

Taken out of context but applied thematically, this acoustic juxtaposition of drumming and car tires on a bridge might highlight the issue of indigenous land coopted for highways or other undeclared building projects. 

 

But I digress. The point is that, for anyone wanting to listen differently, acoustic ways of knowing often adhere to visual logic and ways of knowing. They primarily recede.

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Resolve

Why Soundwalking Matters

The problem is that how we envision or imagine acoustic space often differs from what it is. Acoustic space exists in the present but is complex underneath a simple and comprehensive reality.

The acoustic real is part geophysical, corporeal, perceptional, subjective — with implications that one comes to know over time as a dedicated listener listening for its variables, such as wind, weather, temperature, time of day or season, migrations of creatures, body and location and changes in geography. It comprises complexity’s interplay.

It’s hard to dislodge visual predominance even somewhat; however, the effort returns abundant gains that cannot be understated in these times when we are experiencing  unprecedented besieged existence.

Listening has implications for human-to-human relationships, human-to-creature relationships, human interaction with the planet – and, on a micro level, in audio production.

With increasingly widespread listening audiences, much is at stake: how generously a host listens to a guest in a podcast; what expressive gestures (pauses or cadence) a producer edits out or AI smooths over; how the qualities of sound are incorporated in story and its telling; whether musical choices close or welcome listening; and so on — whether an audio production opens cognitively receptive and imaginative space for a listener or not defines our collective pathway forward.

Acoustic ways of being and knowing erode with acculturation to mono-sounds or audio forms without nuance. We inhabit a different time sensibility as observers. In attentive listening, everything is at play simultaneously and relationally. With potentially radical equanimity, the act of listening is an act of substance.

Call to Action

Soundwalking can effect profound personal and societal change — and it’s an astonishing way to spend time. It is a practice. It takes effortless effort.

Try it.

Try listening with intent for a moment or two.

Then, go on a soundwalk or take yourself on one.

 

You won’t believe what happens.

 

© 2024 Andrea Dancer